Julia Cameron brings us up-to-date with the Lausanne Movement
It is five years this month since the Cape Town Commitment was published. In that time it has spread out widely, and down deeply, across the continents, in major and ‘minor’ languages.
The Congress itself reflected the global church, with invitations allocated in relation to the number of evangelicals in each nation. There was, however, one conspicuous exception.
Onsite media crashes
The newsroom hosted writers and journalists from all continents, and a further group of credentialled writers offsite had privileged access to material. Western media carrying reports included the Times, Guardian and Economist. A small city of trucks parked in the Convention Centre Marshalling Yard handled digital media and created TV and radio programmes. BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Worship on the first morning of the Congress came from All Souls, Langham Place, led by Hugh Palmer, with Chris Wright and Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda speaking from the Marshalling Yard. All was going smoothly. Unwelcome news, however, was arriving of participants who had been stopped from leaving their country.
That evening, just 30 minutes into the official opening ceremony, systems crashed. Nothing could be certain about the cause, but there was a clear sense of how it could have happened. News of this had to be carefully managed; meanwhile, linked locations in 93 countries waited for broadcasts. Now, five years later, it has been widely reported that the bringing down of the website was the result of an attack, orchestrated by an aggrieved government. The next day a member of the communications team gave chase to a photographer sent by that country, who had managed to slip past security. Constant vigilance was needed.
Game-changers
But God’s plans are not thwarted. A new in book The Lausanne Legacy: Landmarks Global Mission, to appear in June, will show the flightpath of the Movement through its major statements. The Lausanne Covenant (1974) gave rise to new concepts in mission, which proved to be game-changers. ‘Unreached people groups’ – a phrase and indeed the birth of a strategy – was one; as was the rediscovery of a place for compassion in evangelistic ministry. Since the great days of evangelical social reform, the West had come to fear ‘social justice’ as the domain of liberals.
But the voices of two young Latin American IFES student workers, Samuel Escobar and René Padilla, were heard in Lausanne and a commitment to holistic ministry was bound into the Covenant. From the Second Congress in 1989, some 300 new mission networks and initiatives emerged, many in the global south.
The Lausanne Covenant served to define evangelicalism across the world for a quarter of a century. Good foundations, as Michael Oh, Lausanne’s Executive Director, reminds us, ‘are to be built upon, not admired’.
The China story
What then of the one conspicuous exception? More than 200 Chinese participants invited to the Third Lausanne Congress had their passports withheld for two weeks as they checked in for their flights to South Africa. This was a huge blow for Chinese Christians and for the Congress. The second Lausanne Congress had taken place three months after the Tiananmen incident, so in 1989, too, Lausanne was incomplete.
In 2011, a hundred of the leaders unable to leave China a year earlier gathered in Seoul, where Lausanne quietly held a special meeting for them. Last Autumn 850 gathered for their own missions conference in Hong Kong and resolved to send 20,000 missionaries from China by the year 2030, one for every missionary received by China in the past 200 years.
Onsite in Cape Town, conversations added pace to a new and very different Chinese initiative. Several African countries now host hundreds of thousands of the Chinese workforce moving into commerce and technology. A large influx from a very different culture provides a challenge for any society. OMF and SIM are now working at the invitation of the Movement for African National Initiatives (MANI, a network of networks) to equip African church leaders to welcome the Chinese population and to engage with this new reality of Africa’s growth and diversity.
Younger leaders and the future
Lausanne distils its purpose in seven words: ‘Connecting influencers and ideas for global mission’ – that is, for mission in the geographical world and in the spheres of thought and culture.
Now in its fifth decade, it continues to tackle some of the toughest questions facing the church. Global consultations have begun on a range of issues, to take place over several years. These include areas such as poverty and prosperity, gender and sexuality, religious liberty, identity and ethnicity, technology and the public arenas, creation care, nominalism, and unreached oral cultures. ‘Exegete the city’, urged Raymond Bakke in 1974, for he could see that soon half the world would live in cities.
Working to identify emerging leaders has long been a value of Lausanne. August 2016 sees the next Lausanne Younger Leaders’ Gathering, in Jakarta. Vaughan Roberts, Os Guinness and Becky Pippert are among the speakers drawn from all continents. This event will launch YLGen, a structured ten-year plan to work with 1,000 selected participants and other younger leaders in their countries. A specially-designed ‘Connector’ has enabled them to start preparing, by gathering now online, in affinity groups.
Conveyor and catalyst
As in the past, Lausanne acts most effectively as convenor and catalyst. As a result, it’s often said that ‘Lausanne’s fruit grows best on other people’s trees’. To help you keep up with world news, Lausanne Global Analysis can provide bi-monthly updates to your inbox. May the Lausanne foundations, laid by Billy Graham and John Stott, continue to be ‘built upon, not admired’.
