Key issues for pastors and church leaders as christianity moves deeper into the 21st century

By Martin Conway

From 1910 to 2010 and on

The plan and central purpose for this book, as for many conferences and other books that will be appearing in 2010, arises from the awareness that the World Missionary Conference which took place in Edinburgh in June 1910, thanks not least to the long and careful preparation which had been given to it, produced results that were both surprisingly profound and optimistic about the future of Christian mission. This chapter, well aware of major problems ahead, nonetheless hopes to suggest perspectives that can point to no less profound and in the long run hopeful obedience of the total Christian community in the very different world of the 21st century.

Overall, the twentieth century was a horribly violent and wasteful period in many respects – just think of the Soviet gulags, the Nazi concentration camps, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let alone all the other horrors of two world wars and the subsequent conflicts that have damaged so much of humanity and of nature in nations such as Algeria, Vietnam, Congo, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Iraq ... In recent years Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama have perhaps stood out as persons with a wideness of heart and concern for their fellow human beings around the entire world, but the new century was hardly able to begin in 2000 with a sense of high optimism about the future of the planet.

At the same time, and in significant part because of the results of that Edinburgh conference, the 20th century has seen much  unpredictable yet most welcome advance in regard to the effectiveness of Christian mission, as of movement towards the unity to which all Christians are called in the one body of their one Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.   Edinburgh 1910 was a key factor in inspiring Archbishop Nathan Söderblom to plan what became the Universal Christian Conference for Life and Work, at Stockholm in August 1925, dealing above all with the need to banish war as an acceptable means of settling disputes.  Two years later – thanks above all to Bishop Charles Brent's vision at Edinburgh of a united church – the  first World Conference on Faith and Order, looking into the many theological question over which the churches had become divided over the centuries,  met in Lausanne in August 1927. 

These two movements were brought together in 1937, at their respective second major conferences, to agree to form a World Council of Churches.  The Provisional Committee for that met in 1938 and 1939 but had to wait until after the Second World War before the founding Assembly of the WCC could be held in Amsterdam in August 1948.   The International Missionary Council, established in the 1920s in direct follow-through of the Edinburgh Conference's main aims, was slower to take up the opportunity of joining in the new Council, but voted to do so in 1958 and was joyfully accepted into a partnership of the three great movements at the 3rd Assembly of the WCC in New Delhi in 1961...

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