With the planting of the Barr Colony, we come to the end of the colonial missionary movement, or as much of it as can reasonably be covered in a single book. Over the course of a century, the various churches and their colonial missionary societies sent out their pioneers, planted churches, squabbled with their rivals on the frontier and – finally – settled into the landscape. As national churches emerged in place of the colonial seedlings, the emigrant clergy who had spearheaded the movement began to do two things: they organised imperial congresses that would help to celebrate their achievements to the empire, and they wrote up their memoirs.

As the colonial churches were filled slowly with personnel, the bishops and higher clergy were constantly on the move between colony and metropole. Some journeys were professional requirements, such as that which compelled Catholic archbishops who functioned as metropolitan (leading bishop) of a province to return to Rome for consultation within a year of their consecration. From 1867, Anglican bishops returned to London for the Lambeth conferences. However, in the last decade of the nineteenth century – the heyday of imperialism – all the churches began to meet in great ecumenical gatherings that drew their representatives back to Britain from outposts and colonial cities around the world. For the British churches, these were effectively imperial meetings of the settler churches, since their membership was dominated by British, American and colonial delegates.