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Evangelical missions are generally more flexible, less hierarchical, and less bureaucratic. For this reason the World Evangelical Alliance appears better positioned than the World Council of Churches to support effective Christian proclamation in the 21st century.

Perhaps I have drawn too sharp a line between these two worlds. Some in WEA would love to see their organization lurch in more liberal directions in environmental and government regulatory policy, while some in WCC would like to see more biblical and classical Christian teaching.

How the two general assemblies related to their host countries further illustrates the differences between them. The WEA held its assembly in Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim nation with a small, mostly Christian minority. The WCC held its assembly in Zimbabwe, which has a supposedly Christian political leader, but one whose reputation has been long sullied by corruption.

Both the WEA and WCC assemblies featured addresses by political leaders of the host nations—Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Mahathir bin Mohamed in Malaysia. Despite religious restrictions and human-rights abuses in both countries, neither assembly criticized its host publicly. The WCC, however, declared its support of Mugabe's policies, despite the regime's corruption and brutality.

The WEA doubtless showed more courage in encountering a Muslim nation than did the WCC in its support for a corrupt regime with a nominal Christian leader. At Kuala Lumpur, evangelicals were going directly into one of the most strongly Islamic countries in southeast Asia, and that Muslim country's prime minister seriously addressed Christians who have a decisive stake in nation-building in that region. Religious liberties are crucial to evangelicals, who are restricted from assembling, purchasing property, and publishing as they wish. The prime minister set forth an illuminating new Islamic clarification of religious liberty that many evangelicals could affirm.

In Zimbabwe, one of the major concerns of the WCC was debt relief, which would benefit Mugabe and his cronies. Mugabe has abused foreign debt many times, at the expense of the working poor of Zimbabwe, whose standard of living has been diminished radically by repeated debt cycles, which have increased taxation of the poor.

Debt relief was also a key theme at Kuala Lumpur, but the WEA closely connected it with microeconomic strategies for growth. The jubilee year was a theme at both conferences, but in Zimbabwe the WCC saw it largely as a government-to-government arrangement, while at Kuala Lumpur the WEA built on microeconomic models that would not be prone to government corruption. Evangelicals saw debt relief as a stimulus to grassroots development, so that ministries could meet the banking needs of small businesses.

To be fair, neither the WCC nor the WEA adequately embodies our Lord's prayer that we "all may be one." At one time the WCC grasped a plausible ecumenical vision, but squandered it in extremist causes that alienated much of its lay support. But the WEA, with its roots in Protestant free-church congregationalism, has not yet sufficiently grasped the historic vision of Christian unity or the ways in which evangelical witness today stands in the historic stream of the communion of saints.

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August 5 2002, Vol. 46, No. 9