He authored numerous works and traveled extensively to promote dialogue and understanding between missionaries and local communities, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.

He also enlisted in the Student Volunteer Movement, which sought to "evangelize the world in this generation" and worked on the staff of a local Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).

Eddy's father died in 1894, leaving him an inheritance that made him financially independent and enabled him to work for the causes he believed in without concern for finances.

Eddy was one of the first of sixteen thousand student volunteers who emerged from the leading universities of the U.S. and Europe to serve as Christian missionaries across the world.

[4] He spent the next 15 years doing student evangelistic work across Asia—from China, Japan, and the Philippines, through the Near East to Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and then to czarist Russia—and made 15 trips to the Soviet Russia.

He admired the Soviet system and refused to believe reports of famine; in 1937, he agreed that the victims of Stalin's show trials were traitors as charged.

The main supporters of the Fellowship in the early days included Eddy, Eduard Heimann, Paul Tillich and Rose Terlin.

The farms helped southern sharecroppers out of their economic plight (caused in part by side effects of the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration).

[8] Eddy drew considerable support from his friend, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who once called the farms "the most significant experiment in social Christianity now being conducted in America.

However, due to the tense political climate of the 1950s and declining cotton prices and sales volumes, the experiment concluded around 1956, and the land was sold to the cooperative's members.

In 1897, Sherwood Eddy experienced a personal and spiritual crisis that profoundly changed his vision of missionary work.

In doing so, he anticipated by nearly 50 years, and initiated, the reflection that would lead the American Presbyterian Mission to thoroughly review its concepts, mainly after 1945.

[2] From 1911 onwards, Sherwood Eddy and the YMCA missionaries led an effective evangelization in China based on the convictions and methods established in India.