In 1910, for the first time in history, mission leaders and missionaries were called together to consider how best to finish the global task of missions. The conference was called The World Missionary Conference. That was the First Call. No one was invited. The only people attending were delegates chosen by legitimate mission agencies. Great things came out of that conference. A Continuation Committee was formed. Then the International Review of Missions and the International Mis- sionary Council (which served effectively for forty years) derived from that committee. This famous 1910 conference also, and unexpectedly, inspired dreams of both Christian unity and a number of other successive but unconnected conferences, some liberal, eventually resulting in the World Council of Churches. However, none of those later conferences had the distinctive composition of exclusively mission people as had the 1910 meeting.

The Second Call:

In 1972 a Southern Baptist professor of mission proposed a repetition of the 1910 conference. In 1974, a group of missiologists under the banner of the newly formed American Society of Missiology, meeting at Wheaton College, hammered out the wording of a Call for a second 1910 type conference to meet on the world level in 1980. As reported in the July 31, 2003 letter (See attached), here is the exact wording of that Second Call.

It is suggested that a World Missionary Conference be convened in 1980 to confront contemporary issues in Christian world missions. The conference should be constituted by persons committed to cross-cultural missions, broadly representative of the missionary agencies of the various Christian traditions on a world basis.

When that 1980 meeting took place in Edinburgh in November of 1980, it was called The World Consultation on Frontier Missions. More agencies were represented than in 1910, and notably one third of all agencies were now from the Third World (none in 1910). The compendium of that conference is the book Seeds of Promise, Edited by Alan Starling (William Carey Library, 1981).

In 1980 the slogan adopted was “A Church for Every People By the Year 2000.” Thomas Wang was one of the plenary speakers, and he carried it into the AD2000 movement with a clarifying addition, “A Church for Every People and the Gospel for Every Person by the Year 2000.” Problem: the 1980 “Continuation Committee” failed to function. No ongoing structure survived.