The Missionary Era · 1886-1920 · N. America, Britain, global
The Student Volunteer Movement & Edinburgh 1910
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About This Movement
In the summer of 1886 a hundred students at a conference in Massachusetts signed a declaration that they were willing and desirous to become foreign missionaries, and over the next thirty years the Student Volunteer Movement they founded put something on the order of twenty thousand young Americans and Britons on ships, under the watchword "the evangelization of the world in this generation." Its summit was the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, where twelve hundred delegates met to plan the work as one enterprise instead of a hundred competing ones. Two of the very few non-Western delegates used their few minutes to say the necessary thing: V. S. Azariah of India asked the room, to its face, for friends rather than masters, and Cheng Jingyi of China told it that the Chinese church wanted to be one church and had no use for European denominational divisions. Both were right, and it took the rest of the century to act on it.
Sources
- The SVM's own records: the Mount Hermon record (1886), declaration cards, watchword literature, quadrennial convention reports (1891-); Mott, The Evangelization of the World in This Generation (1900) (primary)
- Volunteers' diaries and letters: candidates' and missionaries' correspondence; women volunteers' letters and diaries; Grace Wilder's origin role (primary) — Women were the majority of the volunteer force, and the women's missionary movement's own records are central to this history. Grace Wilder's own role, though, is recorded mostly through others' accounts of her, not her own words.
- Edinburgh 1910's own record: the nine published volumes (Commission reports and proceedings); the non-Western delegates' interventions - Azariah's 'give us friends' address, Cheng Jingyi's unity speech (primary) — Colonized voices inside the summit, verbatim in the conference's own record — though worth noting how few there were: a handful among 1,200 delegates.
- Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Eerdmans, 2009), with Michael Parker, The Kingdom of Character (1998) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 34 'Missions and empire, c.1873-1914' (Stanley) (reference) — Its author, one of the volume's co-editors, works directly on this subject.