Amsterdam ’86 trains national evangelists for national evangelism.
The Christian mission to people in other cultures has undergone radical changes in the last century. C. T. Studd was one of the famous “Cambridge Seven” who went to China in the 1880s with the China Inland Mission. He reported: “For five years we never went outside our doors without a volley of curses from our neighbors.” H. J. Kane also cites nineteenth-century missionaries in an undocumented quotation of one of the Chinese literati: “We would sooner go to hell with our Confucius than go to heaven with your Jesus.” He then adds: “These quotations point up a major contrast between the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, thanks to the colonial system, the doors to the Third World were wide open—politically; but the hearts of the people were closed against the gospel.”
During the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of evangelical missionaries carried the gospel from Europe to every corner of the world. And in the twentieth century, following World War II, another wave of missionaries spread out over unevangelized continents and islands.
But today, political realities have all but reversed themselves. Newly independent Third World governments have broken away from political imperialism and are seeking to complete their independence by cutting off what they deem cultural imperialism. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get into some countries, and other countries are closed to the Christian missionary. But if one can only get in, he or she often finds the hearts of the people wide open.
George Gallup, Jr., argues that there is abroad in the world an almost universal hunger for spiritual reality. Never have the masses in Africa and Asia been so open to the claims of Christ. And this includes people in all walks of life. As missions historian George Peters sees it: “This is indeed the day of salvation as far as the Third World is concerned.”
Training Evangelists
Amsterdam ’86 was an attempt to meet head-on the needs of the gospel in these changing times. It was not so much a conference on evangelism as a training school for evangelists. Its purpose was to train nationals to do the work of evangelism effectively.
The importance of such a task today can hardly be overestimated. Closing doors around the world are shutting out the European, and especially the American, missionary. Liberalism in the Western church has eroded the incentive to send out missionaries to “save the lost.” Western materialism makes it more and more difficult to recruit highly educated and talented men and women for the missionary force. And, most important, nationals born to a culture always reach their own people more effectively than foreigners. This is particularly true in a day of growing nationalism and Third World pride of culture.
At Amsterdam, approximately 8,500 evangelists (24% from Africa, 22% from Asia, 17% from South America, and the rest from 184 countries scattered over the face of the earth) spent ten intensive days, learning and sharing. From 75,000 names originally submitted, they were selected largely by their own national churches because of their promise for evangelism.
The aim of the school was not to make Billy Grahams of these Third World evangelists. Certainly it was not to turn out carbon copies of Western missionaries. Rather, it was to provide information, skills, and equipment to enable them to function more effectively in their own cultures.
Among other things, each person received a miniature “library for evangelists,” including a concordance, a Bible dictionary, a book on Bible study methods, a manual on how to prepare sermons, and a volume by Graham himself setting forth moral and spiritual requirements of those who seek to represent Jesus Christ and bear witness to his gospel.
Such training is not only needed, it works. Amsterdam ’83, a similar training conference, proved it. Let David Kilel, chaplain of Tenwick Hospital in Kenya, serve as a representative: “Amsterdam ’83 made me a better evangelist. It taught me how to prepare evangelistic messages. Before ’83 we experienced on the average 100 conversions a year at the hospital. Since ’83 the number has jumped to between eight and nine thousand per year.”
Of course, such a program as that carried out at Amsterdam ’86 costs money—$2,500 per evangelist, including $1,300 on the average for air passage to Holland and return. And the national evangelist cannot pay that kind of money himself even if his own government would let him take it out of the country. But it was money well spent in light of the significant changes.
Westernization?
Still, the average Western church member is a bit skeptical of all this. Aren’t we really weighing these nationals down with a heavy baggage of Western methods, Western gadgets, and Western theology?
Well, yes and no. No, they will not be handed a Billy Graham theology or a three-volume set of Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology. Though some of us could wish that theology had received a little larger role in the program, participants will pick up a lot of theology indirectly.
They will learn new methods of evangelizing: not methods proved in Minneapolis, New York, or London, but methods tried and proved in the villages of Upper Volta and on the streets of those great and growing megalopolises of the Third World like Nairobi, Manila, and Mexico City.
They will also learn how to use some of the gadgetry of modern communications science—but not the elaborate and costly equipment unobtainable by them and totally useless in the hinterlands of the world. It will be inexpensive cassettes, hand-cranked for use without batteries or electricity, and information on how to make film strips and effective tapes. Gadgets? Perhaps so; but these are gadgets available to them in their own lands, tools whose effectiveness has been proved in their own cultures.
Some liberals, however, say that if not Western methods and gadgets, at least Western forms of theology were forced upon participants. Yet those who complain most about the cultural imprisonment of Western theology are bound by the cultural chains of their own liberal theology. Evangelicals are grateful for the doctrinal heritage bequeathed them from the ancient Greek church, the medieval Latin church, and the sixteenth-century Reformers. And in the Bible they have the infallible Word of God, by which they can test that heritage and draw new riches from its inexhaustible depths.
Though the doctrine of the Trinity may not be completely explained, the Savior who is fully God and fully human can be understood in any culture. And so can the message that Christ died instead of us sinners. And that God forgives us if we put our trust in him. And that for believers, life continues beyond the grave in an eternal fellowship with God. And that God by his Holy Spirit will help us to be good. And that the Bible is God’s Word, completely trustworthy, to guide us on our way. These truths are not American theology stemming from our American culture. They are God’s truth stated here in American English.
In a broad sense, they are good news—the Good News we have all been instructed to share with an entire world. They are truths intended equally for the sophisticated European and the untutored African Hottentot or Indian from the rain forests of the Amazon Valley in South America.
Social Concern And Evangelism
Of course evangelism, and, therefore, the whole point of Amsterdam ’86, makes sense only for those committed to the urgency of the gospel. Vast areas of the nominal church no longer accept this. The left wing on the fringe of the church is convinced that this life is all we have. For them Amsterdam ’86 is bound to seem a gigantic waste of effort, if not positively harmful. It is far better, they would no doubt say, to put our energies into digging wells for Sub-Saharans dying of thirst.
Evangelicals, by contrast, insist that digging wells is not nearly enough and is not getting at the central problem of humankind. Evangelicals are, of course, aware of the seriousness of world hunger and of the Sub-Saharan drought. They, too, are sending money for wells to be dug and are shipping food for the hungry, though less than they could.
But this is not the only, or even primary, need of humankind. Our Lord warned us that “Man cannot live by bread alone.” He has other needs of an even deeper sort. These spiritual hungers can be satisfied only by resources made available to us through the Word of the living God; his true thirst slaked by the Water of Life.
While the broad center of the church is not prepared to go to the liberal extreme that finds hope only in this life, it is nevertheless greatly influenced by a near universalism that destroys much of the urgency of the gospel. Whatever may be said in support of this broader interpretation, certainly the New Testament is clear that without Christ we are without grounds for hope. And the Scripture itself lays highest priority on the necessity and importance of carrying the Good News to the lost world. “And how shall they hear,” Scripture exhorts us, “unless they have a preacher?”—the bearer of good tidings to lost men and women.
Evangelicals dare not withdraw from a personal commitment to bear the Good News to regions beyond. For every closed door, God in his good providence opens a new door. And in many places, Third World missionaries cannot function effectively. Yet the task is great enough and challenging enough for all. And we should gratefully give God thanks for Amsterdam ’86 and support these 8,500 evangelists and their successors with our prayers and finances. They represent the new wave of evangelists and missionaries of the twenty-first century.
KENNETH S. KANTZER
