Two conferences of some significance took place shortly before the First World War: the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, and the Kikuyu Conference, held at a Church of Scotland mission station at an out-of-the-way place in East Africa in 1913. In an Ecumenical Age, the fame of the former is likely to endure, the notoriety of the latter to be forgotten. Yet it was the controversy raised by the second conference which caused Lord Morley to remark that the ‘cacophonous’ name of Kikuyu might one day rival in fame that of Trent. Another grand claim was made for Kikuyu by the Bishop of Zanzibar—one with which The Times agreed—that ‘there has not been a conference of such importance to the life of the Ecclesia Anglicana since the Reformation’. And when the Kikuyu controversy was at its height in December 1913, Charles Gore, then Bishop of Oxford, recorded his conviction that the cohesion of the Church of England had never been more seriously threatened. Admittedly Morley was too detached, and the two bishops too involved, for a correct reading of the temperature of the Church of England. But Kikuyu does seem to have brought to the boil discontents which had been simmering for a variety of reasons. A. C. Headlam nicely distinguished between the actual proceedings at Kikuyu, and the agitation whipped up in England ostensibly on its account. One aspect of that agitation, which is especially appropriate to the theme of this volume, is explored here, namely the relationship between two conferences, that at Kikuyu in 1913, and the great World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910.