Bishop Samuel Amirtham (1932–2017) was pastor, theologian, social reformer, ecumenist, and bishop of the Church of South India — a man whose life was a sustained and living commentary on the three-fold call of Micah 6:8: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

Born in Parassala into the Congregationalist tradition of the London Missionary Society, he was formed academically under Dr J R Chandran at United Theological College, Bangalore, and under Professor Hans-Joachim Kraus at the University of Hamburg — one of the great Old Testament scholars of the twentieth century. His theological imagination was moulded by the Psalms and the prophets: demanding, unsparing, and always oriented toward justice.

He served as Founding Principal of Tamilnadu Theological Seminary in Madurai from 1969 to 1978 — a joint ecumenical enterprise of the Tamil dioceses of the CSI and two Lutheran churches of Tamil Nadu. It was in Madurai that the fuller shape of his ministry became clear. Alongside his academic work, he founded the Palmyrah Workers' Development Society (PWDS) in Marthandam in 1977, a community development initiative among the Palmyrah tappers of Kanyakumari and Trivandrum districts — among the most marginalised communities in South India. He worked among slum dwellers and among those whom polite society preferred not to name. This was not charity. It was theology: the conviction, held and enacted at cost, that the Word does not become flesh in the preaching but in the doing.

A decade at the World Council of Churches in Geneva — directing first the Programme on Theological Education and then, concurrently, the Ecumenical Institute at Chateau de Bossey — gave global reach to a vision that was always local in its roots. He returned to South Kerala as bishop from 1990 to 1997, and spent his final two decades in Parassala in lay theological education, writing, mentoring, and prayer. He died on 26 September 2017, in the town where he was born. He was eighty-five.

That he is remembered primarily as a churchman is a limitation of institutional memory, not a measure of the man. His ministry refused the boundaries the church conventionally draws between the pulpit and the street, between theological education and the transformation of society, between the worship of God and the dignity of the poor.

LIFE! 2026 is the first major public expression of his legacy — a deliberate attempt to wake the church and its people from the comfort of institutional lethargy, and to place in their hands the tools of ecumenical formation that Bishop Amirtham spent a lifetime building and giving away.