Now for the bad news …
World mission strategists connected with the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization have prepared a long-range planning report that presents a fascinating snapshot of world Christianity and trends for the future.
It says some 16,400 people a day are converting to Christianity in Africa, or nearly 6 million per year. In East Asia and South Asia, churches are gaining 360,000 and 447,000 new members a year respectively. Although the Chinese government has officially approved only several hundred churches in that country, there might be between 25 and 50 million believers meeting in hundreds of thousands of house churches throughout China.
In the West, by contrast, the picture is dismal. The churches of Europe and North America together are losing 2.8 million people a year to nominalism and unbelief, and that number more than offsets the growth of evangelical churches on the two continents. The report says greater emphasis must be given to reevangelization of the West.
The Lausanne committee report made these further points:
• About one billion people throughout the world consider themselves Christians but are only nominally so. There are enough evangelicals throughout the world to evangelize these people, but one hindrance is the tendency of many Western evangelicals to emphasize salvation without preaching the necessity of a new life in Christ.
• The Westernizing and modernizing trends of the world are rapidly moving Christians away from commitment to prayer and meditation upon the person of Christ.
• The trend toward secularization in the West will continue, and that will lead many to promote secular answers, such as Marxism, to the world’s problems. “An ever-increasing pluralism will make an appeal to ‘what is right’ ever more difficult.”
• The number of “hopelessly poor” people in the world is increasing at a faster rate than the world population. Many people in unstable countries seem ready to give up much of their freedom in exchange for assurance of social and economic stability. That means there will be stronger trends toward dictatorships of the Left and the Right.
In light of that, the Lausanne strategists say, “We must recapture a vision of the church’s responsibility towards the poor. We must remember the biblical admonition that God has a special concern for the poor and demands justice for them.”
• The most dramatic change in the world’s population is the movement of people into cities. By the year 2000, the percentages of populations living in cities will be: the United States, 94 percent; Europe, 82 percent; the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 80 percent; Latin America, 73 percent; Australia, 85 percent; Asia, 60 percent, and Africa, 45 percent.
• Populations of some cities will swell immensely by the turn of the century. Mexico City will have an estimated population of 31.6 million; Calcutta, 19.7 million; greater Bombay, 19.1 million; greater Cairo, 16.4 million; Jakarta, 16.9 million; Seoul, 18.7 million; Manila, 12.7 million; Bogotá, 9.5 million; and Lagos, Nigeria, 9.4 million.
The Lausanne committee, which supervised preparation of the report, stems from the conference on world evangelization that met in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974.
World Scene
Officials from the Verbo Church of Eureka, California, have found it necessary to deny allegations the church has political motivations in Guatemala. The Church’s most noted member is Guatemala’s deposed president Efraín Ríos Montt, who has been accused of unfairly using his political power to advance Protestant theology (CT September 2, 1983). The Verbo Church is one of some 50 congregations in seven countries associated with Gospel Outreach, a loosely organized Pentecostal church consisting of numerous groups organized by members of the counter-culture movement of the 1960’s.
Organized Christian activity in Saudi Arabia has ceased. It reportedly began after a representative of the Carter administration persuaded King Khalid in 1977 to allow low profile Christian religious expression in the Islamic country. Eventually, Christians were meeting weekly in large groups. But the Islamic revolution in Iran reversed the trend. Hopes that Khalid’s death in 1982 would ease the suppression were crushed. Since King Fahd has taken over, Christians have been interrogated, deported, and generally denied the limited freedoms they had been granted.
Tonga people in the drought-stricken Gokwe region of Zimbabwe have dug deep into their meagre resources to show Southern Baptists their gratitude. Drought victims raised more than $100 to help replace a 10-ton Southern Baptist-owned relief truck that had been destroyed by anti-government dissidents in May. The money won’t come close to replacing the truck, but missionaries were touched by the generosity of the Tonga people.
A Roman Catholic faith-healer in Zambia has been forced to resign his post as archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo has been named a special delegate to a small Vatican office in Rome. Sources close to Milingo said the resignation was forced and that he was “deeply grieved.” Milingo, 53, was called to Rome last year after he ignored Vatican orders that he curb his faith-healing activities and devote more time to standard duties.
A survey sponsored by the British and Foreign Bible Society concludes that less than half of England’s population has even a passing knowledge of the Bible. Most English people (81 percent, according to the survey) have a Bible in their home. But only 8 percent read it more than once a week, and more than a third never read it at all.
The World Council of Churches has added two denominations to its membership. At its recent Vancouver meeting the council added the Baptist Convention of Nicaragua, with 35,000 active members, and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of South Africa, with 30,000 members, all of whom are black. The current WCC membership consists of 301 denominations in 100 countries.
The Russian Orthodox Church demonstrated its support for Soviet foreign policy in a statement delivered at the recent Vancouver assembly of the World Council of Churches. The statement read in part, “… the foreign policy of our government … is the policy of peace. Only the nuclear freeze, which our Soviet government and party General Secretary Yuri Andropov support, can bring peace to mankind.”
Nearly a million Ethiopians are in danger of starving to death because of a famine caused by a severe drought. Three organizations—Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, and Lutheran Relief Services—believe the tragedy can be averted if the United States government would grant emergency aid for the transportation of food. The government has expressed concern that aid will be used for military purposes.
Two United Methodist Church agencies have asked President Reagan to cancel his trip to the Philippines, scheduled for November. The church’s Board of Global Ministries and Board of Church and Society, in a telegram to the President, called the murder of former Philippine Senator Benigno Aquino a political murder that raises questions about the credibility of the Marcos regime.
Pope John Paul has proposed that 1983 be recognized as the 2000th anniversary of the Virgin Mary’s birth. The Pope made the proposal during his recent trip to Lourdes, France. Catholics celebrate Mary’s birthday on September 8, but had never officially set a year for her birth. Since tradition holds that she was 17 when she bore Jesus, 1983 is a logical choice, though most of modern scholarship holds that Christ was born in about 4 B.C.
An evangelical seminary is scheduled to open next September in Holland. Tyndale Theological Seminary fulfills the dream of Bob Evans, who founded Greater Europe Mission. Arthur Johnston, professor of missions at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, will be Tyndale’s first president. Currently, none of the few conservative seminaries on the European continent offer instruction in English.
In West Germany, It Is Only Natural To Teach Religion In Public Schools
Ronald Reagan could be forgiven for a twinge of jealousy should he ponder the question of church-state separation in West Germany. In that country, not only is prayer allowed in public schools, church and state officials work together to provide a religious education to every school child who wants it.
If a school has at least 10 children from the same religious tradition, parents have the right to demand a teacher from that confession to give religious instruction.
Karl Heinz Potthast, who chairs Germany’s national Protestant Board on Religion and Training, states that “Christian values are one of the important foundations of education.” Nonetheless, the courses are not mandatory. Parents may have their children excused, and students 14 years or older may decide for themselves whether to attend. Still, nearly all schoolchildren do attend, because, according to Potthast, they find they can confront questions that never come up in other classes. Potthast adds, however, that despite the religious freedom, public schools are humanistic and secular in their outlook.
The greatest problem religious teachers in Germany face is how to educate some 700,000 Islamic students in the public schools there. German law says they have a right to receive Islamic instruction. But the law also states that religious education in public schools “must correspond to the value system of the constitution.” The constitution is based on Judeo-Christian ethics.
RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE