The 1910 World Missionary Conference, or the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, was held on 14 to 23 June 1910. Some have seen it as both the culmination of nineteenth-century Protestant Christian missions and the formal beginning of the modern Protestant Christian ecumenical movement, after a sequence of interdenominational meetings that can be traced back as far as 1854. [1]
Major Protestant and Anglican denominations and missionary societies, predominantly from North America and Northern Europe, sent 1,215 representatives to Edinburgh, Scotland. Delegation was usually based on the annual expenditure of the missionary societies; one hundred additional special delegates were appointed by the British, Continental, and American Executive Committees. No Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic missionary organizations were invited. Only 18 delegates were from non-Westerners. [1] [2] Catholic Anglicans agreed to participate only after the British Executive Committee agreed to add the subtitle “to consider Missionary Problems in Relation to the Non-Christian World” to the conference title and to define the non-Christian world as excluding areas of the world that were nominally Christian but mostly non-evangelical, such as Latin America. [3]
Lord Balfour of Burleigh, of the Church of Scotland, a former Unionist cabinet minister, was the President of the World Missionary Conference. American John R. Mott, an American Methodist layperson and leader of both the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the World Student Christian Federation, chaired its proceedings. The main organiser was Joseph Oldham, a leader in the Student Christian Movement. The conference was held in the Assembly Hall of the United Free Church of Scotland.
The formal title of this conference should be called the "third ecumenical missionary conference," because the first and the second had already taken place in London in 1888 and New York in 1900 respectively. [1]
Before the conference convened, eight assigned commissions, each with twenty members, conducted two years of research on their assigned topic. Each commission produced a single volume report, which was distributed to all of the delegates before they headed to Scotland and discussed at the assembly during the Conference.
The Eight Commissions and their date of presentation at the Conference are as follows:
A ninth volume, containing the proceedings and major speeches, was published after the conclusion of the Conference. For one, a notable German medical missionary, Gottlieb Olpp, described "the work that has commenced auspiciously in Germany" and ended his address with reverence to "the great missionary, Livingstone" and "our Lord Jesus Christ." [4]
The spirit of the Conference was driven by the watchword of the Protestant Christian Missionary community at the time: "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." Thus, sentiments of obligation and urgency drove many of the commission reports, discussions and speeches at the Conference. A call to unity among Protestant missionaries was also a common desire expressed at the Conference, although no common liturgy was celebrated among the delegates while in Edinburgh. [5] In his 1947 book What Must the Church Do?, Robert S. Bilheimer used the phrase "New Reformation" to refer to the ecumenical movement that resulted from the conference, and this usage became commonplace thereafter. [6]
In the years following the Conference, Mott was especially energetic in promoting indigenisation of the evangelisation process. A Continuation Committee was formed under his leadership and he recruited thirty five members to carry out this mission. One important member was the only representative from China to speak at the conference, Cheng Jingyi, whose address to the Conference had been especially fervent on the issue of turning leadership of mission organizations to native leaders. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
In the next few years, members of this committee, under Mott's direction, headed to India, Burma, Malaysia, China, Korea, and Japan to gather information. The work of the Continuation Committee was interrupted by World War I, but formed the foundation for the establishment of the International Missionary Council, established in 1921. Later, in 1948, the World Council of Churches formed.
In celebration of its 100-year anniversary, a new World Missionary Conference was held in Edinburgh in 2010. Like the 1910 original, it was preceded by discussions on reports written by nine appointed study groups. There was a delegate conference in Edinburgh from 2–6 June 2010, which included representatives of the Evangelical, Protestant, Orthodox and Pentecostal churches, and the Catholic Church. It produced a common call to mission. [12] Recognising the global nature of modern Christianity and the wide appreciation of the Edinburgh 2010 legacy across churches and mission bodies, many other events and study processes took place throughout the year. The whole process was co-ordinated through the Edinburgh 2010 website, where documents, videos, photos, etc. are available. [13]
Also in 2010, three other major conferences were held to commemorate Edinburgh 1910. The first was held in Tokyo as a gathering of global mission leaders, from May 11–14th, called the Global Mission Consultation. [14] The next gathering, the Third International Congress of the Lausanne Movement, was held in Cape Town, South Africa, from 16–25 October 2010. [15] The third gathering was held in Boston, from November 4–7. [16] Each of these four gatherings reflected on the significance and outcomes of Edinburgh 1910 over the last century. They also looked to the future of the Church's global mission in the century ahead. The meetings in Edinburgh and Boston were more ecumenical in representation, and the meetings in Tokyo and Cape Town were primarily evangelical. The Tokyo meeting was organized and designed for evangelical mission leaders, and the Cape Town meeting was organized and designed for a broad representation of Church and mission leaders.
The World Council of Churches (WCC) is a worldwide Christian inter-church organization founded in 1948 to work for the cause of ecumenism. Its full members today include the Assyrian Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, most jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Old Catholic Church, the Lutheran churches, the Anglican Communion, the Mennonite churches, the Methodist churches, the Moravian Church, Mar Thoma Syrian Church and the Reformed churches, as well as the Baptist World Alliance and Pentecostal churches. Notably, the Catholic Church is not a full member, although it sends delegates to meetings who have observer status.
Ecumenism – also called interdenominationalism, transdenominationalism, or ecumenicalism – is the concept and principle that Christians who belong to different Christian denominations should work together to develop closer relationships among their churches and promote Christian unity. The adjective ecumenical is thus applied to any interdenominational initiative that encourages greater cooperation and union among Christian denominations and churches.
The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) is an interdenominational organization of evangelical Christian churches, serving more than 600 million evangelicals, founded in 1846 in London, England, United Kingdom to unite evangelicals worldwide. WEA is the largest international organization of evangelical churches. The headquarters are in Deerfield, Illinois, with UN offices in New York City, Geneva, and Bonn. It brings together 9 regional and 143 national evangelical alliances of churches, and over one hundred member organizations. Moreover, the WEA includes a certain percentage of individual evangelical Christian churches. As of March 2021, the Secretary General of the WEA is German theologian Thomas Schirrmacher.
John Raleigh Mott was an evangelist and long-serving leader of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF). He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for his work in establishing and strengthening international Protestant Christian student organizations that worked to promote peace. He shared the prize with Emily Balch. From 1895 until 1920 Mott was the General Secretary of the WSCF. Intimately involved in the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, that body elected him as a lifelong honorary President. He helped found the World Student Christian Federation in 1895, the 1910 World Missionary Conference and the World Council of Churches in 1948. His best-known book, The Evangelization of the World in this Generation, became a missionary slogan in the early 20th century.
Arthur Judson Brown was an American clergyman, missionary and author.
A Christian mission is an organized effort for the propagation of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries, to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work. Sometimes individuals are sent and are called missionaries, and historically may have been based in mission stations. When groups are sent, they are often called mission teams and they do mission trips. There are a few different kinds of mission trips: short-term, long-term, relational and those that simply help people in need. Some people choose to dedicate their whole lives to mission. Missionaries preach the Christian faith, and provide humanitarian aid. Christian doctrines permit the provision of aid without requiring religious conversion. However, Christian missionaries are implicated in the genocide of indigenous peoples. Around 100,000 native people in California, U.S., or 1/3 of the native population, are said to have died due to missions.
The World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) is a federation of autonomous national Student Christian Movements (SCM) forming the youth and student arm of the global ecumenical movement. The Federation includes Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic students.
Indigenous churches are churches suited to local culture and led by local Christians. There have been two main Protestant strategies proposed for the creation of indigenous churches:
The Conference of European Churches (CEC) was founded in 1959 to promote reconciliation, dialogue and friendship between the churches of Europe at a time of growing Cold War political tensions and divisions.
Student Christian Movement of Great Britain is a British religious charity led by students, past and present. The movement is an ecumenical and inclusive community that recognises unity in diversity and explores faith through worship, discussion and action. SCM's vision is that "every student can find a vibrant, open and inclusive Christian community, where they can explore faith and be inspired to put faith into action."
The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions was an organization founded in 1886 that sought to recruit college and university students in the United States for missionary service abroad. It also sought to publicize and encourage the missionary enterprise in general. Arthur Tappan Pierson was the primary early leader.
The Church of Christ in China was a coalition of churches in mainland China, established in the early half of the twentieth century. After missionaries were expelled from China in the 1950s, it would continue to exist primarily in the Hong Kong Council of the Church of Christ in China.
This article describes the relationship between the Seventh-day Adventist Church and other Christian denominations and movements, and other religions. Adventists resist the movement which advocates their full ecumenical integration into other churches, because they believe that such a transition would force them to renounce their foundational beliefs and endanger the distinctiveness of their religious message. According to one church document,
John A. Mackay was a Presbyterian theologian, missionary, and educator. He was a strong advocate of the Ecumenical Movement and World Christianity.
Christianity in the 20th century was characterized by an accelerating secularization of Western society, which had begun in the 19th century, and by the spread of Christianity to non-Western regions of the world.
Cheng Jingyi or Cheng Ching-yi was a Chinese Protestant leader who worked for an independent, unified Chinese Christian Church and a nondenominational unity of Christians in China. He received honorary doctorates from Knox College, Toronto, Canada (1916); the College of Wooster, Ohio, USA (1923); and St. John's University, Shanghai (1929). He died in Shanghai after his visit to the mission work in southwest China and Guizhou in 1939.
The Christian Occupation of China: A General Survey of the Numerical Strength and Geographical Distribution of the Christian Forces in China, Made by the Special Committee on Survey and Occupation, China Continuation Committee, 1918-1921 is a book published in 1922 simultaneously in English and Chinese by the Special Committee on Survey and Occupation, commissioned by the China Continuation Committee, headed by Milton T. Stauffer, assisted by Tsinforn C. Wong, and M. Gardner Tewksbury. The volume was intended as a progress report on the status of Christian churches in China, including social and economic background and local conditions, in preparation for foreign missionaries to turn control over to Chinese Christians, but instead, partly because of the provocative title of the English version, was one of the provocations of anti-Christian movements of the early 1920s.
Scottish Protestant missions are organised programmes of outreach and conversion undertaken by Protestant denominations within Scotland, or by Scottish people. Long after the triumph of the Church of Scotland in the Lowlands, Highlanders and Islanders clung to a form of Christianity infused with animistic folk beliefs and practices. From 1708 the Scottish Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) began working in the area. In 1797 James Haldane founded the non-denominational Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home. Dozens of lay preachers, divinity students and English preachers were sent to the region. In the early nineteenth century a variety of organisations were formed to support evangelism to the region.
The National Christian Council of China (NCC) was a Protestant organization in China. Its members were both Chinese Protestant churches and foreign missionary societies and its purpose was to promote cooperation among these churches and societies. The NCC was formed in 1922 in the aftermath of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference.
The International Missionary Council (IMC) was an ecumenical Protestant missionary organization established in 1921, which in 1961, merged with the World Council of Churches (WCC), becoming the WCC's Division of World Mission and Evangelism.
