Engaging Global Reconcilliation

Evangelicals from around the world gatheredin Cape Town last October for the Third Lausanne Congress. The world has changed dramatically since the first Congress in 1974, but are evangelicals adapting to the current challenges?

 

Trinity Magazine spoke with Dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Dr. Tite Tiénou, Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology Dr. Peter Cha, and Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology Lisa Sung about their experience and reflections upon the Third Lausanne Congress held in Cape Town, South Africa.

 

Trinity Magazine: Dr. Tiénou, give us some historical context. You have been to all three Lausanne Congresses, beginning in 1974. How have they changed?

Dr. Tite Tiénou: The Lausanne Congress that was held in October in Cape Town, South Africa, officially called Cape Town 2010, is actually the third Lausanne Congress. The first one, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, is where the name comes from. The second was held in Manila, Philippines, in 1989.

The names of the Congresses tell you something. Something happened at Lausanne that people wanted to recapture, hence the name Lausanne II in Manila and then Cape Town 2010 being Lausanne III.

The spirit of Lausanne I was such that everyone who was there, indeed the whole world, knew that something specific happened. Many factors helped the ’74 Congress become what it was. One of those factors is the maturing leadership of evangelical Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The first international director of the Lausanne Congress was a Ghanaian pastor working in Kenya. There were significant voices at Lausanne from Latin America, from Asia, and from Africa as plenary speakers. The second thing that was important at Lausanne I was the agreement among evangelicals that evangelism and social concerns should be taken together.

There was a covenant at Lausanne I, the Lausanne Covenant. Still today it marks one of the highest moments of evangelicalism in the 20th century. The genius of finding the word Covenant at Lausanne I is that it was symbolized by a signing of the covenant. We want to abide by it.

In Manila, the Congress produced the Manila Manifesto. There is a difference in tone. One can rally around a covenant. A manifesto is somehow a very different kind of document in my mind. In Cape Town, we left with the Cape Town Commitment. It’s not quite as strong as a Covenant. In the end, the spirit of Lausanne could not be recreated.

TM: Is that because having made the Covenant, the major issues had been worked out?

Dr. Tiénou: One can find a way of doing something that would have the same effect without trying to link it to a place name. Now there is the Lausanne movement. We think of it as a worldwide evangelical gathering, but it almost negates the global nature of the movement by keeping the name Lausanne in it.

But something more is missing. Having been at all three and having processed all three together, my conclusion is that perhaps we should have let the spirit of Lausanne be the spirit of Lausanne. We should try to move forward in that spirit, but not try to recreate it

Dr. Peter Cha: In a recent issue of Christianity Today, there was a report about Cape Town. One line said that there was no significant missiological or theological breakthrough. Listening to Tite, I’m wondering if that is because this was framed as recapturing and continuing the Lausanne ethos. It didn’t really frame the gathering so that the participants would be engaged in a new challenge about the world that has changed so significantly since 1974. Cape Town did not allow us to create a new way to think about missions in a way that fits where global missions is today.

Professor Lisa Sung: A group of us had the opportunity to learn about missions and church history in South Africa, especially about the development of apartheid as a theological teaching that legitimized the country’s political doctrine and policies until 1994. Re-reading the 1974 Covenant with this historical awareness, I was surprised at just how seminal it was. In my theology classes, I speak of the Lausanne Covenant as the consensus, self-definitional document for evangelicalism in the 20th century. I was surprised that in Cape Town further explicit reference was not made to this document. It continues to stand the test of time.

The Covenant rightly begins by reaffirming the classical doctrines of the redemptive purpose of the Triune God, the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Christ’s uniqueness and universality as Savior and Lord, and careful definitions of evangelism and of the gospel. What was so seminal about the Lausanne Covenant was the statement of Christian social responsibility as inseparable from evangelism (proclaiming Christ’s sin-bearing death to reconcile people to God). I am struck by how farsighted that statement was.

These are so often polarities—evangelism and social engagement— and what was so revolutionary about the Covenant was that these were fresh insights that were emerging in light of conditions evangelicals were facing in Latin America and elsewhere, including the struggle for civil rights in the U.S.

Where are we 35 years later? Those evangelicals who are familiar with the Covenant will affirm it, but I don’t know that we have gone very far in integrating the two. I still hear either/or rhetoric in theological circles and in churches. We have a long way to go in terms of appropriating and living up to the Lausanne Covenant.

Dr. Tiénou: At Lausanne in ’74, one had the sense that the leadership as well as participants were paying close attention to the world in front of us. One can almost hear it in the Covenant. There was a sense of urgency, to listen and pay attention.

Over the years, my observation is that evangelicals have become a bit more triumphalistic, and that has prevented us from listening carefully to the world around us. We have to pay attention to what kind of world is in front of us.

TM: What role does such a gathering play in the global church?

Dr. Cha: I understand that one of the challenges that this Congress was trying to address was the sense of fragmentation that can happen as the church is growing globally. At this gathering there was a strong desire to see a sense of unity through a shared affirmation of Christ’s uniqueness, the authority of Scripture, and the importance of world missions. Those are some of the basic themes that were presented. It serves to remind all of us who belong to this global evangelical family that we are affirming these things, even if there might be disagreements on other things.

Dr. Tiénou: I have been thinking about live gatherings that evangelicals have sponsored in my lifetime compared to live gatherings that other Christian groups have sponsored, such as the Vatican II council.

I’m reading and teaching in this area right now. I think that the challenge for evangelicals is that every one of the Lausanne Congresses was actually an ad hoc event. It was organized for the occasion. As a result, continuity between the three is really difficult. Whereas the World Council of Churches or the Roman Catholic Church has an infrastructure behind it, so they have continuity.

When evangelicals gather, the people who come are the ones to cause the change when they go home. We have no basis to judge if that actually happens. They’re not answerable to anyone. We came as individuals, not as delegates of our respective churches. When we come back it is of our own goodwill that we produce something. What we should expect from this sort of gathering is personal renewal and an effort to get the message of the event across to others when we get home.

Dr. Cha: In the first Congress, people might have walked away with different levels of commitment, but there is this objective document that steered and guided a lot of the conversations afterward. Such a statement could provide some direction for the global church for the next decade.

Dr. Tiénou: The times are different today. After Lausanne I there was a sense of unfinished business. Several consultations were planned on issues that generated a lot of spark but no final resolution at the Congress. For example, the question of the homogeneous unit principle was a huge debate in ’74, and it was not resolved in the document. The first consultation following Lausanne I was on the homogeneous unit principle, and it happened in ’77 in Pasadena, California. There was a consultation on Muslim evangelism. There was a consultation on gospel and culture. There was a consultation on evangelism and social responsibility. There was a consultation on simple lifestyle.

These were all unresolved issues. And from ’74 to the early ’80s you had a sense of a global conversation. If you sustain a conversation, then you get something. So the Lausanne Congress had a life that was sustained. People were talking about it. But it does require attention.

TM: What are some issues evangelicals are dealing with today when it comes to world evangelism?

Dr. Cha: I have been thinking about the ongoing tension between social responsibility and evangelism. Perhaps one way to address those competing agendas is to find a biblically-supportable third leg.

If you think about the theme of reconciliation, it is the single theme that brings together our reconciliation with God and
our reconciliation with each other as something that was achieved on the cross. Social responsibility is a way of our
expressing commitment to the horizontal reconciliation that we are called to be engaged in.

Perhaps there are now ways to think biblically about bringing these two things together by adding a third dimension of reconciliation.

Sung: One of the helpful statements in the Cape Town Commitment is the definition of integral mission. It explains, “Integral mission is the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. … [O]ur proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. And our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. If we ignore the world, we betray the word of God which sends us out to serve the world. If we ignore the word of God, we have nothing to bring to the world. We commit ourselves to the integral and dynamic exercise of all dimensions of mission to which God calls his church.”

Dr. Tiénou: What Dr. Cha just mentioned here can be seen in the theme verse of the Congress, 2 Cor. 5:18-20. God has reconciled himself to us and given us the ministry of reconciliation. This could break new ground. Had it been the theological centerpiece of Lausanne III, there would have been a new focus in evangelicalism. The world today is a fragmented world. There is no question about that. And the fragmentation is going to continue. The question then is in such a fragmented world, what does the gospel bring? We have the answer in Scripture; it’s reconciliation. We cannot do global evangelism today if we do not think reconciliation.

TM: If you could attend Lausanne IV, what issues do think might be at the center of discussions?

Dr. Cha: Globalization and its missiological implications. Globalization has taken away the boundary between a local ministry and an overseas missionary. It’s hard to talk about those things as if they’re two separate phenomena. Thinking through global missions is no longer just the burden of missionaries and missiologists. It will be a burden for all local church pastors, particularly in North America where we’re becoming more and more globalized.

Dr. Tiénou: My sincere hope is that evangelicals would break their focus on geography and culture as the centerpiece of mission. If we don’t do that, then we cannot really talk about evangelization meaningfully. For instance, Europe and North America have significant challenges in terms of global evangelism. In 1986 it was written that the US is not only the largest mission field it is also the most difficult mission field. At large evangelical gatherings, we don’t get a feel for that. We must erase the foreign/home divide and focus on advancing the Christian faith wherever pagans are found.

Sung: That there are still all kinds of power imbalances. The vision of the organizers of the Cape Town Congress was to begin to help evangelicals around the world move from the mentality of the West to the Rest. I think that challenge is very much in front of us. I’ll be interested to see if we will have made substantial progress.