Drawing on the insights of British novelists Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and E. Nesbit, Literary Insight into Mission examines novels and missiological texts published around the 1910 World Missionary Conference to illuminate the cultural and missiological conversations of the period. Treating these literary works as contextual aids, this study offers a fresh examination of a pivotal missiological event by exploring how the conference's reports, debates, and decisions reflected or departed from the broader social discourse of Britain's high imperial era.

Secretary J. H. Oldham, Cheng Jingyi, Harada Tasuku, Yun Ch'iho, and V. S. Azariah emerge as noteworthy characters at the conference. Their diplomatic decisions and words to the conference delegates reveal the complexities of navigating power structures during Britain's high imperial era on British soil and among an assembly predominated by British missionaries. This intertextual reading illuminates an overarching sense of a new era on the horizon. While the potential decline of the British Empire caused angst among the novelists, the conference welcomed a new era in which leadership became younger, more national, and more ecumenical.

Candis Berends completed her PhD in intercultural studies at Columbia International University in 2025. As a nomadic immigrant, she has lived in the United States (her country of birth), Morocco, England, China, Aotearoa New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Timor-Leste. Together with her Kiwi husband, she is the mother of two children, one on earth and one in heaven. Her experiences of bereavement, trauma, relocation, and cross-cultural engagement have shaped her empathetic approach to historical interpretation, attentive not only to what texts reveal but also to the significant absences they contain. Her research and writing have been published in Evangelical Quarterly and in Brill's Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, 1500?1900.