Called to Unity: For the Sake of Mission

John Gibaut

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781908355683
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343393
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The purpose of this volume on mission and unity is to bring to public attention a broad overview on the history, development and perspectives on the role of mission in the pursuit of unity and the central biblical focus on unity as a prerequisite for an authentic witness in mission. The volume raises concrete questions: If the churches can agree on unity for mission, then does this visible unity go any further than the 'mutuality, partnership, collaboration and networking' of the Edinburgh 2010 Common Call? Does the call to unity or communion imply common touch stones, structures or ministries to serve the communion of churches in mission?

SECTION ONE

HISTORICAL AND MISSIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

EDINBURGH 1910: EVANGELIZATION AND UNITY¹

Brian Stanley

The centenary of the World Missionary Conference held in the Assembly Hall of the United Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh, 14-23 June 1910, was marked by a considerable number of commemorative events held in different parts of the globe during the year 2010, including the official centennial conference that took place in Edinburgh itself, 2-6 June 2010. The various centennial commemorations witnessed to the fact that all sections of the global Protestant family, from the most committed of ecumenists to the most conservative of evangelicals, were keen to pay their several acts of homage to the cherished memory of ‘Edinburgh 1910’, and to display their apostolic credentials as the true heirs of this historic assembly. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches also showed their eagerness to be involved in the commemoration of an event that forms no part of their own histories. It was noticeable during the commemorations how frequently statements were made that implied that Edinburgh 1910 was an ecumenical conference in something like the modern sense, and that it marked the beginning of the ecumenical movement. The year 2010 thus added a new chapter to the ongoing narrative of reinterpretation of the conference, a narrative that began even before it reached its conclusion. There can be few other episodes in modern church history that have been burdened with such a weighty cargo of symbolic meaning and, as a result, have been so liable to the distorting effect of selective remembrance. This article will attempt to disentangle history from myth, and assess the true significance of the conference with particular reference to its ecumenical consequences.²

The First International and Ecumenical Missionary Conference?

Contrary to what is often alleged, Edinburgh 1910 was neither the first international missionary conference, nor was it an ‘ecumenical’ conference except in a strictly limited sense of the word. Its original title was indeed the ‘Third Ecumenical Missionary Conference’, since it followed two earlier (and now generally forgotten) large Protestant missionary gatherings held in London in 1888 and New York in 1900. The first international conference of Protestant missionaries was in fact held in New York in 1854, albeit on a much smaller scale than the meetings in 1900 or 1910. It is a nice irony that, when at a crucial planning meeting held at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford in July 1908, it was decided to abandon the title ‘Third Ecumenical Missionary Conference’ in favour of ‘The World Missionary Conference’, the reason given was that ‘the word “ecumenical” has acquired a technical meaning’ – in other words, its modern meaning, associated with the very movement for church unity to which Edinburgh gave birth.³ As John H. Ritson, an English Methodist minister, secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and member of the British executive committee, observed, the word ‘ecumenical’ had been dropped, ‘as it cannot be used truthfully while great sections of the Church are in no way connected with the Conference.’⁴ There were, of course, no representatives of the Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Oriental Churches, although one Roman Catholic modernist, Bishop Geremia Bonomelli of Cremona, did send a letter of greeting which was, eventually, read to the conference on 21 June by his friend, Silas McBee, an American Episcopal layman from New York, with the tacit and unofficial approval of the conference business committee.

The organizers of the Edinburgh conference were thus humble enough to recognize that their overwhelmingly Protestant and broadly evangelical assembly could not justifiably claim the label of ‘ecumenical’. The most that can be said is that it was rather more ecumenical than its predecessors in that the Hhigh- Cchurch Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), to the chagrin of many of its supporters, was for the first time represented in a Protestant missionary conference, although the more distinctively Anglo-Catholic Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) was not. Despite the description of the conference in one recent academic study of twentieth-century ecumenism as ‘the first modern assembly of world-wide churches’,⁵ the participating agencies in the Edinburgh conference were voluntary bodies with no ecclesial status: it was composed of delegates of western missionary societies, with the addition of a few specially invited guests. As is well known, only a tiny minority of the 1,215 official delegates came from the non-western world: at the latest count, twenty such have been identified – nine Indians (including one Eurasian Methodist woman from Madras, Grace Stephens),⁶ four Japanese, three Chinese, one Korean, one Burmese, one Anatolian, and a solitary and heavily Europeanized black African – Mark Christian Hayford from the Gold Coast (Ghana). Hence, even if the term ‘ecumenical’ is interpreted in its original and non-ecclesiastical sense as meaning ‘representative of the entire family of humanity’, the World Missionary Conference has only a very limited right to the title.

The Starting-Point of the Ecumenical Movement?

The Edinburgh conference is even more frequently described, not least in undergraduate essays, as the starting-point of the modern ecumenical movement. Alec Vidler’s volume in the Pelican History of the Church observed that ‘it is generally agreed that the movement, as it is now known, dates from the International Missionary Conference [sic] that was held at Edinburgh in 1910’.⁷ John Kent’s acerbic judgement on the ecumenical movement as ‘the great ecclesiastical failure of our time’ referred to 1910 as the year ‘when the search for institutional unity was first systematically organized’,⁸ ignoring the fact that any questions relating to the differences in doctrine and order between Christian churches were strictly prohibited from the discussions at Edinburgh. The exclusion was extracted from J. H. Oldham, the newly appointed conference secretary, in 1908 by Charles Gore, bishop of Birmingham, and Edward Talbot, bishop of Southwark, as the condition that would, they hoped, secure the participation in the conference of the SPG, many of whose supporters viewed the projected event as a lamentable gathering of Protestant sects with which no catholic Anglican could possibly be identified.

In point of fact, the terms of the exclusion of faith and order were placed under considerable strain by the weight of evidence submitted to Commission VIII on ‘Co-operation and the Promotion of Unity’, such that Protestants in India, China and Japan were ready to talk about moves towards church union, and not merely about closer co-operation between mission agencies. Nevertheless, if the conference had made any sustained venture into the forbidden territory of discussing the possible reunion of western Christendom, its minority of Anglo-Catholic delegates would have promptly walked out, and disaster would have ensued.

As is well known, there is nevertheless good justification for tracing the genealogy of the World Council of Churches at least in part to the 1910 conference. John R. Mott, the American Methodist lay evangelist who took the chair at Edinburgh, was the first speaker at the inaugural assembly of the WCC at Amsterdam in 1948, and was made honorary President of the new World Council. The WCC was the offspring of the marriage in 1938 of the Faith & Order and Life & Work movements. The latter was, however, a response, not to the World Missionary Conference, but to World War I. Its principal architect, Nathan Söderblom, Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala, was not a delegate at Edinburgh, though he was deeply influenced by the international student movement that was so formative for the collaborative and non-dogmatic approach adopted by the conference.

The Faith & Order movement, by contrast, owed its genesis to Charles H. Brent, American missionary Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Philippines, who was present at Edinburgh, and spoke twice. His first address was a bold contribution to the debate on ‘Co-operation and the Promotion of Unity’, in which he urged that, ‘In any scheme, practical or theoretical, for unity, we must take into our reckoning the Roman Catholic Church, which is an integral part of the Church and of the Kingdom of God,’ ⁹ an emphasis that reflected his own experience in the Philippines, the most Catholic nation in Asia. His second address, made to the penultimate evening session on 22 June, referred in general terms to the ‘new vision’ that had been unfolded to the delegates.¹⁰ According to Tissington Tatlow, General Secretary of the Student Christian Movement, ‘the new vision was the vision of a united Church’, though there is no conclusive evidence that church unity rather than enhanced missionary co-operation was what Brent meant.¹¹ In his old age, J. H. Oldham, the Secretary of the conference, claimed that Brent had called at Edinburgh for another conference to tackle those questions of faith and order that had been excluded from the agenda, but the evidence suggests that Oldham’s memory was at fault; no such reference is recorded in the reports of either of Brent’s conference addresses, and his diary records that the idea of a world conference on faith and order in fact came to him vividly at a morning Eucharist in Cincinnati on 5 October 1910 at the opening of the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church.¹²

Was Edinburgh the Genesis of Structured Forms of International Co-Operation between Protestant Missions?

If the Faith & Order movement owed its origins at least indirectly to the deep impression which attendance at Edinburgh made upon Charles Brent, as on many other delegates, the connection between the conference and the formation in October 1921 of the International Missionary Council at Lake Mohonk, New York state, is self-evident and well known: the first major global ecumenical body was formed, with Oldham as its Secretary, in direct succession to the Continuation Committee established at the close of the Edinburgh conference. What is rarely emphasized, however, is that there was strong pressure well before 1910 for the formation of a permanent international Protestant missionary body. That pressure came from North America and continental Europe, where Protestant ecumenism was considerably further advanced than in Britain. In North America in January 1883, twenty-three Protestant foreign missionary societies of the United States and Canada had formed an annual conference.¹³ By 1910, the Foreign Missions Conference of North America was a well-established feature of the North American Protestant landscape, representing over fifty missionary societies, and it was this body that took the initiative in suggesting that a sequel to the 1900 Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York be held. Similarly, on the European continent, there were regional or national bodies representing Protestant missions in Scandinavia (from 1863), Germany (from 1885) and the Netherlands (from 1887).¹⁴ A conference of representatives of mission boards from Germany, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland was formed as early as 1866, generally meeting every four years.¹⁵

With such embryonic national or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Editorial Introduction: Called to Unity – For the Sake of Mission
• Section 1: Historical and Missiological Perspectives
• Section 2: Ways of Doing Mission in Unity in Different Contexts
• Concluding Chapter: A Credible Witness
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover