Three months ago I returned from the 3rd Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. Since then I have been digesting my time there: the content and process, and perhaps most importantly the impact and effects of the event.
Let me say upfront that I am attempting to evaluate and critique the event. A couple of delegates felt uncomfortable with that approach. Some were unhappy with some of the blog comments on the event when we were there. Why critique? How do we reconcile critique with our calling as Christians? Is critiquing simply a word for being negative and complaining? I believe we can not only reconcile our critiquing but that it is a vital part of our calling – let me explain.
I am passionate about Jesus and the mission of God to reach all people with His good news and therefore we all need to be constantly asking, “What is my role, what is our role in God’s mission today, tomorrow and in the future?” “How effective was our role in God’s mission yesterday, last year, last century?”
I believe it is only by asking these questions that we ensure we are being good stewards: doing the best with what God has given to us! And so I make no apologies in critiquing Lausanne III but I do so recognising that it was, like all our efforts to take part in God’s mission, limited by us all, participants and organisers, being frail humans. I have huge respect for the effort, energy and sacrifice that it took for many in the planning, fundraising and running of Lausanne III. Indeed one of the personal reflections I took away was the real challenge leaders face in conceiving, setting up and hosting such an event and the very difficult issues it raises.
And so to a critique – Lausanne will prove to be either…
• A retrenching of North American classic evangelicalism with its fear of messiness and its defensiveness and discomfort in the light of difference
• Or the last gasp of modernistic mission
For me I hope it is the latter. Yes it was undoubtedly a privilege to worship with over 4000 fellow believers from almost 200 nations, but I could not help the nagging feeling that the neat, organised and tightly defined event constrained and limited the creativity, energy and diversity of the global church. For creativity, energy and diversity was there and there in abundance, but it only shone through on a few occasions, and usually in spite of the programme rather than because of it.
What did Lausanne III do?
+ It has excited people
+ It has caused people to connect
+ It has widened people’s perspective
− It has disappointed people
− It has highlighted some tensions in the Global Evangelical Church
− It has cost a massive amount
− It has exposed many more tensions than most delegates were aware of beforehand
The strap line of Lausanne from the original 1974 conference was “The Whole Church taking the Whole Gospel to the Whole World”. Unpacking the congress by unpacking these words, at the heart of Lausanne, was for me a very helpful process.
The Whole Church – who does this mean or include? Only those we agree with, and agree with on which issues? Does it exclude those who were excluded from the event: NT Wright and Brian McLaren, just for examples? These are usually considered within the broad spectrum of the Evangelical church.
If it does exclude those, what does this mean for those from Catholic, Orthodox and the wider and more varied WCC family? They were invited as observers and guests but if another evangelical’s view puts them beyond the ark of fellowship (excludes them), surely these guests and observers must be beyond the ark of faith.
The Whole Gospel
“The spirit of Lausanne is holistic mission” said Rene Padilla as he sat with Samuel Escobar on the platform one evening and offered a wonderfully subversive reminisce that felt so like a parable of Jesus!
He issued 3 challenges for the Lausanne III delegates to take seriously:
1. Integral mission
2. Globalisation destroying communities
3. Environment
I would encourage you to watch the video of these two missionary statesmen who have walked the walk for many decades. What left me concerned was the applause, or lack of it. It seemed to me that the applause diminished as they worked their way through the three points! When we reached the environment it seemed only half the delegates were clapping – perhaps we are divided by our eschatology more significantly than we think. Where else does that eschatological difference play out?
Three key theological issues I took away from the event were about how we define the gospel.
Are we engaging in a salvation of conversion or discipleship? Many at Lausanne challenged about the need to be more discipleship focused – from the main platform Chris Wright, Castillo Odede and Femi Adeleye and others, and yet the messiness involved in a discipleship emphasis seemed so much at odds with many approaches, techniques and methods being commended or showcased at Lausanne. Perhaps our inclination is right but we have not thought through the implications of where God is leading us.
What is our motivation for mission? We don’t all have to have the same motive to unite and engage in mission together, but we need to understand each other’s motives, be able to accept those motives as valid and feel able to work across that difference. Personally I don’t feel the need to have a clear and present image of unbelievers being subject to eternal torment, to motivate me to share the gospel. If others do I don’t object (although I may want to question how it shapes their approach). Piper’s seeming insistence that eternal punishment was the only legitimate motivation for mission was not only offensive to many present who hold different views but also a blatant attempt to rewrite Lausanne history. Stott himself refused to accept this position. An older participant who had been present at both previous Lausanne events commented, “Stott never shut anyone out of Lausanne”.
Thirdly, who are we converting or discipling? To Westerners this often sounds a heretical question. Our expectation of and emphasis in ‘personal conversion’ is, I learnt in Asia, a strong reflection of our individualist identity. In many parts of Asia, the idea of ‘converting’ as an individual rather than as a wider family is incredibly problematic. Why? Because I do not have an identity outside of my group. This is basic cultural awareness, and not I believe, a watering down of the gospel. We may struggle with the historic conversion of Clovis (Clovis c. 466–511 was the first King of the Franks to unite all the Frankish tribes under one ruler) or the present day mass conversion of the Dalits, but personally after much heart searching, debate and discussion with friends converted from these societies, it seems that much of my resistance is more to do with the messiness of it and its distance from my own cultural identity than any theological issue. It would appear again that we are back to the messiness of discipling, and discipling a group about their identity in Christ is messier than an individual.
The Whole World
What do we mean by “whole world”? Some seemed to think that if there was one from each people group that was sufficient. For me living in Europe with high levels of migration, and diaspora communities that outnumber the remnant left behind in a traditional location, it seems we now have hybrid people. Mixing with other people groups and merging so that generational, socio-economic and work identities assume an equal or greater importance. This understanding is not new, my colleague Jonathan Ingleby wrote an excellent article http://www.redcliffe.org/SpecialistCentres/EncountersMissionJournal/vw/1/ItemID/27 on this in 2004. Some in the UPG networks are wrestling with this challenging reality and yet others including Paul Eshleman are stuck in a time warp articulating strategies for a simplistic world now gone!
Which bits of the whole world are missing? Credit to Lausanne, the emphasis on the city was excellent and Keller’s input inspiring and yet actionable. This has been a lack to date and here was a clear example where Lausanne tackled a hard issue that others, including the WEA, have so far failed to give a lead on.
One gap that remained seemed to be the emergent/emerging church. I use these terms with caution, conscious that they mean different things in different places and are viewed very differently depending on what they are called. What I mean is that there seemed to be an assumption that the discipleship we need to engage in will be done exclusively within the bounds of the church structures we have. And yet certainly within Europe the majority of the population will not step into that environment – indeed may be characterised as benignly indifferent to the gospel and to the church. In Lausanne’s emphasis on defining evangelical identity clearly in those invited and platformed, were they unwittingly excluding those that are pioneering difficult mission at the fringes of orthodox practice. The history of the church is littered with examples of mission practice challenging the sensibilities of the established church: from William Wilberforce’s work on the abolition of slavery to Carey’s contextualisation and cultural sensitivity. Surely we should be walking with them, learning from them, and where necessary, challenging them but doing so in a spirit of fellowship that seeks to understand the issues they face in their mission context.
“Taking” was the other word that challenged me. The strap line talks of the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world. How are we “taking”? What I really mean is “whose mission is it?” David Bosch – a South African himself interacted with Lausanne I and II, but he seemed absent in more than just death, from this third event. His articulation of the Missio Dei seems to have so much to say to us as we seek to cope in a messy world with many shades of grey and little that is a simple black and white division.
Likewise some of the triumphalism (albeit more muted than at some earlier events) emphasis on countable and calculable results would be countered and checked with serious engagement with Bosch. However, given some of the people who were excluded from the event, perhaps even if Bosch were still alive he would not have been welcomed anymore; for he insisted on engagement from across the wider Christian world beyond the bounds of evangelicalism. Part of me wonders whether this is a factor in him still having as much to say to us today as he did twenty years ago when he wrote Transforming Mission.
Conclusion
“The whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world”, or “a relatively narrow bit of the church, telling the wider evangelical church how to take their definition of the gospel to a world that qualifies as finishing the task”?
Too harsh? Perhaps, but only if we accept the original as unattainable, unrealistic and only aspirational, this side of heaven. Let us face reality with a sense of reality – why do we have to kid ourselves when God is aware of and can cope with the reality. We live in a world that is increasingly secular, we ‘the church’ have less power and control, ‘truth’ is truth, but as frail sinful humans we have a partial grasp of it – why do we delude ourselves, why do we delude ourselves, why cannot we face it – our God is big enough – he copes with messiness, in fact he really rather seems to thrive on it – it is often when he appears most clearly.
The twentieth century is over and as we are now 10 years into the twenty-first, we need to leave twentieth century mission behind and reformulate a mission of messiness, characterised by tentative certainty and confident only in a God of certainty.
Lausanne contained too much that looked back longingly to mission in the twentieth century and only a few glimpses of creativity for messy mission in the twenty-first.
Chris Maynard
March 6, 2011
Thanks Rob, from one who was not present, for your considered reflections on the Cape Town event. I still aspire to the wider scope of the three “wholes”, so I am with you in pushing the boundaries of each one where we can.
While keeping the aspiration broad, are you shaping a few of your reality checks a little narrowly? “We live in a world that is increasingly secular” was probably true from (say) 1880 to 1980. It is still true for North America, the Pacific, and large parts of Europe. (The Netherlands and the Czech Republic in particular seem to be in transtion from Christianity to some form of Secularism.) But the statistics in the new version of Operation World suggest that the tide is going in the other direction in the majority world. “The Economist” as a secular magazine with a global outlook once ignored religion, but now takes it very seriously. These major regional (and even local) differences are one of the many factors that make “global” conclusions and “global” strategies so very difficult. I have no doubt that in some areas of the world the people group approach is still very relevant – and may remain so for a long time to come. Maybe this is also one source of “the real challenge leaders face in conceiving, setting up and hosting such an event” as Cape Town 2010.
On another point, you make me feel I should get back to “Transforming Mission” and read it properly this time, instead of relying so heavily on Nussbaum’s “Reader’s Guide”. Thanks.
Thanks also for our recent micro-dialogue on twitter.
Chris. (ChrisMaynard3)
robhay
March 7, 2011
Chris,
Thanks for your response and thoughtful challenges to my thinking – helpful and keeps the brain going on the issues. The secular question is an interesting one. I would perhaps have been better saying that the churches predominant model has been a power-based one that has shown little self-doubt. I am not suggesting doubt in the gospel or God, but rather in the church (as a collection of frail humans here on earth) and its ability to correctly understand the times and live as effective witnesses in each era.
Is lack of secularism the same as a growing church in the global south? I am not sure. I would completely agree that post, certainly 1990 (not sure I would go as early as 1980) there has been a new and growing openness to spirituality in UK and the wider European context (still with exceptions) but I don’t think it is widely felt elsewhere. This would be very much the case if you put it in terms of no longer seeing secularism as an enemy, but rather seeing it as potentially a more welcoming environment for the gospel than Christendom. This was highlighted in Cape Town on the Dogma and Diversity day when the plenary sessions were much more defensive than the multiplex sessions: Os Guinness reflected an old approach to a context now gone in UK, whereas Robert Calvert’s introduction and the other speakers in the multiplex session from Europe and Lebanon greeted secularism not as enemy but simply as context with good and bad elements.
I would agree that the people group approach may still be useful in some parts of the world, my concern is the massive investment in it as a global solution!
On Bosch – keep reading the man himself. Stan did the world a huge service by writing the reader, particularly with the diagrams of Bosch’s paradigms but Transforming Mission has an ongoing challenge that if we could get to grips with we would be a long way forward from where we are as church!
Thanks again
Rob
Ted Pilling
March 7, 2011
Rob, this is the first time I have replied to any blog. I have waited for someone that I know and respect to share their observations on Lausanne 2010. I resonated with your penultimate sentance in the conclusion and would like to summarise your “messy mission characterised by tenative certainty”, if only to re-assure myself that I have understood you correctly, and then ask some follow-up questions.
The tentativeness of certainty would include:
- a willingness to dialogue with those of differing views and practices
- a more relaxed eschatology
-the acceptance of a wider motivation for mission
- the rejection of a neatly packaged conversion/discipleship experience (individuality/community)
- increased dialogue with the emerging church (as you define it in your paper)
- a wrestling with the implications of Missio Dei and the relaxation of the narrow definition of ‘authentic mission’ held by some
If this is a reasonably accurate summary of your observations, then, I resonate with much of what you say. So here are the questions…. Where does our confidence in the God of certainty interface with the tentative certainty of messy mission? Is there anything the God of certainty want us to be certain of beyond His character, and where does He draw the boundaries of certainty?
I think I am trying to explore where ‘tentative certainty’ meets a ‘biblical conviction’ as opposed to an ‘entrenched personal bias’.
With you,
Ted
Alex Araujo
March 7, 2011
Rob, thank you for the very helpful critique of Lausanne III. I did appreciate those who commented soon after the event while their memory was fresh. Yet, I see the benefit of taking time to reflect, as you have done, and bringing a more measured and cogent reflection. I myself was not there, although I was very involved in some of the web based discussion tracks.
I am glad Ted Pilling raised the questions in his comments. Those are also questions I have, perhaps the most important questions we need to study in light of your critique.
Alex Araujo
Sas Conradie
March 8, 2011
Hi Rob
Thanks for a very interesting and thought provoking blog. Having participated in Cape Town 2010 and having known Prof David Bosch fairly well I understand your concerns about the Congress. There were definitely parts of the Congress that had too much about methods and strategies instead of based on a relationship with God through Christ. I also think especially some of the evening programs made a caricature of mission in different contexts instead of properly engaging with those contexts. And yes, there were definitely people who should have been at the Congress who were not there. Others had been sidelined whether it was intentional or not. I would definitely have liked to see greater interaction between differing view points. I expect the organisers might have tried to prevent that so that ‘evangelical unity’ could have not been questioned. However I did not experience the triumphalism that might have been expected from a Congress mainly organised from North America. The general responses from people in the South and East who participated is also very positive especially after the sessions on partnership.
It is very interesting what you are writing about David Bosch. I worked with him between 1989 and 1992 and was his personal assistant for a year until his tragic death. It is a very interesting question about what David Bosch would have made of Cape Town 2010. I suspect that he would have been disappointed with many if not most of the Congress plenary sessions but would have been excited about the interaction created by many of the Multiplex and Dialogue Sessions. I think you are right that he would have questioned the wording ‘taking the Gospel’ because God is already working in all people and communities. However, despite questions about some issues he would definitely have welcomed and even approved of the Cape Town Commitment. Actually when you mention Transforming Mission I thought to some extent the Cape Town Commitment is a kind of summary of the book. Perhaps somebody must write an article on the Cape Town Commitment from the perspective of Transforming Mission! Bosch would not have believed that some of the issues he had been fighting for such as greater equality between Christians, integral mission and a trinitarian understanding of mission could have become ‘mainstream evangelical missiology’. At the same time he would have asked how what is being said in the Cape Town Commitment could now become a reality in the life of the global church. That was the litmus test in the end for him. How to bring changed behaviour in line with changed views on theology in general and missiology in particular. So, yes I do not agree with everything in the Cape Town Commitment and definitely not with everything that was said and done in Cape Town. But my question is how are we going to make what is said in the Cape Town Commitment a reality in our own lives and that of our churches and theological institutions. In my view it will be impossible to stay the same if we take the Cape Town Commitment seriously. I am not sure that we ready for such radical change. It is somewhat similar to the late 1980s/early 1990s in South Africa when some churches acknowledged the sin of apartheid but in practice continued to live in that sin. That is something that grieved David Bosch deeply.
Something else that we need to be careful about is that we from this side of the Atlantic (I talk as a South African who work and live in the UK) do not impose our understanding of mission from a post-modernistic perspective on others. I definitely think there is a danger that this could happen. My experience is that mission for many in the South is definitely much more certain and definitely less mission. For example you question Os Guiness’s approach to truth. But that is exactly what Christian in the South and East supports. Just think what is happening in the Church of England around the homosexuality debate. The people who hold to a more literal and certain view are the churches in the South. Who are the people who are passionate about personal evangelism? The people in the South. Quite often with a very strong eschatological motive – they emphasise that people will be forever lost without Christ. It was interesting that during the reflection by the British delegation to the Congress recently many said they were deeply touched by the passion for specifically evangelism by people in other parts of the world and that they wish we could have had more of that in the UK.
We can go into a much deeper discussion on the various issues you mentioned. I am just concerned that there is a danger that we expect from others in especially the global South and East to support our understanding of 21st Century mission. Then we will fall into exactly the same trap as the paternalism of the 20th Century. What is really needed is increased mutuality and interdependency in our missiological reflection and also in our missiological practice.
Greetings
Sas Conradie
Jon Hirst
April 12, 2011
Rob, I want to thank you for your insightful and thoughtful critique of the Lausanne III Cape Town 2010 event. I appreciated the context of humility yet the willingness to say some difficult things that needed to be said about the dynamics of the event and the movement as a whole.
I was not able to attend Cape Town 2010, but I served as the coordinator of the Lausanne Blogger Network and helped with much of the social media before, during and after the event. From this vantage point, I listened to the many voices interacting about the event – both on-site and around the world. Many of those comments, view-points and reflections were voicing the same things you have outlined above.
What I would like to add to your critique is not directed toward your key points, but an observation on what might be one cause behind the limited vision and scope that we saw come out of this event. As I worked with the Lausanne team, I have developed a great appreciation for their abilities, their heart and the global nature of the leadership. People from dozens of countries and industries participated at a very high level bringing their perspective and understanding of the global need to the table as the event was designed and plans were carried out.
So my question is, why did such a large budget, talented organizers, global input and significant anticipation seemingly not net an experience with a more significant outcome from a Kingdom perspective? I think if we look at the DNA of the Lausanne movement we might find some answers. Although we are standing in the doorway of the 21st century and looking forward with anticipation to what God will do, the DNA of an organization always pulls their members backwards. Organizations are designed to create stability, reduce ambiguity, and maintain continuity for the vision birthed at their inception. The vision for Lausanne was a distinctly 20th Century ideal, birthed in its time by men and women of God who had a passion to reach the lost. However it was birthed within modernity and before globalization, the rise of the Global South Church and the democratization of ideas.
Given the fact that typically, the DNA of a 20th century Christian organization is likely centralized, Western-focused and deeply rooted in modernity, I wonder if we could have expected any other result? I’m sensing that all of the changes designed to counteract these features: inclusion of new voices, sitting delegates at tables, and other efforts were no match for the strength of the Lausanne DNA.
I used to have the hope that we could help change organizational DNA … that it could be transformed by intentional leadership. But the more experience I have within the nonprofit world (at least in the US), the more I am realizing that the DNA of an organization is almost impossible to alter. We can compensate for weaknesses and magnify strengths . . . but the same strengths and weaknesses will always be present. God does not save and transform organizations . . . He does so with His creation – us.
I’m wondering if the best outcomes of Lausanne are that God did some amazing things in the lives of the individuals who attended Cape Town 2010. And perhaps the most significant outcome is that many of them (like you) have seen first-hand what must change for the mission of God to be advanced in a new millennium. I am convinced that critiques like yours are vital. While we need to learn from the best efforts of the last century, we also must stand up for what we believe God is calling us to do together in this new millennium. I think one of our greatest challenges is that money and influence reside in the organizations of the last century. It takes vision, persistence and time to mobilize a new kind of initiative around where God is going rather than where He has been. My hope is that as we continue to process Cape Town 2010 and ask the hard questions, God will birth a new Kingdom vision in the leaders of countless countries. I am praying for these leaders, that God will encourage their hearts and empower their efforts as they look to Him for direction in the days ahead.