Polycentric Missiology

21st-Century Mission from Everyone to Everywhere

Allen Yeh

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899265
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

The Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference was the most famous missions conference in modern church history. A century later, five conferences on five continents displayed the landscape of global mission at the dawn of the third millennium: Tokyo 2010, Edinburgh 2010, Cape Town 2010, 2010Boston, and CLADE V (San José, 2012). These five events provide a window into the state of world Christianity and contemporary missiology. Missiologist Allen Yeh, the only person to attend all five conferences, chronicles the recent history of world mission through the lenses of these landmark events. He assesses the legacy of Edinburgh 1910 and the development of world Christianity in the following century. Whereas Edinburgh 1910 symbolized Christendom's mission "from the West to the rest, " the conferences of 2010-12 demonstrate the new realities of polycentric and polydirectional mission—from everyone to everywhere. Yeh's accounts of the conferences highlight the crucial missiological issues of our era: evangelism, frontier missions, ecumenism, unengaged and post-Christian populations, reconciliation, postmodernities, contextualization, postcolonialism, migration, and more. What emerges is a portrait of a contemporary global Christian mission that encompasses every continent, embodying good news for all nations.

FROM 1910 TO 2010

THE LEGACY OF EDINBURGH 1910

The Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference, arguably the most famous missions conference in history and flagged by Mark Noll as the most recent of the twelve “decisive moments” for the church,1 is burdened with a moniker that it can never fully live up to: “The Birthplace of the Modern Ecumenical Movement.” Brian Stanley gives three reasons for this nickname, with reference to the year 1910 itself (past, future and present):

• Past: some scholars connected William Carey’s proposal of an ecumenical 1810 conference to its supposed fulfillment at Edinburgh 1910 (see chapter five for a fuller explanation).
• Future: the World Council of Churches (founded in 1948) can directly trace its lineage back to Edinburgh 1910.2
• Present: the conference organizers and participants themselves had a sense of self-importance regarding the significance of this conference.3

However, Stanley contends that “to a possibly greater extent than any other event in modern Christian history, the conference suffers from the distortions of hindsight.”4 Edinburgh 1910 was not ecumenical because it did not have adequate representations of:

• denominations: Aside from Protestants, there were only Anglo-Catholics,5 but no Roman Catholics or Orthodox, and certainly no Pentecostals as they were just appearing on the world scene historically at the time.6
• nationalities/geographies: Latin America was infamously excluded, in terms of both delegate representation and being a recipient of missionary work7 (see chapter seven for further explanation).
• races/ethnicities: Though Africa and Asia were represented, only eighteen Asians and one black African were in attendance (the others from Africa were all white expatriate missionaries).8
• gender: There were very few women compared to men9 (see chapter four for more).
• age: It is debatable whether this was a problem or not; certainly there were no youth representatives at the conference, but if there was one thing that motivated the proceedings, it was young people10 (see chapter six for a further discussion).

Nevertheless, Stanley himself dedicated several years to penning his centenary commemorative volume of the history of Edinburgh 1910, so this shows the power of a sobriquet: even if it is illegitimately earned, its “myth” still captures the imagination of people. Edinburgh 1910 will always have the historical spotlight shone on it for the simple reason that its nickname perpetuates a certain reputation, whether it be reality or exaggeration.

Edinburgh 1910 is saddled with a second, seemingly contradictory, characteristic: it ended the Great Century of Missions (the nineteenth century), as dubbed by Yale church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette.11 Keeping in mind that Latourette wrote in the early twentieth century and thus did not have the benefit of knowing the events of the latter twentieth century onward, the reasons he cites for claiming the nineteenth century as the Great Century of Missions are the following:

• the link between Christianity and imperialism: “In most of these areas Christianity had been planted by the great missionary movement of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. . . . This expansion was in connexion [sic] with phenomenal explorations, commercial enterprises and conquests by Christian Europeans, in themselves also on a scale unprecedented in human history.”12
• geographical initiation: “Not so many continents or major countries were entered for the first time as in the preceding three centuries. . . . What now occurred was the acquisition of fresh footholds in regions and among peoples already touched, an expansion of unprecedented extent from both the newer bases and the older ones, and the entrance of Christianity into the large majority of such countries, islands, peoples, and tribes as had previously not been touched.”13
• Christian expansion: “The scene is no longer confined, as in the first five centuries, solely to the basin of the Mediterranean and to the few peoples outside that basin touched by Mediterranean culture. Nor is it restricted mainly to Europe with a few excursions to Asia and Africa, as in the succeeding thousand years, or chiefly to Europe and America, with some extensions to Asia and Africa, as in the three centuries between A.D. 1500 and A.D. 1800. It is now expanded to include all the globe and all peoples, nations, races, and cultures.”14
• Protestantism on the ascendancy: “It was in Protestantism that the nineteenth century awakening in Christianity was most pronounced. Protestantism became less a political and more a religious movement than any previous time. In many respects the nineteenth century was the Protestant Century. . . . New organizations and new denominations multiplied.”15
• mission societies established: “Within Protestantism arose hundreds of societies for the propagation of Christianity. Many of these were in Europe. A growing number were in the United States, and to a lesser extent, in other regions where Europeans had migrated. Like the corresponding Roman Catholic organizations, they were made possible by the voluntary gifts of thousands. This expansion of Protestantism was even less accomplished by the aid of the state than was that of Roman Catholicism.”16
• Protestant Christendom: “In some respects, the civilization of Western Europe was more profoundly moulded by Christianity than at any previous time. The democracy which was so pronounced a trend in governments in large part had a Christian source, particularly Protestantism.”17
• social justice awakening: “Mainly but by no means exclusively from Anglo-Saxon Protestantism sprang movement after movement to meet the social ills of the day. If, as seems probable, the machine itself was to some degree a product of Christianity (for it was by Christianity that that confidence in an orderly and dependable universe had been bred in the European mind on which was based the scientific attitude out of which came the machine), then Christianity was to that extent responsible for the collective evils which followed it. However, there also issued from Christianity, notably in Great Britain where it had had its earliest extensive application, efforts to remedy the sufferings brought by the machine and so to reconstruct society that it would be a blessing and not a curse. . . . Among the reforms which most clearly caught their inspiration from Christianity were those directed against Negro slavery, for the creation of modern nursing, and for the control and reduction of war and the relief of the sufferings entailed by war.”18
• Christianity in the United States: “In the United States of America the gains made by Christianity were even more striking than in Europe. Here arose the largest of the new nations born of the migration of European peoples. Here Christianity was confronted with a combination of challenges—to follow and mould the population on the westward moving frontier, to hold to their traditional religious allegiance the immigrants from Europe, to reach the non-Christian elements among the immigrants, notably the Jews and the Orientals, to protect the Indian and the Negro from exploitation by the aggressive whites and to win them to its faith, and to shape the rapidly changing culture of the land. In meeting this collection of gigantic problems Christianity made really astounding progress. While at the outset of the nation’s independent life only about one in twenty had a formal membership in some church, by 1914 more than four out of ten were on the rolls of the churches, and this in spite of the prodigious growth in population. Not much effort was made to reach the Jews, but numbers from the small Oriental enclaves had been touched, and between a third and a half of the Indians and about half of the Negroes had become professedly Christian. Due largely to impulses issuing from Christianity, Negro slavery had been abolished and the Negroes had made enormous strides in education. From the Christian conscience had come many attempts to protect the Indians and to enable them to achieve a successful adjustment to the strange world created by the white man. From Christianity, too, had come major contributions to the ideals of the country, to government, to education, to a different status for women, towards the curbing of the use of alcoholic beverages, to better care of the sick and the insane, to improved prisons, to more tolerable conditions for labourers in mines and factories, and to larger opportunities for the underprivileged in the great cities. As in Europe, most of the programmes for international peace stemmed from Christian idealism. In addition to effecting all these results in the country itself, the Christianity of the United States was increasingly reaching out to other lands and was undertaking a growing share in the world-wide missionary enterprise.”19
• world peace: “The relative peace also assisted the spread of Christianity. Because of it, missionaries could travel with comparative safety, funds could be sent them expeditiously, Christian communities could grow uninterruptedly, and fellowship could be maintained and strengthened between the new churches and those which had founded them.”20

If one gives at least some validity to Latourette’s claim, the question that needs to be asked is, if 1910 was so significant for missions, why did it end, rather than further launch, a great era of missions?

There are at least two reasons for this: one is the traumatic events of world history since 1910, which the Edinburgh participants could not have predicted, and the other is Edinburgh 1910’s unanticipated negative effect on world missions in general. With regard to the former (world history), in the last century since Edinburgh 1910 we have had:

• wars: two World Wars,21 the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Cold War, two Gulf Wars, 9/11 and numerous civil wars globally
• genocide: the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans
• economics: the Great Depression, the bursting of the Internet bubble, the crash of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the Euro crisis, and other econom...