From Christendom

From Christendom to World Christianity: Missions and the Demographic Transformation of the Church by Andrew F. Walls

Andrew F. Walls is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland; Honorary Professor in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and Visiting Professor at the Akrofi-Christaller Centre in Ghana. He taught at the Seminary as Guest Professor of Ecumenics and Mission in the 1997 and 1998 spring semesters and from 1998 to 2001. This essay, which appears also in the author's new book, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (2001), is the first of his four lectures on issions, delivered April 16, 2001, in the Gambrell Room of Scheide Hall.

THE HISTORY of Western Christian missions is a single story, at least from the early sixteenth century. The Reformation complicates the story of missions, but it does not determine it. The roots of the work of the most adamantly Protestant missionaries lie in the work of Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci and Pedro de Gante. In the non-Western world the attribute that first identifies Western missionaries is not that they are Catholic or Protestant, but that they are Western. The viewpoint even in the Eastern churches is well expressed by the remark of the Russian theologian Khomiakov, that the Pope was the first Protestant.

At the beginning of this story Christianity appeared to be a Western religion. Appearances were deceptive; there was nearly a millennium and a half of active and expansive Christianity in Asia before the first Western missionary arrived there. Equally there were Christian communities in Africa that could claim a continuous history from sub-apostolic or early patristic times. But by around 1500, the time when a long-isolated Europe at last found itself in contact with the non-Western world, circumstances dictated that Christianity became more European than it had ever been before, and did so just at the point when Europe became more Christian than it had ever been before. Events so welded Christianity and the West together, and the

domestication of Christianity in the West was so complete, the process of acculturation there so successful, that the faith seemed inseparable from the categories of European life and thought. Nor did that perception change quickly. By the end of our story, however, it was the Western world that was giving up on Christianity, with the proportion of Europeans and North Americans in the Christian body declining year by year, and the cultural contexts and world views of Africa and Asia and the rest of the non-Western world were beginning to remake Christian living and thinking.

This demographic transformation of the Church, and especially its rapid acceleration in the twentieth century, can be illustrated by a visit to two locations which provide rich materials for viewing the missionary situation a century ago, as it looked to some of the wisest and best-informed people in the Protestant world. The two locations are Princeton and Edinburgh. The reason for choosing Princeton is the delivery of the first series of the Students' Lectures on Missions at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1893. The lecturer was the Rev. Dr. James S. Dennis, then of the American Presbyterian Mission in Beirut, and the series was entitled "Foreign Missions after a Century." The lectures were published the same year under the same

title. The copy I have been using carries the bookplate of B. B. Warfield.

This fairly modest volume—368 pages with generous margins—was the acorn of a mighty oak. The Princeton lecture series was expanded into three large volumes entitled Christian Missions and Social Progress. This book, which appeared between 1897 and 1906, is one of the landmark undertakings in the study of missions. It was soon followed by a fourth volume which

formed a statistical appendix—the fullest body of statistical data on missions that had hitherto been collected.

Dennis delivered his lectures at the very height of the missionary movement, in the period when the number of missionaries from the Western to the non-Western world was reaching its peak. But he believed that there was work for many more. The newly-instituted lecture series, the Students' Lectureship on Missions was set up to appeal to students, because students were to be the primary source of the missionary multitude, the source not only of recruits but of drive and enthusiasm. "The establishment of lectureships on missions in our prominent theological seminaries," says Dennis, "is timely and in touch with the leadings of the Spirit of God in our day." "The marvelous development of missions" was, in fact, "manifestly one of the

foremost movements of Providence in the religious history of our century."

The underlying assumption in Dennis's title is that in 1893 the missionary movement was about a hundred years old; old enough, that is, to have acquired wisdom and experience, young enough still to have vast resources of energy and stamina. It had emerged out of apathy and hostility, survived the era of infant mortality and overcome the perils of infancy and adolescence; it now seemed unstoppable. Everything was in its favor: the march of technology

that ensured rapid communications, the organization of the world that placed power in the safe and predictable hands of the civilized nations. "When," he asks, "in the history of the Church has it been so easy to send our missionaries to the ends of the earth and extend to them adequate protection and support and sympathy?" Modern methods of travel, postal services, international comity, financial exchange, telegraphic communications, are all in favor of mission work. "International comity" in this context implies, of course, Western hegemony over the rest of the world; a little later, Dennis will refer to the "strong, firm, and just rule" of the British Raj exercising its "benign sway" over the "vast, restless, and turbulent races" of India. There is not a glimmer of expectation that these conditions will ever change.

Dennis's analysis of the world situation both in terms of church growth and the beneficent social results of that growth is almost unfailingly upbeat. The analysis begins with Japan, where political, social, commercial, educational, literary, and religious change had occurred since Commodore Perry opened the country to foreign influence "on a scale unprecedented in the history of any other nation." Japan—already influencing China in helpful directions—was the key to the Orient. If the Church of Christ would seize the present opportunity Japan would be the "grandest trophy of modern missions." In China, the present church growth rate extended for the next thirty-five years would produce twenty-six million Protestant communicants. China is destined to be a land of Pentecosts, and needs only the religion of Christ to become one of the dominant powers of the earth. For India, Dennis produces dramatic statistics from the conversions in the mass movements going on at the time. He acknowledges how long, even at a rapid rate of conversion, the evangelization of such a vast population would take; nonetheless, he sees in the developments of the past century the possibility that the Empire of India will soon be in the hands of Christian converts. By contrast, Korea, a land where there were currently only 177 Protestant church members, gets only a brief mention. And on Africa "a whole continent of forgotten humanity," he is less buoyant. His summary view is that mission history there has less of discouragement than would naturally be expected.

Dennis's own missionary service was in the Middle East. He is dismissive of the ancient Christian Churches of the East (Coptic, Syrian, and Armenian), and derides the Anglican mission that was trying to work with the old church in Mesopotamia. "God has chosen American Christians to be the saviors of Christianity in the East," 13 regenerating it so that it may aggressively commend Christ to Muslims. Similarly South America is "as destitute of spiritual, saving Christianity as those who have never heard the Gospel message of salvation."

Africa, South America, and the Middle East are in fact the chief reminders of the long hard labor still lying before the missionary movement. By contrast, he sees East and Southern Asia as, from a Christian point of view, full of bright hope. It is easy to misunderstand Dennis here. His rosy portraits of the Christian future of India, China and Japan are not prophecies, they are pointers to what could happen if the Church—an essentially Western Church—were to perform its duty. It is for the students of Princeton and their peers to rise to their responsibilities. There is nothing to impede them; they live in a politically stable world, marked almost everywhere by evidence of what Dennis calls social progress. The Asian powers, with Japan in the lead, are now in transformation, and that transformation will make them world powers. There is no sense of threat in this, or indeed in anything in the world that Dennis describes. There is much darkness in it, but it is residual darkness; there is no sight of the Mystery of Iniquity manufacturing destruction.

The interest in statistics that was later to find expression in the supplementary fourth volume of Christian Missions and Social Progress and later in the Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions is evident already in Foreign Missions after a Century. The very smell of a statistic can send Dennis into an orgy of calculation. He tells us that the Indian post office deals with 320 million letters a year. He knows how many miles of telegraph wire India has, and how many elementary schools there are in Japan. He calculates how long it would take the inhabitants of China to sign their names, allowing four signatures a minute for twelve hours a day; and how long the line would be while they were waiting their turn. He notes that 20,000 people a day die in China, and that this rate of mortality would finish off New York in a month.

But his most interesting statistics are those comparing growth of church membership in the United States with that in various parts of the non-Western world. As he puts it, "It is only when we compare results in the foreign field with corresponding results in the home field that many minds succeed in recognizing the significance of the facts." And the facts were that the churches of Asia and Africa in 1892 were in general growing faster than those of the USA. The past year's statistics for the Presbyterian Church in the United States showed that only fourteen congregations in the whole country had exceeded the growth rate of the Presbyterian Church in Tripoli in Syria. Only eight presbyteries—and those the rich big city ones of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—had admitted as many communicants as the presbytery of Shandong in China. And not a single American presbytery could come anywhere near the rate of growth of the Presbytery of Laos. Laos was the "banner presbytery of the whole Presbyterian church." Dennis has noted the surprising development that the church overseas was increasing at a rate faster than that in the expansive, confident America from which its missionaries were coming.

And this fact moves our tale from Princeton to Edinburgh. In the building which currently houses the Scottish Parliament, and which has hitherto been the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, a conference took place in 1910 to survey the issues which Dennis had presented in his Princeton lectures. Dennis, by this time recognized as the master statistician of the missionary movement, was called in to assist in one of its preparatory documents.

The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, has passed into Christian legend. It was a landmark in the history of mission; the starting point of the modern theology of mission; the high point of the Western missionary movement and the point from which it declined; the launchpad of the modern ecumenical movement; the point at which Christians first began to glimpse something of what a world church would be like.

The crucial events of Christian history have often taken place through obscure people. The missionary movement itself, in both its Catholic and Protestant phases, has usually been a peripheral activity of the church. It would be hard to guess from the average volume on the history of the church in the nineteenth century that events which were to transform the church altogether were going on in Africa and Asia; for these events are likely to occupy a few pages in the volume at most. So we need not be surprised to find that the origins of the World Missionary Conference lie among obscure people and in mundane circumstances. John R. Mott, the dynamic and unanimous choice for Conference chairman, though internationally known before the Conference began, was not directly involved in its origins. J. H. Oldham, the Conference Secretary, became involved in an executive capacity almost accidentally. (Two more senior churchmen were originally appointed to organize the Conference. One fell ill, the other was appointed Principal of the Scots College in Calcutta. Oldham, until then little known outside the Student Movement, was called in to fill a sudden gap.)

The affairs of Malawi started the process which led to the World Missionary Conference. A secretary of the Livingstonia Mission Committee, 19 his name not widely known then and still less since, had attended the Ecumenical Missionary Conference of 1900 in New York. In the course of a letter to the secretary of the American Presbyterian Mission Board he asked when another such conference would be convened. Robert E. Speer responded warmly, and got it on the agenda of the next meeting of the secretaries of the main American mission boards. That meeting agreed that it was desirable to hold another conference ten years after the New York meeting of 1900; and added that it would be appropriate for it to be organized in Britain.

There was nothing particularly new about the idea of a general missionary conference in itself. The idea goes back at least to the early years of the nineteenth century. In 1806 William Carey proposed an intercontinental meeting of missionaries. Perspectives were different in those days. It would never have occurred to Carey, who never returned to Britain in the course of his long Indian service, to hold a missionary conference in Edinburgh. He assumed that such a conference would take place where missionaries were actually working, and suggested the Cape of Good Hope as a suitably central location. His proposal was dismissed as the "pleasing dream" of an "enlarged mind." The first missionary conference actually to take place is probably that which occurred in New York in 1854. The occasion was the visit of Alexander Duff, missionary in India of the Free Church of Scotland, to the United States. Duff was already celebrated, not only as an eminent missionary but as the spokesman for the systematic study of missions, a cause which he constantly brought to the attention of his church. In the next decade he was to persuade it to establish in New College, Edinburgh, the first chair of mission studies (evangelistic theology as he called it) anywhere in the world and he saw this as only the first step towards a Christian institute of languages and cultures such as existed elsewhere only in Rome. In America Duff had a triumphal progress, and the first international missionary conference was hurriedly erected round his visit. The better-known Conference on Mission held in Liverpool in i860 was a British initiative, and overwhelmingly British in composition. There was just one participant from Asia, the Rev. Behari Lai Singh, an Indian minister of the Free Church of Scotland. His interventions were substantial and lively, notably in his insistence that Hindu and Muslim scholarship posed intellectual challenges that Christians ignored at their peril. A larger conference took place in London in 1878, and a really big one, the so-called Centenary Conference, in 1888. 24 Then there was the Ecumenical Missionary Conference already referred to, in New York in 1900. "This Conference is called ecumenical," said one of its organizers,

not because all portions of the Christian Church are to be represented in it by delegates, but because the plan of campaign it proposes covers the whole area of the inhabited globe. Blot out of the map the desert and waste places, the Arctic and the Antarctic zones, and what you have left is the ecumenical world.

Add to these the conferences of the Student Volunteer Missionary Union with their batteries of eminent speakers and published proceedings, and it is clear that Edinburgh 1910 was far from being the first major international missionary conference. It was not even the biggest; over 300 more delegates attended the London Centenary Conference of 1888 than came to Edinburgh twenty-two years later. Yet that meeting and most of the others are now largely forgotten. Something about Edinburgh 1910 makes it the best remembered conference of all, better even than its successor meetings in Jerusalem and Tambaram. So it is worth considering some of the ways in which it differed from its predecessors.

First, it differed in composition. It attempted to maintain a balance between the missions so as to produce a microcosm of the actual mission situation overseas. The intended outcome was that the Conference would also reflect the proportionate involvement of the various parts of the missionized world in the work of evangelizing the non-missionized or partly missionized. (In this respect it differed greatly from the Centenary Conference, whose large body of delegates was dominated by the host country, Britain.) At Edinburgh there were 500 delegates from Britain, 500 from North America, 170 from Continental Europe and 26 from "the colonies" —that is, the white populations of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. This may have slightly under-represented North America, but it gave a generally fair picture of the relative strengths of missionary forces.

Representation, curiously as it may seem today, was proportional to financial outlay. Missions got one delegate for the first £2,000 a year they spent on overseas work, and another for each £4,000 thereafter. In the long run this correlated fairly well with their deployment of personnel and relative scale of operations.

Even more importantly, the conference sought to be comprehensive in confession, tradition, and ethos. There was at this date no possibility, of course, of including Catholic or Orthodox Christians, and for Christians of those traditions, 1910 is not a particularly significant date. But the aim at Edinburgh of bringing together the whole Christian world other than the Roman Catholic and the Greek was remarkable in its day, and the degree of its achievement is equally remarkable. It is safe to say that in 1910 no theological concern other than missions could have brought together such a comprehensive gathering. Even the Centenary Conference had been unable to secure the participation of the oldest British missionary societies, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, or of other Anglican societies which drew on a largely High Church constituency. The gap was significant; not only did the SPCK and the SPG contain important doctrinal and ecclesiological strands in Anglicanism not otherwise represented at the conference; they represented something like the official expression of the English national church. Ecclesiastical and doctrinal divisions in England were still sharp in 1910, and potentially explosive in the political field; that Anglicans of every hue were represented at Edinburgh was extraordinary. There was an SPG contingent of thirty-five, and among the "special delegates" who accepted invitations to participate were the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and seven other English bishops—Charles Gore as well as Handley Moule—and the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. It had taken a good deal of Scottish and American diplomacy to secure this participation. One factor which undoubtedly helped was the knowledge that High Church Anglicans were now joining the Student Missionary Volunteers.

It is significant that it was Anglican High Churchmen, not principled evangelicals who found it difficult to join in concert with those of other views. In 1910 it was still possible to recognize a common purpose in the task of mission. The cleavages over the definition of mission lay in the future, even though the methods and priorities of contemporary missionaries differed greatly. Some of the ardent young people who went out as missionary volunteers were motivated by the thought of millions entering a Christless eternity; others wanted to bring relief, healing, or reconstruction in Christ's name to deprived societies overseas. These different styles had not yet been polarized into different and exclusive theologies of mission.

Nevertheless, there was a price to pay to achieve consensus. A self-denying ordinance was accepted by delegates not to raise "any matter of faith or policy on which those participating in the Conference differ among themselves." The most important result of this was that in the Conference program one major area of the world, Latin America, was quietly ignored. Edinburgh's silence was deliberate. The whole construction of contemporary missionary thought was territorial; there were missionized lands and there were nonmissionized lands. Some members of the Conference would have judged that Latin America belonged to the unmissionized lands and others would not. As a result, Edinburgh 1910 was a World Missionary Conference without Latin America.

Confessional comprehensiveness is one thing; ethnic, cultural, and geographical

comprehensiveness another. We have seen that the Liverpool Conference on Missions in i860 had a single representative from the southern continents. The report of the Centenary Conference of 1888 has a section headed "Races represented," but this is not what it may seem. It observes that the Conference brought out "the great extent to which the work of the evangelization of the world is taken up by, or thrown upon, the Saxon race"—in other words the British and the Americans, with the assistance of "our noble brethren, the Saxons of Germany" and "our honoured cousins of Scandinavian blood." The only other race mentioned is "the Latin race," in manifest decline since its subjection to Rome, despite the noble efforts of a few small missionary societies originating in Belgium, France, and Switzerland. The Centenary Conference comes as nearly as possible to thanking God that the British are not as other men are.

Far more participants at Edinburgh came from the new churches arising from the missionary movement than had attended any earlier conference. There were delegates from Burma, Ceylon, China, India, Japan, and Korea. Among them were people of status not simply in their church but in their nations. Two were among fourteen recipients of honorary degrees awarded by the University of Edinburgh on the occasion of the Conference. 33 The Conference organizers had hoped for more Asian participation, and were partly frustrated by the mission boards' priorities. But when one reads the conference reports now it is striking how little is made of the significance of that small but eminent and articulate group of Asian Christians.

There is no sign of recognition that they heralded the greatest demographic change within the Christian faith since the conversion of the Western barbarians, that would render the patronizing language of the Centenary Conference about "the races" simply laughable. The presence of the Asian contingent is mentioned in the official report as demonstrating the universal nature of Christian faith, and as reflecting the way in which the assembly's purpose transcended race and color. But there is no sign that these delegates were expected to have a distinctive or original contribution to the conference. The key lies in the repeated use of the phrase "the infant churches." (In at least one paper infancy was modified to adolescence.) Of course, no one suggested that these distinguished Asians were in any sense infants; but their churches were still thought of as infant, not likely to take steps (safely, at any rate) independently of their parents. The churches of the south were, in fact, still seen mainly as extensions of the missionary movement, incorporations into a church still overwhelmingly Western in location and tradition. Edinburgh 1910 was itself to provide a basis for a new vision of the Christian reality.

There was not a single African present—and no one seems to have thought that strange. When the organizers specifically mention that they would have welcomed the involvement of more Asians, they do not mention the absence of any African participation at all. The immense Christian significance of Africa was still not visible. In no other way has the demographic shift within the Christian church been so dramatic as in the emergence of Africa as a continent of the Christian heartlands. The most important single transforming feature of twentieth-century Christian history was unpredictable even to the best-informed at the end of that century's first decade.

The purpose of the Conference was consultative rather than educative: it was not simply to be a shop window for missions as the Centenary and Ecumenical Conferences had been. Nevertheless, much effort was devoted to bringing mission issues into the consciousness of the Western churches and into the life of the church as a whole. It was not a conference of churches; that would have been impossible in 1910. It was a meeting of mission agencies, some related directly, with more or less formality, to the structures of various churches, others purely voluntary societies. But as one tries to relive the World Missionary Conference one can see that during its course the missions became almost a surrogate church. Delegates were experiencing a sense of common purpose that they recognized as belonging to the nature of the church, or as a foretaste of what the church could be.

John R. Mott described the Conference as "the first attempt at a systematic and careful study of the missionary problems of the world." The important word here is "systematic." There had never before been such a systematic conference as Edinburgh, at least not in the English speaking world. The "steady stream of facts and truths poured in upon heart and brain" were meant to issue in clear-headed appraisal and appropriate action. Edinburgh sought to survey and assimilate the accumulated experience of the interaction of the Christian and non-Christian worlds with a view to bringing the encounter to a new stage.

This was reflected in the Conference organization itself. There were no announcements; Oldham saw that all necessary information was delivered on paper to each delegate at breakfast time each day. Contemporaries were also struck by the brevity of the speeches. In an age when pulpit oratory counted for much, no-one, other than those presenting commission reports, was allowed more than seven minutes. It was observed that this cut out conventional pieties and inhibited any tendency of speakers to talk about themselves. It all heightened the sense of urgency, of business, of active engagement. The very shape of the General Assembly Hall furthered the sense of a participatory conference, not a series of orations to an audience .

Still more important was the method by which the Conference worked. Well in advance of the Conference eight major topics were identified as arising from the experience of the world missionary movement. Each of these topics was remitted to an international commission with a mandate to consult on a worldwide basis and bring a printed report for discussion to the Conference. These printed reports of the Commissions (the discussions, in small type, form supplements) fill eight of the nine Edinburgh Conference volumes.

For no previous conference had such a quantity of preliminary work been done; perhaps nothing like so much was ever done again. Some commissions did more than others by way of consultation. Commission I, "Carrying the Gospel to all the Non-Christian World" endorsed the production of a supplementary volume of information much larger than its report. Commission IV, "The Missionary Message in relation to Non-Christian Religions" produced a particularly careful analysis and exposition based on detailed questionnaires sent around the world.

This procedure differed from that later adopted at Tambaram, for instance, where one person, Hendrik Kraemer, wrote a major contribution, a substantial book, in fact, on the theme which had occupied Commission IV at Edinburgh, for others to react to. It differed still more from that of some more recent conferences where preparation seems to be mainly directed to group dynamics. The concern at Edinburgh was with the whole missionary operation of the church and the preparation of suitable instruments for it. Thus the supplement to the report of Commission I (held by the Commission to be essential for the study of the report itself) was a Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions (the statistics compiled, naturally, by Dennis, the atlas by Harlan P. Beach of Yale). The work caused some pre-Conference tension —its perspectives were too manifestly those of American Protestantism for some Anglican taste, and Oldham had to make a hurried transatlantic journey to sort out the trouble—but the Statistical Atlas is a landmark in the process of understanding how the Christian world was changing. It is the true ancestor of Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia.

The full title of Edinburgh 1910 was "World Missionary Conference to consider missionary problems in relation to the non-Christian world." The effect of concentration on the non-Christian world was a new understanding of the Christian world.

The place of the World Missionary Conference in the history of the ecumenical movement is so well documented as to require no further commentary. The lineal connection between Edinburgh 1910 and Amsterdam 1948 is clear. 37 The World Council of Churches is a direct descendant of the World Missionary Conference and the International Missionary Council. All aspects of its work—in mission and evangelism, in faith and order, and in service to the world—can claim to have their background in the Edinburgh meeting. Western Christianity only understood itself when the missionary movement brought it into encounter, first with non-Christian faiths and cultures and then with the new Christianities forged by the Gospel within those cultures.

But the World Council of Churches is not the same thing as the ecumenical movement, and the Council is only one of the children of the World Missionary Conference. The determinant factors in twentieth century Christianity include worldwide presence, consequent cultural diversity, and the growth of conciliarity. And conciliarity is not restricted to the World Council of Churches. Since Vatican II it has been part of Catholic structures through the synod of Bishops and the regional Bishops' Conferences, and it has become part of evangelical Christianity, even in those sections of it which have stood aloof from the World Council of Churches. The Lausanne movement for World Evangelization is essentially conciliar in structure, and the crucial interventions of African, Asian, and Latin American participants at its Lausanne and Manila conferences show just how effective its conciliarism can be. To describe the Edinburgh conference, therefore, as a landmark in the ecumenical movement, is to indicate its connection with one of the outstanding features of twentieth-century Christianity as a whole. It was at Edinburgh that Western Christianity, at least Protestant Western Christianity, first caught a clear sight of a church that would be bigger than itself.

Edinburgh developed instruments for mission, both new structures and new studies. At earlier conferences the desirability had been asserted of further meetings, but not until Edinburgh 1910 was effective machinery for international cooperation put in place. In the late sessions of the Conference a Continuation Committee was established with a minimum of fuss, with Mott as chairman and Oldham as full-time secretary. The First World War rudely shocked and might have wrecked it, but it survived to be the seed of the International Missionary Council. These structural developments are so well known that they have overshadowed the impulse Edinburgh gave to the development of instruments of another kind. It marked, if not the birth, a genuine renaissance of mission studies. We have already noted the significance of the Statistical Atlas of Christian Missions, a pioneering Christian survey of the world Christian situation that has had many successors. It was only one of a range of new instruments forged from scholarly application that can trace their origin to Edinburgh. Another was the first general international ecumenical missiological journal, the International Review ofMissions. It began in 1912, and included from the beginning a quarterly bibliography of mission studies, originally edited by Oldham. Another major journal appeared in 1912, the fruit of the labors of another student volunteer movement activist, Samuel Marinus Zwemer, with eminent international assistance. It was called The Moslem World. The first issue acknowledges its origins in the interest in the Islamic world manifested at the World Missionary Conference. Its opening editorial calls it "a quarterly review of current events, literature, and thought among Mohammedans, and the progress of Christian missions in Moslem lands." It was intended to represent "no faction or fraction of the Church" but "all who hold the unity of faith in the bond of peace and righteousness of life"—authentic Edinburgh sentiments. The importance and scholarly status ever since of The Muslim World (as its title now is) needs no affirmation.

There are areas of ambiguity and uncertainty about some aspects of the Edinburgh legacy, and these deserve more investigation than they have so far received. For instance, how far did Edinburgh begin the movement which has made English the language of ecumenical theology? In the Conference report it is noted with pleasure that, with only two exceptions, every contribution to the debates was made in English; and of the exceptions one speaker, a Japanese, afterwards made a speech in excellent English. But that is only part of the story. The Continental battery of delegates, 1 70 strong, while by no means contemptible in numbers, must have been overwhelmed by a thousand Anglo-Americans. And they could have claimed that of the serious theological effort devoted to the cause of mission up to that time, more had been conducted in German or Dutch than in English. It is well known that Gustav Warneck, the German doyen of all missiologists, had serious reservations about the way the missionary movement was now going, and that his attempt to have them expressed at Edinburgh was only partly successful. It may be argued that in 1910 English set out on its career as the successor to Latin as the international language of theology. The full implications of this for the world church remain to be faced.

A still more obscure area is how far Edinburgh marks the bifurcation of the missionary movement, with an American-led section of Western evangelicalism taking an independent path. We have seen that at Edinburgh the task of mission brought together people of diverse theological and ecclesiological priorities. Does the divide which has emerged between "ecumenical" and "evangelical" have its origins in the outcome of the Conference? It is certainly safe to say that if the World Missionary Conference had not met in 1910, it would have been impossible to convene it on the same basis in 1930, and the history of the International Missionary Council would have been quite different. It is equally true that both "ecumenical" and "evangelical" today have their roots in Edinburgh 1910. If each will go back to the pit whence both were dug, each may understand both themselves and the other better.

The Conference ended on a note of high optimism, justifiably in view of the purposeful way the deliberations had gone. It set up machinery for international cooperation in the task of bringing the whole Gospel to the whole world, from the fully missionized lands—that is, Europe and North America with Australia and New Zealand—to the lands not yet fully missionized—for practical purposes, the rest of the world. With sober assessment of the resources available and careful planning to maximize those resources, the evangelization of the world seemed possible. "The end of the Conference is the beginning of the conquest," were Mott's stirring words at the close of the Conference. "The end of the planning is the beginning of the doing."

The most prescient of the delegates could not have guessed what was to follow. One by one all their assumptions about how the evangelization of the world could be effected crumbled away. They had identified cooperation between the missionary sending nations, so cheeringly realizable in the conference itself, as a key to world evangelization. Within a few years of the conference the nations which were to cooperate were at war with one another, and fellow-missionaries on the field were being interned as enemy aliens. Deep were the wounds, and bitter the feelings, that followed. Another assumption had been that the flood of young missionaries, people like the student volunteers Dennis had sought from Princeton, would continue to flood to the mission field. But much of that young life drained away into the trenches of France and Flanders, and in the postwar world that sat licking its wounds people spoke less confidently of the evangelization of the world, on whatever schedule. The missionary movement in 1910 was riding the tide of Atlantic prosperity; the depression that followed the First World War cut deep into its economic base, and after the 1920s things were never the same again. The Second World War followed, bringing with it the first use of weapons that hinted at the possibility of the destruction of the planet. Many, perhaps most, of the delegates at Edinburgh were looking to the Western Empires to provide the stable conditions under which Western missions could do their work effectively (remember Dennis on the firm, just rule of Britain over turbulent India). In the years that followed the Second World War, those empires melted away. But the most fundamental assumption of all, that there were fully missionized lands which would continue to form the base for the evangelization of those not yet missionized proved fallible. Christendom itself crumbled. The first sign was the dissolution of Holy Russia during the First World War; within a decade of the end of the second, a great recession from Christianity was manifest throughout the liberal democracies of Western Europe. It has proved one of the largest and fastest movements away from the Christian faith ever to have taken place; much faster, for instance, than that in the Middle East which followed the rise of Islam.

The whole basis on which the thinking and planning of Edinburgh had been predicated had been swept away; so had the world of J. S. Dennis and of the Princeton students who heard the first series under this lectureship. Dennis, looking out in 1893 over boundless social progress, never glimpsed the Mystery of Iniquity even lurking in the background. We who lived in or through the twentieth century saw it again and again—an abomination of desolation, standing where it ought not. Perhaps no century in all human history has been more violent. Even now, when we survey the world continent by continent, as Dennis did in 1893, we sense the presence of the Angel of Death. We have hardly ceased to hear the beating of his wings in our lifetime.

But if the world is different, the church is still more different. In the period from the Edinburgh Conference until now (that is, a period roughly equivalent to the period from the beginning of Christ's ministry to the end of the apostolic age), the period which has seen this great recession from the Christian faith in the West, there has been an equally massive accession to that faith in the non-Western world. When Dennis spoke at Princeton, well over 80 percent of those who professed Christianity lived in Europe or North America. Now approaching 60 percent live in the southern continents of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific and that proportion grows annually. Christianity began the twentieth century as a Western religion, and indeed, the Western religion; it ended the century as a non-Western religion, on track to become progressively more so.

Many of the trends Dennis identified in his world survey have since either receded or washed past us. But one of the most significant points in his analysis is his observation that even at a time when the great churches of America were still growing fast, the churches of the mission field were growing faster. It was not clear at that time which contemporary developments would do most to shape the future church. Like most of his contemporaries, and like the delegates at Edinburgh, Dennis looked with most hope at Japan, at China, at India. In each of these cases the twentieth century brought deep disappointments; and the trauma of the mid-century events in China did more than anything else to change the direction of mission thinking. By contrast Korea, which Dennis passes over so quickly, has become the missionary phenomenon of the century with a place in world Christian witness that is all its own. Latin America, which Dennis called a forgotten continent and which Edinburgh avoided discussing, is home to a religious and theological ferment such as Europe has hardly known since the sixteenth century. And strangest of all, Africa, which had no representative at Edinburgh, and not much more than ten million professing Christians at the time, has now some 300 million or more who profess the faith of Christ, one of the largest concentrations of Christians anywhere. A century ago there were hardly any Chistians among the aboriginal peoples of North East India, and Nepal was a land closed to Christianity even fifty years ago; now a vast belt of actively Christian peoples extends from Nepal and North East India into South West China, Myanmar and Thailand—a great unnoticed Asian Christian constituency. Kenneth Scott Latourette described the nineteenth century as the Great Century of Missions, and devoted three of his seven volumes of the History of the Expansion of Christianity to it; but the most remarkable century in the history7 of the expansion of Christianity has been the twentieth.

As a result of missions, the center of gravity of the church has shifted substantially during a single lifetime. Europe, so long the Christian heartland, the matrix of such formative Christian movements as the sixteenthcentury reformations, has seen quiet but insistent Christian erosion. There are now far more Muslims in England than there are Presbyterians in Scotland. It is not for me to make prophecies about North America, or indeed anywhere else; I will only say that many signs are visible in the United States now that marked Europe when its own rapid retreat from Christianity began. Yet, worldwide, Christianity is not in decline. Africa has quietly slipped into the place once occupied by Europe; and the third Christian millennium begins with the likelihood that the West will matter less and less in Christian affairs, as the faith becomes more and more associated with, and more and more marked by, the thought and life of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

All this could not have happened without the missionary movement. Not that missionaries have been the sole agency. The twentieth-century evangelization of Africa, for instance, has been mainly carried out by Africans. There have been times when the expansion of the church has taken place in the absence of the missions, perhaps because of that absence. The number of missionaries was drastically curtailed during the First World War, and that seemed grievous at the time; in Ghana and Malawi the withdrawal led to a notable expansion of the church, as Africans took responsibility for it. Missionaries were expelled from Myanmar in 1961; since then, on some estimates, the Christian population has trebled. We have noted the trauma inflicted on missions around 1950 by the forced abandonment of a century7 of missionary investment in China. Estimates of the number of Christians in China today differ widely, not to say wildly; but all agree there are many, many more than when the missionaries left. Few would have predicted this in 1910, still less in 1970.

Missions have not been the sole agency, then, in the demographic transformation of the Christian church; but they formed the detonator of the vast explosion that brought it about. This must make the missionary movement one of the most important developments in the entire history of Western Christianity. Yet it has been little studied by church historians, and is still little understood. It would be interesting, for instance, to discuss how far missions were a lay movement, developing in spite of church structures rather than because of them, and constantly subversive of church order and diversionary to concerns that seemed consumingly important at home. Equally, one could pursue the question how far missions were a women's movement, sustained by women through times when male church leaders thought other issues more important, and taken over by women when the men got tired. One way and another, there is a case for approaching the history of the missionary movement in terms of the now fashionable genre of subaltern history.

The demographic transformation of the church brought about by the missionary movement faces us with twin challenges: a post-Christian West and a post-Western Christianity. America was a neglected continent where little in the way of vital religion was noticeable, and even an inveterate optimist like the lecturer could describe the results of mission work in Africa only as less discouraging that might have been expected. By contrast today, we can look back on a century of recession in the West from the Christian faith, washing over the Christian base in Western Europe that in 1893 was still producing the majority of the world's missionaries. Meanwhile a parallel accession to the faith in other parts of the world has left Christianity a predominately non-Western religion, with Africa and Latin America as outstanding Christian heartlands, and with important Christian communities in Asia, among which Korea is particularly noteworthy. In other words, there has been a century-long process of cross-cultural diffusion of Christianity with the Western missionary as a connecting terminal; and the most curious feature of the process is that during the period in which the Christian faith crossed cultural frontiers into African and Asian communities it lost its hold on much of the West.

This is far from being an unprecedented event; such movements have been a recurrent feature of Christian history. The process by which Christianity spreads is not progressive, but serial.

Long ago, Kenneth Scott Latourette pointed out that the history of Christianity has not been one of steady progress, let alone of resistless triumph. There have been periods of advance, but also periods of recession, or falling back, of withering and decay. Islam can make a much better claim than Christianity for progressive expansion, for steady numerical increase and geographical growth. Generally speaking—there are some exceptions — lands that became Islamic have so far remained Islamic. The Arab lands seem now so inalienably Muslim that it is hard to remember that the Yemen was once Christian territory. Contrast Jerusalem, home of the first Christian church, or Syria and Egypt and Asia Minor and North Africa, which once provided the brightest examples of Christian devotion, scholarship, and witness. Or take my own country, where John Knox and John Wesley once preached, now full of unwanted churches turned into furniture stores, garages, or night clubs.

In each of these latter cases, a place which had been a Christian heartland, a shining center of Christian devotion and activity, ceased to have this function; the light burned down or burned out, and the candlestick was taken out of its place. But in none of these cases did this decline mean the disappearance of the Christian faith or the end of Christian witness—rather the reverse. By the time the Jerusalem church was scattered to the winds, the gospel had taken hold in the Hellenistic world of the Eastern Mediterranean. When the literate civilization of the Roman Empire broke up, the gospel was making its way among the barbarians north and east of that empire. And as the modern recession began to accelerate in Europe and to wash into North America, the churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have begun to come into their own. The Christian story is serial, its center moves from place to place. No one church or place or culture owns it. At different times different peoples and places have become its heartlands, its chief representatives. Then the baton passes on to others. Christian progress is never final, is never a set of gains to be plotted on the map. The rhetoric of some of our hymns, and many of our sermons, about the triumphant host streaming out to conquer the world is more Islamic than Christian. Christian history reveals the faith often withering in its heartlands, in its centers of seeming strength and importance, only to establish itself or begin anew at its margins. It has vulnerability, a certain fragility, at its heart; the vulnerability of the cross, the fragility of the earthen vessel.

In other words, cross-cultural diffusion has been necessary to Christianity. It has been its life's blood, and without it the faith could not have survived. It does not, like so many of the religions of India, belong to a particular soil; nor does it, like Islam, produce a distinctive and immediately recognizable form of civilization. The missionary movement from the West, therefore, seen in the context of the total history of Christianity, is one of a series of major cross-cultural diffusions. The first recorded is in Acts n, which tells how some Jewish believers in Jesus who had been driven out of Jerusalem decided that their Messiah had something to say to the Greek pagans by whom they were surrounded in Antioch.

The process of cross-cultural diffusion thus initiated means that since the first century the church has in principle been not only multi-racial, but multi-cultural. The earliest believers were devout observant Jews, maintaining circumcision, delighting in the Torah, devoted to the worship of the Temple, and understanding Jesus and his work in terms of Jewish history, Jewish destiny, and the salvation of the nation of Israel. The new Antiochene believers were not circumcised, did not keep the Torah, probably could not (for the most part) keep the Sabbath, ate pork without turning a hair, maintained social relations with their pagan neighbors, were excluded from the Temple and—so far as we know—did not dwell on the political destiny of Israel. In order that they should come to faith in Christ, Christ had been presented to them in a way wholly different from that in which he had been presented as Messiah among Jews; in order that they should maintain that faith, they had to develop a totally new style of life adapted to Hellenistic social and family conditions. But this had to take place within a church of old-style believers retaining the Torah-keeping way of devotion to the Messiah that had been characteristic of the Jerusalem church.

Issues of culture are at the heart of Christian faith, because Christianity is about conversion. Conversion means turning. Conversion to Christ is turning towards Him. There is a vital difference between converts and proselytes. Before the time of Christ, Jews had designed ways of welcoming Gentiles who recognized the God of Israel and wanted to serve Him in the community of Israel. Proselytes were circumcised, were baptized (thus symbolically washing away the dirt of the heathen world), and entered into the life of Israel by seeking to obey the Torah. It would have been very natural for that first, entirely Jewish community of believers in Jesus to maintain this system. But the great council described in Acts 15, which considered how Gentiles who believed in Jesus should be introduced into the community, deliberately rejected the time-honored model of the proselyte. It was an astonishing decision. Hitherto all believers in Jesus had been circumcised and kept the Torah, just like the Lord Himself. It was the standard lifestyle for believers. But the early church decided that Gentile believers in Jesus—although ex-pagans, without the lifelong training in doctrine and morality that Jews had—should not be circumcised, should not keep the Torah, and should be left to find a Christian lifestyle of their own within Hellenistic society under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. They were not to be proselytes, but converts.

This distinction between convert and proselyte is of fundamental importance. If the first Gentile believers had become proselytes, living exactly the style of life of those who brought them to Christ, they might have become very devout believers, but they would have had virtually no impact on their society; they would effectively have been taken out of that society. In fact, it was their task as converts to convert their society; convert it in the sense that they had to learn to keep turning their ways of thinking and doing things —which, of course, were Greek ways of thinking and doing things—towards Christ, opening them up to his influence. In this way a truly Greek, truly Hellenistic type of Christianity was able to emerge. Not only so, but that Hellenistic Christianity was able to penetrate the Hellenistic intellectual and social heritage. Hellenistic thought, Hellenistic social and family life, and Hellenistic civic organization were challenged, purged, modified, and put to new uses—but from the inside, by people whose own inheritance they were. The fact that cross-cultural diffusion is so characteristic of Christian history leaves the Christian faith with tensions which may be creative or destructive. Cultural diversity is built into the Church; so is the ecumenical sharing of its diverse cultural communities. The greatest problems of the church are therefore often ecumenical. The New Testament makes plain that, even after the Council ofJerusalem appeared to settle the matter, some of the Jerusalem believers in Jesus were still sure that a form of faith which did not include the precious traditional items of Torah and circumcision must be defective. It has been a recurrent problem. Those who have brought others to Christian faith have quite frequently insisted that the new Christians should exactly follow the way of life of their teachers, in effect should adopt their Torah and circumcision. Of all the heresies in Christian history, it is Judaizing that has been the most persistent.

One of the few things that are predictable about third millennium Christianity is that it will be more culturally diverse than Christianity has ever been before, and thus have more capacity for blessing, and more capability for disaster, than any previous era. We need to reflect on the implications of Africa, Latin America, and Asia becoming the home of representative Christianity, that is, mainstream, norm-setting Christianity.

The late Lesslie Newbigin spoke in 1984 of what he called "missionary encounter with our own culture"—that is, the post-Christian culture of the West. Among the priorities for that engagement, Newbigin identified the assistance of Christians from the non-Western world.

We need their witness to correct ours, as indeed they need ours to correct theirs. At this moment our need is greater, for they have been far more aware of the danger of syncretism, of an illegitimate alliance with false elements in their culture, than we have been. But ... we imperatively need one another if we are to be faithful witnesses to Christ.

Western Christians, Newbigin argued, need African and Asian and Hispanic

Christians to help them make a Christian analysis of Western culture.

Syncretism is a greater peril for Western than for African or Indian Christians,

and less often recognizable for what it is.

The demographic transformation of the church brought about by the missionary movement opens the possibility of testing our Christian witness by that of others, of experiencing one another's gifts and sharing our combined resources. Equally, it opens the prospect of a score of local Christianities operating independently without interest in or concern for one another. Either of these processes is possible; only one of them reflects the New Testament view of the Church or the Spirit of Christ.

The great issues of twenty-first century Christianity are likely to be ecumenical. The most urgent issues of ecumenism no longer relate to confessional and denominational issues. The World Missionary Conference of 1910 gave a glimpse of a church in which these were overcome, but in our own day this has become an essentially Western and rather parochial matter. The great ecumenical issues will be about how African and Indian and Chinese and Korean and Hispanic and North American and European Christians can together make real the life of the Body of Christ. The principal Christian significance of the United States may now be in the fact that—thanks to the Immigration Law of the 1960s—nearly all the main Christian discourses have functioning congregations there. More than in any other nation in the world, the Body of Christ could be realized—or fractured—in the United States.

In Edinburgh in 1910, Europe and America sat down together to settle the missionary problems of the world, acknowledging benignly the presence of a score or so of Asians, without fully understanding their significance. From now on, Europe and America will preside at the world table no longer. Whatever may happen in the political or economic sphere, the key events in the Christian sphere will increasingly be those taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At Edinburgh and over the years that followed, representatives of the missionary movement from the West gave the best they had to fulfil the dazzling vision that beckoned there, the bringing of the Gospel of Christ in its fullness to the entire world. The time seemed ripe, the instruments to hand. But they were not in control of the time or the instruments. Time and again their assumptions were undermined, their hopes shattered. The Church of the West at large abandoned the vision, and concentrated on other things. Yet the vision was achieved all the same. The goal that the Edinburgh participants sought—the transmission of the Gospel to the non-Western world and its appropriation there—was achieved, though not in the ways, or by the means, or at the times, or even in the places that they expected, and so quietly that the Western church, caught up in its own affairs, has still not noticed that it has taken place.

Indeed, a vision beyond what most of the best visionaries of 1910 could see has been fulfilled. They still saw the churches founded through mission endeavors as infants learning to walk. During the conference, and still more afterwards as people reflected on what happened there, glimpses occurred of a world church of mutual sharing. One of the Asian delegates, the South Indian priest V. S. Azariah, was deputed to speak on cooperation between native and foreign workers. His closing words have become the most famous uttered at Edinburgh:

Through all the ages to come the Indian church will rise up in gratitude to attest the heroism and self-denying labours of the missionary body. You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS!

It was a bombshell. While missions were busy planning the evangelization of the world, the first desire of the so-called infant churches was not for leadership, not for more workers, not for more funds, but for friendship.

Friendship implies equality and mutual respect. These churches were not prattling infants, and over the years since Edinburgh 1910, they have gone through the fires. What church in history has gone through what the church in China has done over the last fifty years and then emerged as it has? What churches in history have had to cope routinely with such persistent horrors of devastation, war, displacement and, genocide, than those of Central Africa and the Sudan? Which have survived a more testing religious environment than that of South Asia? Which have been required more urgently to give moral leadership to their nation than those of South Africa, or to speak for the poor and needy than those of Latin America, or have ever more thoroughly devoted themselves to the spread of the Christian Gospel than those of Korea? It is now the churches of the non-Western world that have the accumulated and ripened experience of God's salvation.

The Church of Christ on earth has an altogether different face and an altogether different shape as a result of the events of the twentieth century. Missions have taken the history of Christianity in a new direction. They did not do it all themselves, of course, the labor on the ground was done by hosts of people of many nations, mostly unknown and some not even formally connected with missions. But it all happened because missions were there. When the servants of God offer their faith and love in service in Christ's name, God does not spurn them, nor mock them when a wise providence exceeds their utmost understanding.

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