This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The 1910 World Missionary Conference gathered about 1,200 delegates to plan how Protestant missionary societies would carry Christianity into the rest of the world, and almost none of the people who actually lived in that world were in the room. The overwhelming majority of delegates came from Britain and North America. The churches being planted in Asia and Africa, the ones the entire Conference existed to discuss, sent only a handful of representatives to speak for themselves.
One of those few, the Indian Anglican bishop V.S. Azariah, used his moment at the podium to say so plainly, arguing that Western missionaries too often treated national converts as subordinates rather than as equal partners in the church being built. His remarks are now one of the most frequently quoted moments of the entire Conference, cited far more often than most of the official resolutions, because they named a gap the Conference's own delegate list had already made visible without anyone needing to say a word.
That contradiction did not stop Edinburgh from becoming what historians of Christianity now call the founding event of the modern ecumenical movement. Its Continuation Committee grew into the International Missionary Council, and that Council was one of the two organizations that merged in 1948 to found the World Council of Churches. A conference remembered for uniting Christian mission across denominational lines is also remembered, by the same historians, for having done so almost entirely without the voices of the people that mission was aimed at.