The Church of the Three Selves: A Perspective from the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh, 1910

Abstract

Commission II of the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in 1910 undertook a survey of the condition of the churches planted by western Protestant missions in Asia and Africa. The evidence submitted to the commission and the commission's report to the conference suggest that progress towards the Protestant ideal of a self-supporting, self-governing, self-extending indigenous church was extremely uneven: quite rapid in Korea, Japan and parts of China; decidedly patchy in Africa; and extremely slow in India. The commission explained these differences in part by appeal to ‘racial characteristics’, yet the report's use of the category of race was loose and ambiguous: the commission both deplored the failure of the indigenous churches to develop their own distinctive ‘racial’ character and blamed racial deficiencies for the failure of churches to advance more rapidly to autonomy.