The Place of the London Missionary Society in the Ecumenical Movement

Abstract

While much has been written about the London Missionary Society and its very impressive record in the foreign mission held, comparatively little recognition has been given to the Society's early and equally important contribution to church union. This is not surprising. The London Missionary Society has historically been associated with the Congregational Church and until recently was called the Congregational Council for World Missions. Its founding fathers and early patrons, not to mention its missionaries, were mostly Independents although other sympathetic evangelicals—mostly Calvinistic Methodists and English and Scottish Presbyterians—were also involved in its formation. In the view of most historians, the significance of the London Missionary Society lay principally in its impact on heathen popujations in far away lands, only minimally in its impact on those who united to direct its affairs in England. In short, it has often been assumed that, like the Baptist and Wesleyan missions that preceded it, the London Missionary Society was designed to serve a limited denominational or theological constituency and that its evolution into a branch of the Congregational Church was almost inevitable from the beginning.