Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, Official Messages, 1910 (2)

To the Members of the Christian Church in non-Christian Lands

DEAR BRETHREN IN CHRIST,
We desire to send you greeting in the Lord from the World Missionary Conference
gathered in Edinburgh. For ten days we have been associated in prayer, deliberation,
and the study of missionary problems, with the supreme purpose of making the
work of Christ in non-Christian lands more effective, and throughout the discussions
our hearts have gone forth to you in fellowship and love.
Many cases of thanksgiving have arisen as we have consulted together, with the
whole of the Mission Field clear in view. But nothing has caused more joy than the
witness borne from all quarters as to the steady growth in numbers, zeal, and
power of the rising Christian Church in newly-awakening lands. None have been
more helpful in our deliberations than members from your own Churches. We thank
God for the spirit of evangelistic energy which you are showing, and for the
victories that are being won thereby. We thank God for the longing after unity
which is so prominent among you and is one of our own deepest longings to-day.
Our hearts are filled with gratitude for all the inspiration that your example has
brought to us in our home-lands. This example is all the more inspiring because of
the special difficulties that beset the glorious position which you hold in the hottest
part of the furnace wherein the Christian Church is being tried.
Accept our profound and loving sympathy, and be assured of our confident hope
that God will bring you out of your fiery trial as a finely-tempered weapon which
can accomplish His work in the conversion of your fellow-countrymen. It is you
alone who can ultimately finish this work: the word that under God convinces your
own people must be your word; and the life which will win them for Christ must be
the life of holiness and moral power, as set forth by you who are men of their own
race. But we rejoice to be fellow-helpers with you in the work, and to know that you
are being more and more empowered by God’s grace to take the burden of it upon
your own shoulders. Take up that responsibility with increasing eagerness, dear
brethren, and secure from God the power to carry through the task; then we may
see great marvels wrought beneath our own eyes.
Meanwhile we rejoice also to be learning much ourselves from the great peoples
whom our Lord is now drawing to Himself; and we look for a richer faith to result
for all from the gathering of the nations in Him.
There is much else in our hearts that we should be glad to say, but we must confine
ourselves to one further matter, and that the most vital of all.
A strong co-operation in prayer binds together in one all the Empire of Christ. Pray,
therefore, for us, the Christian communities in home-lands, as we pray for you:
remember our difficulties before God as we remember yours, that He may grant to
each of us the help that we need, and to both of us together that fellowship in the Body of Christ which is according to His blessed Will.
 
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