The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910
By Brian Stanley. Wm. B. Eerdmans. Pp. 384.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6360-7.

By George Sumner

Brian Stanley is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh, and so is the most appropriate person to write The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. It is a meticulous, accessible, and theologically insightful account. It is doubly worth reading since the centennial of the conference will see a gathering called Edinburgh 2010.

While all historical moments are fraught, some moments are more equal than others, and the participants traveling to Edinburgh by train and ship in 1910 had a strong sense that they were attending an event of decisive significance. It was seen as a summit of strategic consequence at a time when the triumph of Christian evangelism worldwide seemed a goal one could speak of. (Stanley is careful to note that it was, in fact, less than a truly “world missionary conference,” since Roman Catholics and Orthodox were not present, and Two-Thirds World Christians themselves were badly underrepresented).

John Mott, whose famous watchword was “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” led one of the conference’s commissions, and even Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the initially reluctant opening speaker, could allude to the consummation which that evangelization hastened. To be sure, the theological makeup of the conference was complex, with more scholarly and theologically liberal as well as evangelical voices represented, especially in the commission on relations to non-Christian religions.

Stanley is helpful in pointing out that, while Edinburgh 1910 is remembered as the moment when common mission gave the impetus to a common ecumenical imperative, the actual achievement of the conference was more limited, namely a wider sphere of global missionary cooperation. But an event may be known in its “history of effects” as well as its self-understanding. Edinburgh 1910, with its Continuation Committee, led to the International Missionary Council, and this in turn to the World Council of Churches. Even in its greatest effect the conference, for all its self-conscious importance, brought about something it did not itself imagine.

Stanley paints in strong colors a picture of the political and social assumptions of the conference. At its outset, after a letter from His Majesty was read, the whole gathering (Americans included), stood and sang “God Save the King.” Throughout the deliberations the participants took as a given a hierarchy of racial developments which should make the contemporary reader uncomfortable. Likewise in the commission on relations to the state there is no questioning of the colonial enterprise itself, only discussion of how best to relate to it.

Amid these more painful features of that era, there was also, it should be pointed out, a consistent goal of promoting churches that were, in the jargon of the Church Missionary Society (and of today’s state-sanctioned Chinese Church), “three-self”: self-propagating, self-financing, and self-governing. (And, as a fine contemporary generation of African Christian historians is pointing out, this goal was realized with African Christians as its primary agents, quite aside from some of the presuppositions of their missionary forebears).

Three Witnesses

Three Christian leaders provide a way of interpreting the conference a century later. The first is from one of the galvanizing moments of the conference itself. A young Indian Anglican priest named V.S. Azariah had worked for the YMCA in South India with J.H. Oldham, one of the conference’s main organizers. He would later be consecrated as the Bishop of Dornakal, the first Anglican prelate in India. (An excellent biography, Susan Billington Harper’s In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V.S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India, appears in the same series as Stanley’s book.) Azariah was a great friend of his missionary colleagues, with whom he worked cooperatively throughout his career. But at the conclusion of his address to the conference he spoke these words containing a searing Pauline rebuke: “You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us friends!” Amid the reports and the strategies, Edinburgh 1910 achieved its greatness in part with such a moment of Christian candor.

Among the student pages at the conference was one William Temple, later to be the famous theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury. It was he, our second witness, who spoke in a sermon a generation later of the “great new fact” of Christianity, namely the truly global nature of the faith, a fact whose dimensions have only grown in the intervening half-century since the Archbishop coined the phrase. But the dramatic emergence of this fact did not take place according to any plan or expectation one might have registered at the Conference.

In fact, if there is a consistent law of modern mission studies, it is one of surprise, a historical proof of the divine sense of humor. Africa, neglected by Edinburgh 1910, has turned to Christ, but often in forms (e.g., the East African Revival) or with attitudes (e.g., rejection of the mission churches, as in the African independent churches) unanticipated by the missionaries themselves. Participants in the conference hoped especially for a great emergence of Christianity in the East, and this seems to be on the way in China, but only on the far side of the cataclysm of revolution, forcible ejection of missions, and horrendous persecution.

Likewise the growth of the Church in India has had little to do with dialogue with Hinduism, but more to do with the mass movements of the scheduled castes in conscious rejection of things Hindu (conversions which, surprisingly, were the spark for the church growth movement in North America). And who at Edinburgh could have guessed that a century later scholars would debate whether global Pentecostal churches were the new “mainline”?

Stanley identifies the key concept from which missiological reflection moved at Edinburgh 1910, namely the contrast between the Christian West and the non-Christian East. The intervening century has effectively broken this concept down in all its terms. The conference was held on the verge of the slaughter of supposedly European Christian nations that was World War I. One of the conference’s main organizers, J.H. Oldham, spoke of Western culture becoming increasingly “materialistic, vulgar, feverish, and unsatisfying”: what would Oldham make of culture in 2010?

Similarly, one speaker described the low level of catechetical knowledge to be found among African converts (specifically their ability to articulate the meaning of the creeds, Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, and Small Catechism), a level which, if attributed to our contemporary North American church, would flatter us. In short, in the turmoil of our time, we cannot speak of a “Christian West,” and, as the lucid research of a scholar like Philip Jenkins shows, the extent to which we are Christian is often aided by non-Western immigration.

More on the mark was the premonition at Edinburgh of the challenge of Islam. The commission on other religions tried to offer a liberal model of “fulfillment” of other faiths in Christianity, but had somewhat to admit that such a model was hardest to conceive of with respect to Islam. And the extent and vehemence of radical Islam could hardly have been imagined then and there. The participants likewise could not have imagined that a century later the greatest missionary-sending nations would be South Korea and Nigeria, though they would in theory have applauded the development.

The witness of our third witness is not in a single sentence or phrase, but rather in the totality of his life. Lesslie Newbigin was born not so many miles south of Edinburgh, six months before the conference, and he was ordained in the city a quarter of a century later. He emerged from the evangelical culture familiar to the missionary movement to serve for half a century as a missionary in south India. In short, he was a child of the world of Edinburgh 1910.

But his subsequent career helped to instigate all the great themes of modern missiology, and hence much contemporary rethinking of the Church’s life. He was instrumental in the merger that created the Church of South India. His book Household of God, written by a Calvinist, prompted a more serious missionary pneumatology, even as the Pentecostal movement came to prominence. He contributed to the post–World War II movement beyond mission as individual conversion or church planting to the missio Dei, “the mission of God.”

He first saw the challenge to the Western Enlightenment worldview as a missiological question. As the World Council of Churches drifted leftward, he maintained a witness to the finality of Jesus Christ against the currents of pluralism. Finally as a pastor late in his life in Birmingham he saw that the questions of context and multiculture were to be found closer to home than the West had imagined. Mission-driven ecumenism, missio Dei, postmodernism and missional, religious pluralism, and contextualization: these were in significant ways the issues of Lesslie Newbigin, presbyter of Edinburgh.

And these are also the issues before Edinburgh 2010 (www.edinburgh2010.org). Compare the list of commissions which will do their work at the centennial conference: foundations, other faiths, postmodernity, power, forms of missionary engagement (North-South relations), theological education, community in context, unity, and spirituality. These are the issues of the great-grandchildren of Edinburgh 1910, following the commissions in many respects, but also correcting for its myopia and reframing its zeal for a new day. They deal with legitimate issues of the missionary endeavor, wherever we may find it: What is its deepest motive? Don’t our divisions make less sense far from the time and place of their origin? How can the one gospel go authentically to a multitude of nations? What do our neighbors of other faiths teach us? Don’t we need to consider questions of power and class when the gospel goes from rich to poor, or the other way around for that matter?

But of course future history will show us to have had our own myopias, born, as in 1910, of our own cultural captivity. And mission history may well have as many unlikely proofs of the divine sense of humor as the last century has held. I cannot know what the commissions of the centennial conference this summer will say. But one can guess that they would do well to bear in mind the witness of that great adopted Edinburghian Lesslie Newbigin, lest in the name of mission the newest kinds of Western confusion, swept out the front door, sneak sevenfold in the back.

We must talk as peers to our neighbor religions, with a deep humility and receptivity, but without surrendering the finality of Jesus Christ, whose cross is the source of that humility. We must admit the postmodern situation we find ourselves in, without forgetting that everyone contends for some “metanarrative” on the basis of which they would organize all. Awareness of power and class should lead not to a self-absorbing guilt, but to actually listening to our Two-Thirds World fellow Christians and watching what is happening there.

Yes, the mission is God’s, but this must not become a warrant for identifying that mission with whatever we espouse in the secular world. The heart of that mission has been revealed once and for all in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the proclamation of that new and saving reality to the nations in anticipation of the End. We need to be wise as serpents in understanding how best to summon each of those nations, but innocent as doves too in gathering them together as one reconciled Body.

The idea that each nation must contribute to the cultural “catholicity” of the world Church, an idea derived in part from the romanticism of the 19th century, articulated by Anglo-Catholics like Bishop Charles Gore at Edinburgh 1910, has been a staple of Newbigin’s thought, according to which the nations can thereby test one another’s “contextualizations.” But are we ready truly for such testing, when it tells us something we don’t like? In short, the agenda of Edinburgh 2010 is in large measure Newbigin’s “unfinished agenda,” and those who gather would do well to hear the echo of his clarion witness of the intervening century.

Let us close with something Stanley points out at the very beginning of his work, as he describes the landscape for the conference of 1910. It grew out of a vigorous evangelical culture with a zeal for mission closely connected to theological commitments, shared by many who were giving and praying for the missionaries back at home and in the service of which those missionaries were ready to die. That is the soil from which the missionary movement, and later the conference, sprang. It is the world that produced an Azariah, and a Newbigin too.

For all the movement’s failings, those were the qualities which made it possible, and which mattered most, by the grace of God, to its success. We can, and should, note their errors, and we do well to gather again, a century on, to see what forms the pressing business of mission in our time takes. But no conference, no matter how well planned and executed, can be a substitute for the soil, whose tilling and tending are part of the work of renewal and restoration before us all.

The Rev. Canon Dr. George Sumner is Principal and Helliwell Professor of World Mission at Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada.