[1] BCMS was founded on 27 October 1922 as a result of a split in the Church Missionary Society (CMS).
The Society was quickly established under the forceful leadership of Daniel Bartlett, who dominated its first 25 years.
[2] While the parting was less than amicable, Bartlett ruled that all BCMS missionaries should transfer to areas where the CMS had not previously operated, in an attempt to restore charitable relations.
The ecclesiastical historian Adrian Hastings has argued that this is one of the few English parallels to the Fundamentalism controversy in the US.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the tide of decolonisation led to the scaling down and rethinking of activities in Africa and India.