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Connecting Local and Global Church: A Preview to Edinburgh 2010

On 6 June 2010, there will be a gathering in the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh to remember the famous World Missionary Conference which took place one hundred years ago. It will also be a celebration of the fact that, partly as a result of the efforts of the missionaries of 1910, we recognize today that the Church is global.

A Look Back at 1910
The delegates in 1910 were overwhelmingly of European descent, mostly male, gray-haired, and Protestant. They were missionaries and leaders of what they called the “world missionary movement.” The watchword at Edinburgh in 1910, inherited from the Student Volunteer Movement, was “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and the Bible verses most commonly used to justify mission were Matthew 28:19-20, often referred to as the Great Commission.

The conference neglected a very important aspect of mission theology: the missionary nature of the Church. In 1910, Western missionaries were the unquestioned means of mission. The commissions of Edinburgh 1910 studied the churches in Europe and North America as “the home base” of missions.

Their primary role was to send more funds and personnel overseas. Their own missional nature and potential to reach out to the people of the West was neglected because Europe and North America were understood to be Christendom, and missions were directed to the “non-Christian world.”

“The Church in the mission field” was also the subject of research, and it was discovered to be “by far the most efficient element in Christian propaganda.” However, this was not so much because of its own outgoing mission activity, but because of its potential to serve in the Western missionary enterprise.

The Vital Importance of Local Christians
As we look back over the last century, we see that although the Western missionary movement provided an important catalyst for the growth of Christianity worldwide, the actual work of world evangelization has been achieved mainly through local people in local churches. This is suggested by the fact that churches in the former mission fields grew more rapidly after they were freed from colonial control than they had done before.

At Edinburgh 1910, there were only seventeen “national” Christians among the missionaries. It is apparent from the records of the conference that the prevailing relationship between them was not friendship or partnership, but paternalism. The delegates at Edinburgh failed to see that the future of Christianity would be more determined by the initiatives of local churches than by their global organization and planning.