Literary Insight into Mission Leading Up to the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910

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Candis Berends

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Publication Date: December 1, 2026

Drawing on the insights of British novelists Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and E. Nesbit, Literary Insight into Mission examines novels and missiological texts published around the 1910 World Missionary Conference to illuminate the cultural and missiological conversations of the period. Treating these literary works as contextual aids, this study offers a fresh examination of a pivotal missiological event by exploring how the conference’s reports, debates, and decisions reflected or departed from the broader social discourse of Britain’s high imperial era.

Secretary J. H. Oldham, Cheng Jingyi, Harada Tasuku, Yun Ch’iho, and V. S. Azariah emerge as noteworthy characters at the conference. Their diplomatic decisions and words to the conference delegates reveal the complexities of navigating power structures during Britain’s high imperial era on British soil and among an assembly predominated by British missionaries. This intertextual reading illuminates an overarching sense of a new era on the horizon. While the potential decline of the British Empire caused angst among the novelists, the conference welcomed a new era in which leadership became younger, more national, and more ecumenical.

Endorsements

The history of missions is a history of human cultures. This detailed study offers a fascinating and fruitful examination of one snapshot in missionary history through the lens of key literary and cultural artifacts. In so doing, it not only illuminates that moment but also brings light to the ways in which cultural texts are written and how, in turn, those texts help us to record, remember, and at times misremember the histories we tell, and how they help us to imagine and enact the future. Moreover, its cross-disciplinary approach—one that combines missiology with literary criticism—models a fruitful way forward, both academically and practically, for the church to bridge social and cultural gaps in spreading the gospel.

Karen Swallow Prior, PhDAuthor of The Evangelical Imagination
In the history of mission studies, it is important to grasp the cultures and worldviews of missionary senders—denominations, societies, and theologians. In this intriguing work, by engaging the literature of nineteenth-century Britain before the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, Candis Berends provides an excellent window into nineteenth-century mission sending from this Western nation. Students of British literature and mission history alike will benefit from this work.

Edward L. Smither, PhDDean, School of Missions and Intercultural Ministry, Columbia International University
When I first heard about Candis Berends's monograph, I was filled with anticipation. As a missions professor whose undergraduate degree was in French, German, and English literature, I was very curious to see what would happen when these worlds collided. I was not disappointed! Placing the foundational World Missions Conference (WMC) in the context of empire, as reflected in contemporary novels, and exploring the mixed motivations of British society in its missionary zeal, helps today's missiologist understand some of the baggage we still carry, while at the same time helping us to see the positive ways the WMC 1910 was actually countercultural. All in all, this work is a unique and valuable contribution to the field of twenty-first century missiology.

The Rev. Dr. Bradley P. Roderick, PhD