Historians of modern missions long have acknowledged the watershed character of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. Yet Brian Stanley insists that the common interpretation of it, as the seedbed of the ecumenical movement, is much too thin. Inter-church relations were very much part of the conversation, Stanley acknowledges, but we should recall that Edinburgh 1910 was a missions conference, first and foremost. The ecumenical outcome was in some ways a surprise, given that in order to secure widespread support, conference organizers had to promise that it would address no major issues of church polity or ecclesiology.
This is a richly detailed and nuanced study, filled with insight into the personal, international, and denominational sensitivities of the times. Stanley reveals the surprising extent to which the conference was shaped by Anglo-Catholic partisans. Without their blessing, Anglican leaders could not endorse the meeting, and in a day of British dominance in both missions and empire, that was unthinkable. Another highlight is the delicate role that Americans played in this meeting. After hosting a prior conference in New York in 1900, American missions leaders knew that they needed to defer to the British for the next meeting. Yet it was clear that without the Americans' fundraising and organizational help, the British were unlikely to mount a conference anytime soon. Moreover, the organizers had to woo the European Protestants, led by the Germans, who felt marginalized by the Anglo-American missions colossus. And yet the meeting happened, with great public interest and acclaim, smoothly executed operations, and momentous results.
Edinburgh 1910 was designed to gather intelligence from the mission fields and provide a forum for the findings and recommendations of its eight working commissions. They prepared questionnaires and received detailed reports from missionaries and agency leaders on evangelization, native churches, education, inter-religious relations, missionary preparation, the home base of missions, mission–government relations, and cooperation and unity. The author devotes much more attention to the work of these commissions and to their working materials than to the conference event itself. Through some deft documentary sleuthing, he finds out what was considered, debated, and amended, and which responses from the field, if any, influenced the commissioners' reports. No one has paid much attention to these voluminous materials, outside of the files of the commission on interchurch cooperation and unity. Yet Stanley shows how valuable these sources are for understanding the era's mission thought and experience.
This book is also rich with contextual understanding, and it weaves a tale of personalities, power bases, and missionary and indigenous hopes, fears and tensions. Edinburgh 1910 came at the full flowering of Euro-American imperial expansion and evolutionary theories of national character. The “high civilizations” of Asia excited the highest hopes for the gospel's progress, and the vast realms of Africa elicited only condescension. The conveners encouraged missions to sponsor delegates from the emerging national churches, but very few did so. The seventeen delegates who did come from Asia and the one who came from Africa were for the most part quite circumspect in their public utterances, but still they gave their audiences some arresting counter interpretations of the missionary task. And they took home fresh determination to lead independent churches and support nationalist causes. Mission leaders professed eagerness for the “distinctive gifts” of various peoples to be expressed in new veins of Christian thought, but they had trouble seeing that these new outlooks were emerging.
Stanley knows that these are standard tropes for studies of this era, but he finds some unexpected twists in the plot lines. The commission dealing with Christianity's relation to other faiths embraced the liberal Protestant idea that other faiths were important precursors to Christianity and found their ultimate fulfillment in it. Unfortunately, few of these commissioners had mission experience and they did not listen to those who did. Missionaries mostly said that such views were unproductive. People whose beliefs were thought to have the least “fulfillment” value—the Dalits and hill tribes of India, the ethnic minorities of China, and the many peoples of sub-Saharan Africa—were among the most eager to accept Christianity.
In the chapter on mission–government relations, Stanley finds very little dissent from European imperialism. But he finds many complaints in the missionaries' questionnaires about the colonial regimes. Few missionaries questioned the presumption of European superiority, but many used these racist views to argue for the interests of their indigenous clients. In their eyes, the “white man's burden” was real and deep, and everywhere the colonial regimes were failing in their obligations.
Regarding the belief that Edinburgh 1910 launched the ecumenical movement, Stanley says that this interpretation skips over a more immediate result, the formation of the International Missionary Council (IMC). In the only resolution formally proposed and passed by the Edinburgh Conference, a “continuation committee” was formed to plan an international body to help coordinate mission work, conduct research, and represent missions' interests to governments. “Faith and order” questions had been declared out of bounds at the insistence of the Anglo-Catholics, but practical cooperation was very much on.
Edinburgh 1910 stood at the edge of a world that was soon to crumble. World War I ended any easy identification of Europe with Christendom, foreshadowed the end of Europe's high imperial era, drove deep doubts into its presumption of racial and cultural superiority, and hastened the rise of nationalist aspirations and anti-colonial movements. Less predictably, Edinburgh was one of the last great expressions of an evangelical Protestant consensus and presaged the end of mission agencies by and for women. All this and more, Brian Stanley captures in this astute study. It is a model of historical scholarship in its contextual reach, documentary analysis, and ironic sensibilities.
