The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism by Stanley Brian;

Author:Stanley, Brian; [Stanley, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830895540
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2013-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

The Lausanne movement after 1974

The Lausanne movement, which has continued into the twenty-first century, has thus had to negotiate a winding path between divergent interpretations of what the true message of the 1974 congress was. There is evidence that Billy Graham lost interest in the Lausanne movement after the Mexico City meeting, feeling that the resources of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association would be more productively employed in funding conferences specifically for practising evangelists.[534] In contrast, some on the left wing of evangelicalism felt that the movement had failed to maintain the momentum of gospel radicalism generated in 1974. In their view, at the Lausanne consult­ation held in Pattaya, Thailand, in June 1980 the holistic missionary vision of Lausanne was overwhelmed by a resurgent strategic pragmatism focused on the concept of unreached peoples.[535] In response nearly one-third of the delegates signed a statement of concerns on the future of the LCWE drawn up by Orlando Costas and six others.[536] The statement complained that the LCWE ‘does not seem to have been seriously concerned with the social, political and economic issues in many parts of the world that are a great stumbling block to the proclamation of the gospel’, and called for the LCWE to convene a world congress on social responsibility and its implications for evangelization. Costas found the response to the statement from the leadership of the LCWE disappointing, feeling that only John Stott took its concerns seriously.[537] No world congress on social responsibility was forthcoming, although LCWE was already committed to holding a consultation on evangelism and Christian social responsibility in June 1982. It was at this significant event, held in Grand Rapids, that Stott composed what has since become a well-known definition of the relationship between Christian social action and evangelism as being like ‘the two blades of a pair of scissors or the two wings of a bird’.[538] Nonetheless, in response to what they saw as Pattaya’s apparent indifference to the concerns of the radical evangelicals, Costas and twenty-four other evangelical theologians from the Latin American Theological Fraternity, Partnership in Mission-Asia, and the Africa Theological Fellowship felt it necessary in March 1982 to set up their own organization, known originally as the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians (from the Two-Thirds World) (INFEMIT).[539]

The Lausanne movement’s second full congress, held in Manila in 1989, marked something of a resurgence of a holistic emphasis. Its documentation included a powerful paper on ‘Reaching the Oppressed’ written by Caesar Molebatsi, a black South African who had been prominent in the gathering campaign against the apartheid regime.[540] The Manila Congress produced a series of twenty-one affirmations that built on the statements of the Lausanne Covenant. They included both an explicit commitment to denounce injustice in the name of God’s kingdom of justice and peace (no. 9) and an insistence on the urgency of world evangelization and the possibility of reaching unreached peoples (no. 19). The last of the twenty-one affirmed, using the words of the Lausanne Covenant, that ‘God is calling the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world’.

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