International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Issue 30:4, October 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 2.2 MB PDF)

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Edinburgh 1910: Friendship and the Boundaries of Christendom

Several of the articles in this issue relate directly to the extraordinary World Missionary Conference convened in Edinburgh from June 14 to 23, 1910. At that time, Europe’s global hegemony was unrivaled, and old Christendom’s self-assurance had reached its peak. That the nations whose professed religion was Christianity should have come to dominate the world seemed not at all surprising, since Western civilization’s inner élan was thought to be Christianity itself.

The Great War of 1914–18 soon plunged the “Christian” nations into one of the bloodiest and most meaningless paroxysms of state-sanctioned murder in humankind’s history of pathological addiction to violence and genocide. At least for European missionaries, the war exposed the naïveté of missionary apologetics. Missionaries were unable to offer any credible rejoinder to the charge that the West neither believed nor practiced what the Bible actually taught.

Christopher Anderson’s article on the 1919 Methodist Missionary Fair is a reminder that although old Christendom’s claim to moral superiority had been exposed as a farce, it would take some time before U.S. missionaries began to reach similar conclusions about their own nation. But within the fifty years following the Second World War, profound uncertainty arose concerning the moral legitimacy of America’s global economic and military modus operandi, fueled by the nation’s ethically indefensible and militarily disastrous escapades in Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Only now, when it may be too late, have Christians on this continent—for long seeing nothing amiss in the unholy union between personal piety and blind nationalism—begun to sense the nation’s precarious position. U.S. Christians, at least in some quarters, seem increasingly troubled by the thought that their nation may be on its way to joining the long list of expired empires, each blinded by hubris, deluded by self-absorption, addicted to exploitation, and—if need be—determined to wreak destruction on those who stand in its way.

It is appropriate, then, that this issue of the INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH should pay modest tribute to Vendanayagam Samuel Azariah (1874–1945), whose picture (thanks to the Indian Missionary Society, Tirunelveli, Palayamkottai, South India) appears above. When he attended the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, he was serving with the Indian Missionary Society in Dornakal. Within two years, and until his death in 1945, he would be the first and sole Indian Anglican diocesan bishop. Given the continuing economic polarities and social inequities within the global community of faith, Azariah’s passionate appeal is at least as pertinent today as it was when he made it nearly a century ago. “Missionaries,” he lamented, “except for a few of the very best, seem . . . to fail very largely in getting rid of an air of patronage and condescension, and in establishing a genuinely brotherly and happy relation as between equals with their Indian flocks. . . . 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.”[1]

Brian Stanley’s masterful recounting of the challenges faced by conference statisticians provides a backdrop helpful to understanding our own reality, with the surging vitality of Christianity virtually everywhere except in the world of old Christendom. The challenges facing statisticians, demographers, and cartographers already at work producing the atlas of world Christianity for Edinburgh’s 2010 centenary commemoration are, if anything, even more daunting than those that confronted their predecessors. The boundaries of nation-states or continents are no longer coterminous with any vital ecclesiastical counterpart. Christianity is now a world religion. The lands of old Christendom, furthermore, no longer make any pretense to be Christian, while in the United States, popular profession is consistently contradicted by greed and voided by guns. Christianity today, as in its earliest manifestation, is neither aligned with nor supported by the apparatus of political, economic, and military power. It is found, rather, in those parts of the world that have never experienced the corrosive hubris of imagined superiority.

While neither the nature nor the extent of contemporary world Christianity could have been anticipated by the organizers of Edinburgh 1910, Kenneth Ross reminds us that the Western instinct to political, economic, military, and ecclesiastical domination is as powerful now as it was then. The centenary commemoration of Edinburgh 1910 to which he makes reference will therefore not be an occasion for self-congratulation but an opportunity for repentance—the only ground on which the friendship for which Azariah appealed can be built.

—Jonathan J. Bonk
bonk@omsc.org

 

 

Notes

[1]. World Missionary Conference, 1910, to Consider Missionary Problems in Relation to the Non-Christian World (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1910), 9:315.

 

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Issue 30:4, October 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 2.2 MB PDF)