The Lausanne Movement

Margun Serigstad Dahle

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781908355522
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343362
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The Lausanne Movement has since 1974 functioned as a platform and forum for Evangelical leaders from various geographical and confessional strands. This year it will celebrate its 40th anniversary. This volume brings together voices about both The Lausanne Movement and on the Cape Town Congress in 2010. It gives a broad perspective on the development of and reflection on mission and evangelism among Evangelicals, with a particular focus on the Lausanne movement. It contains chapters about the historical, theological and missiological background and discusses key issues and concepts of Lausanne as they have emerged over the years since 1974. It offers links to and reflections on Cape Town and on Lausanne. Critical views of Cape Town and Lausanne are also included, aiming at opening up a dialogue with other views on evangelism and mission.

SECTION ONE

INTRODUCING THE LAUSANNE MOVEMENT

THE LAUSANNE STORY: A PERSONAL PRELUDE

Knud Jørgensen

In 1974 I attended Lausanne as a young journalist. In 2010 I attended Cape Town as a senior statesman. The decades between these two events contain the life of an ‘evangelical ecumenical’. I was sent to the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 by one of the major Geneva-based ecumenical organizations to report on events and themes for Radio Voice of the Gospel in Ethiopia. At the end of Lausanne 1974 I signed the Lausanne Covenant – and returned to Geneva and Ethiopia.

The word ‘evangelization’ was new to me; it had an American tone and smelled of effectiveness. I knew what ‘evangelism’ was from my days within Christian youth work and the Intervarsity movement in Denmark. But ‘evangelization’ meant more than witnessing to a neighbour. It had to do with ‘unreached’ people groups, church growth theory, the need for sodalities (go-structures) and not just modalities (come-structures). And there was a professor (Ralph Winter) from Fuller Theological Seminary who talked about various types of evangelism: E-1, E-2, and E-3. I understood that I probably was an E-3 evangelist in my radio ministry in Africa.

My job at Lausanne 74 was to make radio programmes. So I pulled key people into my small home-made studio: Billy Graham, John Stott, Peter Beyerhaus, Samuel Escobar, René Padilla, Ralph Winter, etc. I did not know that they were ‘famous’. I asked questions, listened – and sensed that what they said echoed the tones of revival and radical discipleship of my Intervarsity days.

‘Radical discipleship’ was something I had learned from reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.¹ At Lausanne I heard the same tone, first in the desire to bind together evangelism and socio-political involvement, as expressed in the Lausanne Covenant, but even more in the insistent call from the Latin Americans to ‘repudiate as demonic the attempt to drive a wedge between evangelism and social action’.² I came from a church³ in Ethiopia whose guiding light was ‘Serving the Whole Human Being’, so I was in tune with what they said, that there is no dichotomy in the Bible between the Word spoken and the Word made visible in the lives of God’s people. I understood that there was a tension here between the ‘evangelization’ people and the ‘holistic’ people. I sided with those who said that those who proclaim the Cross must be marked by the Cross.

While studying at Fuller Theological Seminary shortly after Lausanne 1974, I felt rather alone with my holistic view. Church growth, à la Fuller professor Donald McGavran,⁴ the name of the game, and his focus was ‘redemption and social lift’: disciple people and then the Spirit will change their lives and they will be change-makers in society. I was therefore relieved when the very first Lausanne Occasional Paper (LOP) dealt with the ‘homogeneous unit principle’,⁵ and when one of the most important subsequent LOPs was a report from the consultation in Grand Rapids about Evangelism and Social Responsibility,⁶ both of them were edited by ‘Uncle John’ (John Stott). I taught regularly at his London Institute for Contemporary Christianity and was therefore included in his extended ‘family’.

On my bookshelves I have found 25 books and booklets directly related to Lausanne. A fair number are the LOPs which have followed me and inspired me throughout my life – and which I would love to see revived. Here was a format easily accessible and requiring clarity in form. Among the books are three volumes that grew out of consultations and study processes of which I had the privilege of being part. The first volume is a book on God the Evangelist⁷ which grew out of a consultation on the ‘Work of the Holy Spirit and Evangelization’ held in Oslo in May 1985. The co-ordinator was my close friend, Dr Tormod Engelsviken. The purpose of the consultation was to take the Holy Spirit seriously in connection with evangelism. All of us had prepared solid and learned papers on the topic; my paper was on ‘The Use of Electronic Media in Evangelization’. As we discussed and deliberated on these papers, we realised on the second-to-last day that we were stuck. We simply did not know how to proceed. Here was a group of top missiologists and evangelical leaders from around the globe, including John Wimber from the Vineyard movement in California, and we did not know where to go. Then someone suggested that perhaps we should wait for the Holy Spirit; for a whole hour we sat still, praying and letting the Spirit talk. To me that was the most memorable part of the consultation. The Holy Spirit was present in a strong and quiet manner, and rather than pass a number of resolutions (which Bruce Nichols from the World Evangelical Fellowship and I actually had worked the whole night to formulate!), we agreed to hand over our papers and the input of our discussions to David Wells who then pulled all of it together in his book on God the Evangelist.

The second book to which I contributed was on Faith and Modernity.⁸ Also at that time (in 1993) I wrote on media (‘Modernity, information technology and Christian faith’). It was Os Guinness that had inspired us to hold a consultation in Uppsala on Faith and Modernity. He had given a paper in Manila in 1989 on the same topic – a paper which provoked great interest and which was so well delivered that all of us got up and applauded. The Uppsala consultation did not get under my skin as the Oslo event (1985), but it represented an honest and biblically based attempt to set up signposts for our encounter with modernity and post-modernity. We struggled, we sweated, and we discussed and listened to one another – Lesslie Newbigin, David Wells, Harold Netland, Vinay Samuel and Os Guinness. I was 43 years of age but felt like a teenager in this solemn company. What impressed me then and now is how Lausanne people have been concerned not only for unreached people, but also for searching for inroads for the Gospel into contemporary society in the Global North. The role this search played in Cape Town in 2010 is a good illustration (where Os Guinness once again played a key role).

The third book is about ‘an uneasy frontier in Christian mission’ as we called it. My field of study had by then shifted from information society to missiology. Within missiology at that time a major controversy had erupted around the concept ‘spiritual warfare’. I was then chair of the Lausanne Theology Working Group, and we decided to bring together a group of key players in August 2000 outside Nairobi. ‘We’ included Scott Moreau, Tormod Engelsviken, Tokunboh Adeyemo, Birger Nygaard and me. We agreed to replace the word ‘warfare’ with ‘conflict’ (to take the military hot air out of the balloon), and we managed to put together a statement on ‘Deliver Us From Evil’. As a moderator, I have seldom felt so ‘successful’ in terms of having achieved something essential for the understanding of the Gospel and the understanding of the adversary Satan and his forces. This echoed Luther’s hymn, ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, and my own experiences in Ethiopia and the East African Revival: ‘You must live in the light so that the devil doesn’t catch you in the dark,’ the African leaders had taught me. A key text is Col 2:13ff about how Christ cancelled my record of debts on his Cross and freed me from the power of the spiritual rulers and authorities: ‘He made a public spectacle of them by leading them as captives in his victory procession.’ Hallelujah! This tone can still make me weep and laugh at one and the same time. In Danish and Norwegian we have a hymn about this: ‘God’s Son has set me free from Satan’s tyranny.’ The outcome of the consultation was an LOP written by Tormod Engelsviken⁹ and a book edited primarily by Scott Moreau about Deliver Us From Evil¹⁰ – a book which reflects a meeting of sisters and brothers where we managed to talk together about a most controversial topic at that time. My own paper was on ‘Spiritual Conflict in the Socio-Political Context’ – a topic which brought together my African experiences and spiritual conflict in political and economic arenas. It was at this consultation I came to know Hwa Yung from Malaysia who since then has been a good friend. Also my doctoral mentor Charles H. Kraft from Fuller and his wife Marguerite were there with their warmth and wise input.

The modernity and the spiritual conflict consultations took place after the second Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Manila in 1989. My role in Manila was information and communication. Prior to Manila I had for a couple of years been part of the Communication Working Group headed by Warwick Olson. At the last hour before the congress, the group had to become operational and take over the running of the information service.¹¹ My job became to lead some of the press conferences. One of them featured a man I had met already in Oslo in 1985, John Wimber. ‘Signs and Wonders’ was his trademark. Having lived in Ethiopia and encountered the stark reality of evil spirits, I was open for what Wimber had to share. Already in Oslo in 1985 he had talked about ‘demonizing powers over Oslo’ – strong words for a non-charismatic Lutheran. But prior to 1989 in Manila I had experienced renewal through meeting with the charismatic movement Oase in Norway, and had become personally acquainted with Wimber. In Manila the focus on signs and wonders – and on Pentecostalism – was highly controversial, and therefore the press conference became quite ‘excited’. But in the Manila Manifesto it was clearly affirmed ‘that spiritual warfare demands spiritual weapons, and that we must both preach the words in the power of the Spirit, and pray constantly that we may enter into Christ’s victory over the principalities and powers of evil’.¹²

Manila inspired me deeply with its clarion call: ‘Proclaim Christ until He Comes’. Here was the focus that since then has become the watchword for the Movement: ‘Calling the Whole Church to Take the Whole Gospel to the Whole World’.¹³ While in Manila, the Communication Working Group, of which I was a member, there and then brought to completion a book on the last day of the congress with the title The Whole Gospel for the Whole World.¹⁴ The editor was Australian Alan Nichols who managed to get all of us to write and give input. How exciting and exhausting to write a book while the congress was still in session. The congress also gave birth to a small book in Danish which I have cherished and often used when telling about Manila.¹⁵ If we want to make Lausanne appeal to people at the grass roots, we need such popular books in different languages.

Upon my return from Manila, I wondered how to put into action and find expression for my deep-felt inspiration. The result was a list of topics and headlines which I shared with my friend Ole Christian Kvarme, then General Secretary of the Norwegian Bible Society and today Bishop of the Church of Norway in Oslo. “Why don’t we write a book?” I asked Ole Christian. He suggested that I join hands with two missi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introductory Chapter: Evangelical Perspectives on Mission – from Lausanne to Cape Town
• Section 1: Introducing the Lausanne Movement
• Section 2: Introducing Major Lausanne Concerns
• Section 3: Reviewing the Cape Town Congress: “… in Every Nation, in Every Sphere of Society, and in the Realm of Ideas”
• Section 4: Critical Reflections and Discussions “Calling the Whole Church to Take the Whole Gospel to the Whole World”
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Summary of the Cape Town Commitment
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Back Cover