The Evangelisation of the World in this Generation

By Bishop Michael Doe

Anyone who has read Brian Stanley’s history of Edinburgh 1910 will realise how much this article owes to that remarkable work published last year. From out of the dense material found in the questionnaires, returns, reports and presentations of the eight Commissions, he paints a picture not only of what happened in Edinburgh in the summer of 1910 but also of an emerging world church just before the age of high imperialism – itself a relatively recent phenomenon – that was to be challenged by the changing world of the twentieth century.

Today we live in a different kind of world, and a very different kind of world church. In 1910 the Anglican Communion consisted of a few autonomous Provinces, and the rest still led by missionary bishops. In the 1960s it sought to turn its back on colonialism and dependency by asserting “mutual responsibility and interdependence”. Some feel that that Christian imperialism is now coming back in the other direction, as growing Provinces like Nigeria and Uganda try to tell the other parts of the Communion what to do. That would have surprised the participants at Edinburgh 1910 who looked to the East rather than Africa for the expansion of Christianity. But in other ways the issues before the Conference one hundred years ago are still alive today. I mention just five.

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