The 1910 World Missionary Conference, or the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, was held on 14 to 23 June 1910. Some have seen it as both the culmination of nineteenth-century Protestant Christian missions and the formal beginning of the modern Protestant Christian ecumenical movement, after a sequence of interdenominational meetings that can be traced back as far as 1854. Edinburgh 1910 Major Protestant and Anglican denominations and missionary societies, predominantly from North America and Northern Europe, sent 1,215 representatives to Edinburgh, Scotland. Delegation was usually based on the annual expenditure of the missionary societies; one hundred additional special delegates were appointed by the British, Continental, and American Executive Committees. No Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic missionary organizations were invited. Only 18 delegates were from non-Westerners. Catholic Anglicans agreed to participate only after the British Executive Committee agreed to add the subtitle “to consider Missionary Problems in Relation to the Non-Christian World” to the conference title and to define the non-Christian world as excluding areas of the world that were nominally Christian but mostly non-evangelical, such as Latin America. Lord Balfour of Burleigh, of the Church of Scotland, a former Unionist cabinet minister, was the President of the World Missionary Conference. American John R. Mott, an American Methodist layperson and leader of both the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the World Student Christian Federation, chaired its proceedings. The main organiser was Joseph Oldham, a leader in the Student Christian Movement. The conference was held in the Assembly Hall of the United Free Church of Scotland. The formal title of this conference should be called the "third ecumenical missionary conference," because the first and the second had already taken place in London in 1888 and New York in 1900 respectively. Before the conference convened, eight assigned commissions, each with twenty members, conducted two years of research on their assigned topic. Each commission produced a single volume report, which was distributed to all of the delegates before they headed to Scotland and discussed at the assembly during the Conference. The Eight Commissions and their date of presentation at the Conference are as follows: Carrying the Gospel to all the Non-Christian World (June 15, 1910) The Church in the Mission Field (June 16, 1910) Education in Relation to the Christianization of National Life (June 17, 1910) Missionary Message in Relation to the Non-Christian World (June 18, 1910) The Preparation of Missionaries (June 22, 1910)