The Global Conversation

i wish to attend the global conversation.

As brother Wright says, none of us can engage in every area. This highlights how desperately we need one another in all of our diversity of gifts, ministries, ethnicity, genders and cultures. We need one another to highlight corporate and individual blind spots. We need one another to share resources most effectively. We need those often deemed "less honorable" (1 Corinthians 12:23). And we need to LISTEN to one another. In some ways, that is what I most value in the Lausanne movement.

what would be your response in term of Pastor's deeply envolved in business for his livelihood and to manage the church as well. And then, could it be possible to have such a business being a Pastor in the church? The third one is , In a remote areas where there is no such a pastor but need to give Baptism without a pastor.. So, who will give Baptism and how it will be done? Please I need the biblical answear . Thanks

"If the planet was created by Christ, sustained by Christ and belongs to Christ as his inheritance, the least we can do is to look after it..." is a good, logical statement - but does it go far enough? In defining the meaning of the cross earlier in the article, Dr. Wright says, "There would be no gospel without the cross. Indeed all blessings of the gospel derive from it, from personal salvation through Christ’s death in our place to the reconciling of all creation." If the end of God's redemptive plan is in fact the reconciliation of the cosmos (yes, that's the Greek for 'world' in the Lausanne theme verse) then caring for our little piece of that cosmos is not a 'least we can do' but one of the most important things we MUST do - for just like Christ's resurrection, caring for and even restoring creation now is a foretaste of future redemption and reconciliation.

Thanks Theodore Gill for remindings us of the IMC meeting in Tambaram and of John A. Mackay, that great Ecumenical-Evangelical theologian. A biography of Mackay will appear soon in the USA. The question posed by Ewald Seidel is very important but I do not have a clear, easy answer. May be special evangelistic efforts should be directed to heads of households, like in the book of Acts. That has been the patter for the incredible growth of the Philadelphia churches of the Gypsies in Spain, a true case of spontaneous expansion of the Gospel in the 20th century.

I am presently in Odessa, Ukraine, having been invited to teach a course on "Christian Ministry: a biblical basis". I am also working on material "God's Mission: Our Mission". I happened to lay my hands on Samuel Escobar's book, "A Time for Mission" where he says that in the African context, evangelism must be directed towards whole families and possibly even clans. It should avoid the individualistic approach that is common in the West. My question is this: What then is the case of people from a Muslim background who come to Christ as individuals and find themselves at best isolated in their communities, or at worst persecuted and even killed in some cases. Muslims also see themselves as members of families and even tribes. How would a person like Samuel Escobar approach such a problem?

What I see is that contrary to other religions in the world, we (the ones having the Gospel) have so many personal agendas, and specially in America the Gospel has become an awful interprise. God help us.