Ecumenical Understanding of Mission:
What We Have Learned Since Edinburgh 1910

It is my profound pleasure and honor to dedicate the following essay to my friend and esteemed brother in Jesus Christ, Bishop Euyakim Mar Coorilos.  Thirumeni is an outstanding leader who, with God’s guidance, helped invigorate the Mar Thoma Church in the United States and contributed in important ways to the community of Christian communions we call the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC). 

I was honored to speak at the farewell assembly as Bishop Coorilos was returning to India after seven years of episcopal service in North America and Europe.  At that time, I noted that five motifs run throughout his ministry.  The church, he insists, must be active in mission, constant in prayer, rooted in its context, committed to education, and ecumenically open to God’s witness through others.  May God grant that all of our ministries serve to build up the body of Christ in these ways! 

The essay that follows is adapted from one of the Thomas Mar Athanasius Memorial Lectures that I delivered, at Thirumeni’s invitation, at the T.M.A.M. Research Centre in Manganam in November of 2010.  It attempts to identify developments in ecumenical understanding and practice of mission in the one hundred years since the World Mission Conference in Edinburgh 1910—and in this way to pay tribute to Bishop Coorilos and his passionate commitment to the mission of the church.

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The ecumenical movement can be defined as the common effort of the churches, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to respond to God’s gift of reconciliation by actually living as the one body of Christ, and to do so in order that Christians might give shared witness to Jesus Christ throughout God’s one creation.  Of course, there has always been an ecumenical impulse in the church, since the calling to unity is at the heart of biblical faith; but the modern effort to overcome past divisions so that we can engage in worship and mission together had its symbolic beginning at a great mission conference held a century ago in Edinburgh, Scotland. 

The Edinburgh conference is now recognized as a seminal event in the history of the church; and it is interesting to reflect on what made it so significant.  After all, there had been prominent (even larger) mission conferences in London and New York in 1878, 1888, and 1900.  Edinburgh was, at the time, seen as a continuation of these previous assemblies – none of which is now much remembered.  In my judgment, there are four reasons why Edinburgh is now seen as a kind of jumping off point for modern ecumenism. 

1.                  This conference, unlike previous ones, was composed of official delegates from missionary societies.  This was not a gathering of churches as such; that would only come later with the advent of councils of churches.  But since many of these societies were directly related to denominations, this conference came closer than any before it to being able to speak for the churches.   

Today we take it for granted that the church as a whole is responsible for mission (a central theme in the ministry of Bishop Coorilos), but this was not the assumption in the 19^th century, at least among western Protestants. My own “denomination,” the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), gave rise to what was called the United Christian Missionary Society, but this society was distinct from the church per se.  Individuals supported it because of their personal commitment to mission – but it wasn’t an “agency of the church.”  I think it is fair to say that with Edinburgh the bond between mission and church grew stronger. 

2.                  The Edinburgh conference was more theologically and ecclesiastically comprehensive – more diverse – than its predecessors.  Traditional Anglicans, for example, agreed to participate once the organizers affirmed that divisive matters of faith (like ministry and sacraments and authority) would not be brought before the assembly for discussion, let alone for vote. 

Having said that, we should acknowledge that the conference was still not very “ecumenical” (very diverse) by our standards.  There was a wonderful greeting from Bishop Bonomelli, the Roman Catholic bishop of Cremona.  But there were no Roman Catholic or Orthodox participants, since these traditions were not yet ecumenically engaged; and, more importantly, only seventeen of the 1200 delegates actually came from what they (inaccurately) called “the younger churches.”  There were a number of missionaries at the Edinburgh conference who were serving in India, but hardly any Indian Christians.   

On the other hand, these seventeen indigenous representatives were invited to deliver six of the public addresses; and one of these - by the great Indian leader, V.S. Azariah - is the best remembered, most widely quoted speech from the entire conference.  I plead with you, said Rev. (later Bishop) Azariah, “that an advance step be taken by transferring from foreigners to Indians responsibilities and privileges that are now too exclusively in the hands of the foreign missionary.”  And he ended with these words:  “Through all the ages to come, the Indian church will rise up in gratitude to attest the heroism and self-denying labors of [foreign missionaries].  You have given your goods to feed the poor.  You have given your bodies to be burned.  [But] we also ask for love.  Give us friends!”  He made this statement out of his Anglican context, with which the Mar Thoma Church had close contact. 

3.                  There is a third reason this event is seen as the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement.  At Edinburgh, there was a stronger emphasis on the visible unity of the church than at previous conferences.  Throughout the report is an awareness that missionaries were fighting over the same souls in the mission fields, and that this (to say the least) undermined their witness to the reconciling love of God made known in Christ!  Our goal, said the delegates (quite astonishingly!), is not the planting of competing churches but the establishment of one united church in each place.  Previous conferences had suggested that comity agreements were a sufficient answer to the problem of Christian competition.  Edinburgh, by contrast, lifts up a vision of “visible fellowship,” spurred in part by another of these local Christians, Chang Ching-yi, who stated bluntly that “denominationalism has never interested the Chinese mind.” 

Of course, as I’ve already noted, Edinburgh did not tackle those doctrinal issues on which churches do disagree and, therefore, fail to express their given unity.  Which is why participants at Edinburgh – most notably, the Episcopal Church bishop, Charles Brent – felt compelled to initiate another stream of ecumenical work called Faith and Order.  But it was this missionary conference that provided the inspiration for the emphasis on theological reconciliation.  It is the coming together of these impulses – mission and unity (the idea that the church witnesses by what it is, not just what it says or does) – that is at the heart of modern ecumenism. 

4.                  The Edinburgh Conference was by no means an end in itself.  The conference chairperson, and great ecumenical movement leader, John R. Mott, closed the conference by declaring that “our best days are ahead of us because we have a larger Christ.”  His remarks anticipated that “what happened here will course out through us to the very ends of the earth.”  And the vehicle for this was a Continuation Committee that, among other things, gave rise to a permanent International Missionary Council – and with that, ecumenism as a structured movement was born. 

A lot changes in one hundred years – and especially in the century beginning in 1910.  It is interesting to note, for example, that historians sometimes regard 1910 as the point at which the world was most unified – but in what we would regard as the wrong way (i.e., western imperial powers controlled most of the earth’s population and resources).  When the delegates at Edinburgh thought of unity, they envisioned a world unified under the banner of a triumphant church – which, of course, was being spread along with western civilization by the colonial powers. 

This past century has seen the end of colonialism, at least in its earlier form. It has seen the end of Christendom (i.e., the assumption of an homogenous Christian world in Europe and North America) along with the resurgence of other world religions.  Beyond that, the past half century has seen a growing appreciation for religious and cultural diversity that has given rise to what we call post-modernism, along with an almost inevitable backlash on the part of those whose identity is threatened by such diversity, as we saw quite dramatically in the days leading up to this past September 11.  This past century has also seen massive threats to human well-being and the survival of the planet, including two world wars, the violent partition of India and Pakistan, and countless regional conflicts, the advent of nuclear weapons, ecological devastation, globalization with all its economic impact, and the horrifying prevalence of genocide.   

This list is very partial, but hopefully makes the point.  Of course, our understanding of mission has changed during this period.  Let’s take it as a given that Christians have a biblically-grounded calling to witness in word and deed to the God we have known in Christ; but how we do so is surely shaped by the times in which we live.  As I read this history, mission theology and practice have undergone four major shifts since Edinburgh – at least in the West, and at least for those churches that are ecumenically engaged.  

1.                  We now affirm that mission is always a two-way street.  Reading the report from Edinburgh, for all of this conference’s advances over previous ones, will still make you cringe because of its tone of “well-meaning condescension.”  The following passage is typical.  “[The] awakening nations [they mean places such as India] are looking to the West for intellectual enlightenment and for civilization.  To give them this without religion would be to give them that which [would] prove [to be] a curse and not a blessing.  The Christian religion has supplied what is distinctively good in western civilization.…And unity alone … can meet the needs of these awakening nations…  It is more than ever incumbent on the Christian Church to realize its responsibility to carry the gospel to the lands which are now open to receive it, and to guide the awakening nations to God in Christ.”  The verbs are telling:  we give and we guide, while they look to us and they receive.

Today, at least in theory if not always in practice, our churches in the West affirm that they receive gifts from sisters and brothers in the Congo or Lebanon or Bolivia or India, even as we share with them what we have received from God.  A major program of the World Council of Churches from the 1970s on was the “ecumenical sharing of resources” which emphasized the gifts of lively and joyous worship, the gifts of character and insight associated with the struggle for dignity, gifts of tradition and faithful witness, as well as gifts of money and material goods.  Behind this is the crucial realization that western culture – home to horrific violence, enduring racism, massive pollution, and vast disparities of wealth – has no claim to moral or spiritual superiority.  This is a monumental shift in perspective. 

2.                  We now affirm that mission is the responsibility of (is constitutive of) the whole church (another key theme in the ministry of Thirumeni).  The paradigm in 1910 was of congregations in, say, New York giving dollars to be used by specialized mission agencies overseas, among the “unreached populations” on the frontier of Christendom.  This is no longer the image.  My own denomination’s mission statement speaks of mission “from our doorsteps to the ends of the earth.”  Every congregation, we now acknowledge, is a mission center, including in the United States which, we now recognize, also needs to hear and experience the gospel anew. 

3.                  Perhaps most significantly, we now affirm that mission starts with God (the often-used Latin phrase is missio Dei), not with the church. As we sometimes put it, it is not that the church has a mission but that God’s mission has a church. Which means that the purpose of mission is not just (or even primarily) the spread of the church but participation in all that God is doing – which, if scripture is our guide, includes working for peace, advocating on behalf of the most vulnerable in society, exercising real stewardship of creation, and fostering community among those who are estranged.  Bishop Coorilos has emphasized this in some of his own writings and addresses. 

The first World Mission Conference to articulate this shift was in 1952, which is precisely where many evangelical scholars think the ecumenical movement went astray. They argue that broadening the definition of mission to include social transformation has devalued the importance of evangelism aimed at bringing people to Christ – which is humanity’s greatest need. This tension is obviously not resolved, but the shift for many Christians in undeniable.  At Edinburgh, mission and evangelism were practically synonymous.  For most of us, I suspect, evangelism is one dimension of a much broader understanding of missio Dei. 

This shift has meant that much theology of mission – articulated, for example, under the auspices of the WCC since the 1960s – has been liberation oriented, advocating an activist justice agenda.  At the most recent WCC-sponsored World Mission Conference, however, which was in Athens in 2005, the paradigm was clearly shifting again – from liberation toward reconciliation, which implies involvement with perpetuators as well as victims and reconstruction of societies on the other side of the struggle against oppression.  South Africa and Rwanda come quickly to mind. In his keynote address, the Roman Catholic theologian, Robert Schreiter, contended that the church is called beyond political action to participation in the healing work of the Triune God, creating safe, hospitable spaces where truth can be spoken and heard, helping to rebuild relationships, and fostering the sort of tough-minded forgiveness (not forgetfulness) that makes a different kind of future possible for both victim and offender.  Watch for these themes to take on more prominence in the coming years. 

4.                  We now affirm that, while mission involves bold witness to God’s love in Christ, such witness can (should) happen through dialogue and partnership with people of other faiths.  This, of course, was not the perspective of the early ecumenical movement whose favored slogan was “the evangelization of the world in this generation.”  According to the report from the Eden conference, the world was then in a “plastic” condition, ready to be molded by the fire of the gospel.  Today, our churches in the U.S. insist that Muslims or Buddhists are not disembodied objects of conversion but human neighbors in God’s work in making peace and serving the needy. 

I need to emphasize that the place of other faiths in God’s plan of salvation remains a highly contentious question for the church as a whole.  If there is a definitive position of the WCC, it is this paradoxical statement made at the World Conference on Mission and Evangelism in 1989:  “We cannot point to another other way of salvation than Jesus Christ; at the same time, we cannot set limits to the saving power of God…. We appreciate the tension and do not attempt to resolve it.”  Still, this is a far cry from the aggressive evangelizing posture of Edinburgh, where it was assumed by many, if not most, delegates that the other world religions were in retreat and would, fairly soon, disappear – at least as viable competitors with Christianity. 

This last point, regarding new approaches to interfaith relations, poses real challenges for our ministry at the National Council of Churches in the USA.  In the remainder of this essay, I want to name some of those challenges as I see them from my perspective. 

I have decided to focus on interfaith relations, in part because it is so important in India, and in part because of the awful eruption of anti-Muslim rhetoric that we have witnessed of late in the United States.  My colleagues on the staff of the NCC and I wrote or contributed to at least six statements, and I personally did something like 20 interviews with TV networks around the world, denouncing categorically the derision, misinformation, and outright bigotry directed against America’s Muslim community.  Calls to burn the Quran because it “teaches violence” are nothing less than a violation of the commandment not to bear false witness against the neighbor.  But, having said that, interfaith relations still raises theological, moral, and missional challenges that deserve serious attention. 

Theologically-speaking, the NCC – which has membership ranging from Orthodox to Quakers -  reflects the same ambivalence seen in the earlier sentences from the WCC.   Our policy statement, “Interfaith Relations and the Churches,” adopted in 1999, obviously encourages interfaith dialogue and cooperation.  But when it comes to the question, “Can non-Christians be reconciled to God, and if so, how?” the statement reverts the language of comparison: some say this and some say that.  There is now broad agreement that God is revealed in other faiths and, thus, that engagement with them affords real opportunity to experience God’s presence – perhaps in ways that are new to us. But are we now prepared to say more?  Are we ready, for example, to say that God wills the diversity of religions? 

In the U.S., we often talk about human sexuality as the most profound, transformative theological challenge facing churches; but seen in wider historical perspective, the interfaith challenge is more radical. If we don’t face it seriously and sensitively, we will only widen the already-enormous gap between the “dialoguers” and the “evangelizers.” 

A good indication of this for me was the 2005 world mission conference in Athens, which was the first such conference in decades to include a large number of representatives from Evangelical and Pentecostal churches.  Not coincidentally, interfaith relations did not figure at all in the conference theme or plenary presentations because it would have been too divisive. It was a vivid reminder that, while new partners at the table can enrich the conversation, they can also complicate it – a reminder that Christian unity and interfaith relations stand in real tension.  During my years of seminary teaching, students would regularly suggest that it is far easier to relate to “ecumenically-minded” Jews or Hindus than to many of the narrow-minded jerks who insist on calling themselves Christians!  Suffice it to say that this is not an overly ecumenical sentiment – but I suspect that many of us feel the same. 

The moral challenge is even tougher:  How can we be both open to religious diversity and firmly opposed to diversities, including some called “religious,” that are demonic. The very experience of religious and cultural diversity has led many persons in my country to conclude that religious beliefs and moral values are a matter of personal preference – which has the benefit of opening us to differences, but won’t stand the test of evil. If one belief is really as good as the next, than how do we say “No!” to Nazis or white supremacist churches or advocates of religiously-based terrorism or Quran-burning congregations with sufficient clarity and conviction?  Saying yes to neighbors of another faith means saying no to those things that harm them, even things done in the name of religion. 

I don’t need to tell you how agonizingly complicated this is.  Are certain forms of traditional Muslim practice regarding women to be accepted as religious diversity or denounced as violations of human rights?  Is the caste system such an intrinsic part of Hinduism that Hinduism is to be opposed rather than dialogued with? 

Notice how all of this profoundly complicates ecumenism.  Let me pose the matter this way:  Is Christian exclusivism (fundamentalism) a form of religion that we must denounce because it threatens the neighbor?  The idea that faith in Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, that Christianity is a spiritually superior religion, does have grounding in our sacred texts and can be affirmed as an expression of our deepest love for others.  But, while there is not a necessary link between exclusivist theology and violence, there is surely a possible link between claiming that our faith is superior and calling for aggression against those who do not accept it. 

Finally, there is the missional challenge.  The leaders of the NCC are now clear, it is fair to say, that mission, which used to be aimed at interfaith neighbors, must now be done with them.  To take one example, the council has an extensive program on ecojustice which is not reticent to name the Christian witness about creation as precious to God; we work hard to articulate this Christian perspective and to mobilize the churches.  But we also are very aware that it really makes no sense to talk about the Christian response to climate change!  Such an issue is simply too big to be dealt with apart from other religious communities.  If God’s mission calls us to protect the environment, then surely our participation in that mission demands collaboration with interfaith partners.  It is not just expedient but faithful to do so. 

The challenge comes in living out the full implications of such a claim.  Until recently, the NCC’s work of interfaith relations was pretty much confined to a particular commission.  Can the NCC retain its character as a “community of Christian churches” if that work becomes more integrated throughout our commissions?  Until now, persons of other faiths have been occasional “guests” at our assemblies. What will it mean for them to be present as full partners in our mission?   

These issues and questions, it seems to me, are pertinent to the church in both the United States and India.  I am grateful to God for the leadership Bishop Coorilos has given the church in both countries.

Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary
National Council of Churches