Faith on the Frontier

J H Oldham is the Father of the Ecumenical Movement and it is impossible to tell his story without recounting the way in which churches and missionary societies all over the world were growing closer together throughout the whole of the 20th century, going back before the Edinburgh Conference in 1910, until his death in 1969. Oldham was a major player in it all. But the book is also about much more than the churches. For Oldham every issue in society or international relations called for the challenge of the gospel, be it in education, race relations, women's suffrage, colonialism or economics. During a short period working in India around 1900 he set himself to build bridges between the Indian and missionary communities because foreignness was a hindrance to evangelism and he knew only too well that what the Indians wanted most was friends and love.