This high-quality collection of essays by leading scholars in their respective fields marks the retirement of Brian Stanley as professor of World Christianity at Edinburgh University. A useful short chapter and bibliography by David Bebbington outlines Stanley's productivity as a teacher, scholar and research leader. Emma Wild-Wood's intelligent introductory chapter sets out what proves to be a fruitful coupling of themes: ecumenism and independency. Ecumenism she defines as the desire for unity, collaboration, connectivity and often for shared belief and practice, while independency is the need for distinction, plurality and contextual translation of the Gospel. These two impulses, Wild-Wood explains, exist in critical tension and entangle in complex and unexpected ways in different eras and geographical contexts.

Like Stanley himself, many of his colleagues and collaborators who have contributed to the volume have worked on Evangelicalism and related forms of nonconformity. Their essays reveal a great variety of responses to ecumenism and independency. In her introduction Wild-Wood observes that Evangelicals often resist formal ecumenical relations because it is a diversion from the Great Commission to make disciples. In his essay on the penumbral origins of Pentecostalism in China, Gary Tiedemann shows how Pentecostal missionaries turned the urge to independency into a withering exclusivism which stymied relations with other Churches but nevertheless created a transnational movement of missionary workers that drew recruits from across north America and Europe. The relentless drive of Pentecostal missionaries to proselytise also captured the imagination of Chinese Christians who formed their own equally independent Churches. A similar urge to separate from ‘unsaved’ church members was present amongst the East African and East Asian revivalists who are the subject of Kevin Ward's chapter, although, as Ward's innovative comparative approach reveals, the assertion of independence took different paths on each continent. While both sets of revivalists were keen to make connections with like-minded spirit-filled believers across the globe they took a different stance towards missionaries. The East Africans worked closely with the Cambridge graduates who staffed the Ruanda Mission, and the East Asians saw revival as a means of breaking free of missionary domination. In Korea, Japanese colonialism prompted a powerful alliance between revivalist Protestant Churches and the nationalist movement.

Indeed, the politics of decolonisation shaped aspirations towards ecumenism and independency in profound ways, as is illustrated by Marina Xiaojing Wang's stimulating essay on the leading Chinese and Indian clerics, Cheng Jingyi and Vedanayagam S. Azariah. In China, nationalism shaped indigenous Christians’ opposition to western denominations and mission, meaning that Cheng's vision of an organic non-denominational Church became a reality in the Church of Christ in China (1927). Nevertheless, the strong indigenous expression of Christianity was tempered by a vibrant spirit of internationalism which sought to connect with Churches in other lands. As Alexander Chow's essay reveals, this was even the case for more sectarian Evangelical Churches which, at the very least, still sought to connect with the Chinese diaspora in Britain and the US. In the Indian case, Azariah's aspirations for ‘oneness’ were eclipsed by the sheer force of Hindu nationalism which retained the caste system and placed Christianity outside the nation, although, as Chow observes in his perceptive conclusion, the unity and independence expressed in the Church of South India (1947) gave Indian Christians the confidence to claim equality with older national Churches situated in the West.

Though it is often assumed that ecumenism was driven by collaboration between denominations in the mission field, Robert Frykenberg's essay on the spat between Anglican and Lutheran missionaries in South India reminds us that missionary relations could sour over issues of territory and sheep-stealing, even as loyal Tamil Christians enriched the Anglican tradition. And not all ecumenism was theologically driven or shaped by independency. Andrew Kaiser's essay about cooperation between missions with deep doctrinal differences in Shanxi, China, reveals that ecumenism can be driven by the practical needs of surviving in circumstances of isolation and limited resources. Ecumenism can also be driven by crisis, as illustrated by Allen Yeh's piece on Evangelical-Catholic collaboration in care for the environment in Latin America, while Dana Robert's enchanting essay reminds readers that Christians across the globe can be brought together by the performance and appreciation of sacred music.

As is often the case with celebratory volumes, not all the essays directly address the themes of the collection. Nevertheless, some of these still deserve a mention. In what must be one of the last pieces penned by the late Andrew Walls, we encounter a characteristically original and insightful essay on generational tensions within the missionary movement, exploring the dialectic between experience and the transformative potential of fresh ideas. Stewart Brown's chapter on China as an idealised model of good values and procedures and a mirror to the West during the early Enlightenment sheds new light on the cosmopolitanism of the era. Mark Noll's attempt to disrupt traditional Euro-American narratives of Christian history through the identification of what became significant non-western developments in the window 1899–1900 challenges historians to rethink their method and presuppositions. His well-developed case studies on the foundation of Indian Pentecostalism in Khedgaon, India, by Pandita Ramabai, and the first Latin American bishops’ plenary council make his essay a particularly compelling read.

The rich body of work found in Ecumenism and Independency brings much-needed conceptualisation to the study of World Christianity, creating a little space between this relatively new subdiscipline and the decades-long tradition of area studies in which southern expressions of Christianity have usually been examined. The profusion of work on Asia, particularly China, also usefully expands the field's initial emphasis on Africa. However, the absence of work on the Middle East and scant representation of Latin America raises hard questions about the real geographical breadth and focus of so-called World Christianity. Is it more of an analytical disposition or a network of scholars who tend to focus on Evangelical Protestantism to the exclusion of Catholicism and Orthodoxy? And the thorny issue remains of whether Europe and North America are in the analytical remit of World Christianity.