Meeting in Pine Mountain, Georgia, the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) has adopted in principle the theme “Christ the Lord: The Hope of the World” for its second international Congress on World Evangelization. The committee left open the possibility of minor alterations.
The second Lausanne congress is set for July 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, 15 years after the landmark 1974 Lausanne event. The Georgia meeting also witnessed the inauguration of Thomas Wang as the LCWE’s third international director.
Wang, formerly the director of the Hong Kong-based Chinese Coordination Center of World Evangelism, will this summer undertake the task of moving the LCWE international headquarters to Lausanne from Charlotte, North Carolina. In his inaugural address, he pledged to encourage the internationalization of the Lausanne movement, which has been dominated by Western influence (see interview on p. 52).
As LCWE gears up for the 1989 congress, it is preparing to enlarge both its staff and financial backing. The committee adopted a $1.8 million budget for 1987, three times the annual budget of recent years. Finance chairman Thomas Zimmerman told the group the cost of running the congress and related events could run to $21 million.
LCWE chairman Leighton Ford said hope is an appropriate theme for the event “in a world of many dreams and nightmares.” Said Ford, “The only solid hope is in Jesus Christ, the Lord of history.” Although the second congress will be held in the same city as the first, Ford said the passing of time has dictated some significant differences. He expressed the hope that the 1989 event will help bring to the surface younger leadership in the worldwide church, as well as “new constellations of cooperation committed to biblical evangelization.”
In Pine Mountain, the committee was introduced to Paul McKaughan, the new LCWE director of ministries who will double as program director of the congress. McKaughan will work with Lausanne by arrangement with the Presbyterian Church in America. He has served as coordinator of the church’s missions program.
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