‘God's Family in the World’: Transnational and Local Ecumenism's Impact on Inter-Church and Inter-Racial Dialogue in South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

In this article I examine two parallel and connected processes. The first process concerns the growth of local ecumenism before 1940, understood as inter-racial unity and equality in the Church. The emergence of transnational ecumenism in the twentieth century, especially its evangelical expression, had a critical impact on processes and events in South Africa. In the first place, the movement proved a spur to the growth of local ecumenism among South Africa's different mission churches. Although South African mission societies had been meeting since the early twentieth century, the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 inspired the General Missionary Conference in South Africa to consider questions of inter-church and inter-racial collaboration more closely. Following the establishment of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1921, South Africa began to move closer to the kind of ecumenical organisation advocated by the IMC, the result of which was the founding of the Christian Council of South Africa (CCSA) in 1934. The second process relates to the impact of both local and transnational ecumenism on black South Africans. What kind of role did an institution like the IMC think black Christians from the sub-continent would be able to play in a transnational expression of Christianity? In this article, the Second World War is a pivotal event, because of the sense of unease which the rise of fascist ideologies in Europe before the outbreak of war engendered in western Protestantism. The impending war colours the nature of South African ecumenism, so that for a time Christian ecumenism in South Africa appeared under threat. In this context, transnational ecumenism provided black South Africans with an international space in which to make themselves heard, a space denied them within South African ecumenical forums during the 1930s.

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