From a Missionary Conference to a Standing Council

The 1910 World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh gathered Protestant mission societies to coordinate their work, and in doing so exposed an uncomfortable fact its organizers had not set out to highlight: competing denominations were sending competing missionaries into the same territories, and the divisions Christians carried from Europe and North America were being exported wholesale into fields where they made little sense to local converts. The conference is generally treated by historians as the practical starting point of the modern ecumenical movement, less because it resolved any of those divisions than because it made the case, unusually forcefully for its time, that Christian disunity was itself hindering the churches' shared mission.

Two parallel streams of cooperation grew out of that recognition over the following decades, one focused on practical service and social witness and the other on working through actual doctrinal differences, and both converged at Amsterdam in 1948 in the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches, which gave the ecumenical movement a permanent institutional home rather than a series of one-off conferences. The Council's founding members were overwhelmingly Protestant and Orthodox; the Roman Catholic Church, then still governed by a more cautious approach to non-Catholic Christians, did not participate and would not meaningfully engage with the ecumenical movement institutionally until the Second Vatican Council over a decade later.