Joseph Oldham (1874-1969) was born in Bombay (Mumbai) and educated at the Edinburgh Academy and Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1897. He developed an interest in the Student Christian Movement and subsequently worked as Secretary of the Scottish Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Lahore, India. After being invalided home three years later, he entered New College, Edinburgh, in 1901, where he began a course of theological studies. Though he was never ordained, he studied missionary theory and practice until 1908 and was appointed Organising Secretary for the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910. He was then retained as Secretary to the Edinburgh Continuation Committee, which continued the Conference's work.

In 1912, he became Editor of the International Review of Missions (Edinburgh, s.d., 1912-) and for fifteen years travelled extensively, interesting himself in forced labour, the education of indigenous peoples, and relations between races. He found himself acting as mediator between settlers and Indians in Kenya and forged a friendship with Frederick Dealtry Lugard, Baron Lugard of Abinger, with whom, after proposing the formation of the Advisory Committee on Native Education in tropical Africa, he collaborated in drafting a first policy statement on African education. He also organised the first conference between missionaries and colonial administrators on education in 1926, and visited educational institutions for black people in the USA, where he established contacts that proved useful when he and Lugard later created the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (of which Oldham was Administrative Director from 1931 to 1938). Together, Oldham and Lugard encouraged research in anthropology and semantics, and provided fellowships for academics.

Oldham was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity by Edinburgh University in 1931 and made Chairman of the Research Committee of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work. In 1937, he organised the World Conference on Church, Community, and State at Oxford, helped Archbishop Temple establish a world ecumenical movement, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford.