High Hopes for Lausanne II

A new generation of Christians heads for Manila to update a historic pledge.

The road from Lausanne to Manila has been rough at times, but those connected with Lausanne II in Manila, an international conference on evangelism, say plans for the event are going well. Sponsored by the 75-member Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE), Lausanne II in Manila will gather 4,000 delegates in the Philippine capital July 11–20.

The first Lausanne was convened by Billy Graham and other Christian leaders in 1974 in Switzerland, and it was hoped the second event would occur there as well. But rising costs and currency exchange rates led LCWE to choose Singapore; then, when housing guarantees fell through, organizers hastily moved the site to Manila.

New Site, New Agenda

Organizers say Lausanne II in Manila will be more than a 15-year anniversary. Leighton Ford, chairman of LCWE, says the 1974 congress took place when global evangelical identity, especially in the Third World, was being formed, and while many major historic denominations were losing their nerve and insisting on a moratorium for missions and evangelism.

“Lausanne II in Manila was called to address new crucial issues that affect world evangelization in the last century of this decade,” notes Ford. “A new generation of Christian leaders is emerging around the globe. Third World missions have become prominent, secularism is rampant, and we’re suffering from a lack of evangelical cohesion.”

Thomas Wang, LCWE’s international director, added: “Around the world we have been hearing an international chorus of Christian leaders crying out for a more concerted evangelistic effort. It’s as though God is saying, ‘Gentlemen, it’s time to get more serious. I’ve been waiting for 20 centuries, and my Great Commission is not yet fulfilled.’ ”

Wang also convened the January 1989 AD 2000 Conference in Singapore, which sought to establish cooperation among many agencies that want to reach the world before the turn of this century. Though some at that conference were critical of Lausanne (CT, Feb. 3, 1989, p. 48), Wang believes the AD 2000 emphasis and Lausanne II can mutually benefit each other “like a two-stage rocket.” He says that D. L. Moody and A. T. Pierson wanted to evangelize the world by 1900, but were joined by only a handful of Americans. Due to international involvement and the added boost that can take place through Lausanne II, Wang says the possibilities of actually reaching the entire world are greater now than before 1900.

Cross-Cultural Commitment

LCWE has set attendance quotas that assure broad participation from the global church. Over 50 percent are to be from the Third World, 50 percent should be under 45 years of age, and 25 percent will be women. At least 50 percent will not have attended the 1974 congress. Brad Smith, chairman of the participant selection committee, reports that “we’re doing well on all our participant quotas.”

The ten-day conference, slated to begin with a look at evangelism’s future by honorary chairman Billy Graham, includes 31 plenary sessions, 450 hours of elective seminars focusing on 19 subject areas, national strategy meetings, and opportunities for impromptu networking.

Thirty-five speakers will address the plenary sessions; seven women and 28 men, with 20 coming from outside Europe and North America. Program chairman Ed Dayton acknowledged that last year’s financial restrictions within LCWE, as well as the venue change, hampered efforts to put together the program. “Now,” Dayton said, “we’ve got a miracle. Nearly all our speakers are confirmed and all our personnel slots are filled.”

A potential problem for Lausanne II is opposition from some in the Roman Catholic community. Catholic leaders in the Philippines, smarting under the anti-Catholic attacks on television from local churchmen, initially felt Lausanne II was another attack. Subsequently, LCWE official Paul McKaughan spoke with Catholic leaders to calm their fears. Although no Roman Catholics have been invited to speak, some Catholics have been nominated as delegates.

What To Expect

The Lausanne Covenant, a document developed at the 1974 congress committing participants to make world evangelization a priority, will not be reworked, say LCWE members. However, some basic statements may be amplified in the light of today’s context. According to David Howard, international director of the World Evangelical Fellowship, the covenant “has probably had a greater impact on the church around the world than any other statement in the last half of this century.”

Still, some observers expect sparks to fly when that covenant is examined in light of Third World realities. Clearly, Third World churches have exceeded their Western counterparts in church growth. If Third World Christians begin asking Europeans and North Americans why their churches aren’t growing and what they are going to do about it, Lausanne unity might be tested.

By William Conard.

NORTH AMERICAN SCENE

ABORTION

“Baby Does” Arrested

Abortion opponents who have embraced the strategy of the organization Operation Rescue (OR) staged the largest rescue effort to date last month in New York City. OR tactics call for demonstrators to block entrances to abortion clinics peacefully (CT, Nov. 4, 1988, p. 34).

Two days of sit-ins at Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Center in New York in mid-January resulted in 970 arrests, according to OR spokesman Jim Backlin. About 675 of those arrested were jailed after identifying themselves as Baby John or Baby Jane Doe, and giving as their address the address of the U.S. Supreme Court. Backlin said all the protesters were released on the third day of incarceration despite their continued refusal to give their true names.

According to Backlin, Operation Rescue has identified some 100 organizations (representing 48 states) committed to the rescue approach.

In Pittsburgh, 98 people have been sentenced to five-day jail terms for obstructing traffic during a rescue effort last October. Meanwhile, a municipal court judge in northern California has sentenced each of 10 antiabortion protesters to three weeks of caring for a homeless child.

MONEY PROBLEMS

Full-blown Dispute

An internal struggle for control of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI) has led to a rapid decline in membership, according to FGBMFI spokesman Jerry Jensen.

The National & International Religion Report recently reported that the organization’s founder, Demos Shakarian, who is also its current president and board chairman, had been accused by ministry officials of using some $275,000 of ministry money for personal expenses, including travel. Shakarian’s attorney claimed all Shakarian’s travel expenses were business related and that other expenses had been authorized by the board.

According to Jensen, some of Shakarian’s accusers have since backed off. He said the FGBMFI executive committee has released a statement claiming there is no evidence of financial impropriety on Shakarian’s part. Jensen added, however, that the 17-member committee, as well as the organizations’s full, 140-member board, are split down the middle on the issue of Sharakian’s leadership. Shakarian has worked without a salary since starting FGBMFI in 1953.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Litigation Epidemic

Temple University professor Franklin H. Littell presented some disturbing news at a recent ecumenical conference of religious leaders, scholars, and attorneys in Los Angeles. He said there have been more legal cases involving religious liberty in the last decade than in the entire history of the American republic prior to 1980.

Participants at the meeting expressed concern at the number of lawsuits being filed against religious groups. Conferees issued a statement that in part warned against relying on information about religious groups that comes from “hostile” sources, including “self-appointed ‘experts’ who purport to know about psychological dynamics but do not know much about religion and its power to change lives, or who may even consider religious experience and behavior to be pathological.”

APARTHEID

Support for Sanctions

The leaders of seven predominantly black U.S. denominations have announced a joint campaign to mobilize their constituencies against apartheid in South Africa. The campaign calls for various antiapartheid measures, including comprehensive U.S. sanctions against South Africa.

Participating denominations are the African Methodist Episcopal Church; the AME Zion Church; the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church; the Church of God in Christ; the National Baptist Convention of America; the National Baptist Convention USA; and the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Their combined membership is 19 million.

In a closing statement at the meeting where the campaign was announced, church leaders said, “The intensifying brutality of the Pretoria regime, death and detention of children, attacks against the churches and church leaders, and the war against South Africa’s neighbors, compel us to speak out as one united voice for an end to the pain being inflicted upon our sisters and brothers.”

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

Relocated: Author, scholar, and educator Nicholas Wolterstorff to Yale Divinity School, where he will teach philosophical theology, beginning in September. Wolterstorff has taught philosophy at Calvin College for the last 30 years and at the Free University of Amsterdam for the last 4. In addition to teaching at Yale Divinity School, Wolterstorff will teach philosophy and religious studies at the undergraduate level.

Affirmed: The dietary and fitness practices of Seventh-day Adventists as practices that may help extend the life span. According to a study presented at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting, Seventh-day Adventist men and women are likely to live beyond the average life span by 7.6 and 9 years, respectively. Practicing Seventh-day Adventists abstain from smoking and drinking; many eat little or no meat and exercise “religiously.”

Exaggerated: Reports of the demise of the crusading efforts of Constance Cumbey, vocal opponent of the New Age movement. Cumbey said she was misquoted in earlier reports that claimed she was ending her crusade against the movement (CT, Jan. 13, 1989, p. 58). Even though she recently returned to practicing law full-time, she said she would still be available for radio interviews and speaking engagements on the New Age movement.

WORLD SCENE

SUDAN

Famine, War Continue

Shortages of food, shelter, and medicine threaten to turn Sudan into the next Ethiopia, warned a local leader of the Combined Agencies Relief Team (CART), a multidenominational relief group operating there.

Atlee Richardson, a Muslim who has coordinated relief efforts in the largely Christian southern region of Sudan, told Religious News Service correspondent Keith J. Kelly, “There is a crisis situation right now.” Speaking in New York, Richardson urged the Western world to help.

But according to a spokesman from World Vision, a Christian relief-and-development agency formerly involved in Sudan, political pressure makes it difficult to deliver aid to the Sudanese. “We were asked to leave last year, and the official reason was that the government had gotten the food problem under control,” said World Vision’s Ken Waters.

For the past 30 years, progovernment Muslim forces in the north have battled predominantly Christian rebel forces in the south. More than 100,000 have died in the episodes of sporadic violence. Nearly two million people have been displaced from their homes, many ending up in camps where the daily food ration is 300 grams.

Waters says World Vision has been sending some supplies through other relief agencies still allowed to enter the country. “We’re poised and ready to go back in, and the government knows it.”

HUNGARY

Religion on the Rise?

A recent study by Hungary’s leading sociologist on religion concludes there is a resurgence in the country’s religious interest and activity, according to News Network International.

The conclusions of sociologist Miklos Tomka suggest that the trend in Hungary toward secularism—from the late 1940s to the early 1970s—has reversed itself. Tomka has interviewed some 100,000 subjects in the last decade or so. He reports a steady increase among Hungarians in the use of religious rites of passage, such as baptisms and church funerals.

On the other hand, Tomka’s research reveals that only about 15 percent of those who declare religious allegiance actually participate regularly in religious activities, such as Bible reading and church attendance. Some attribute this to government efforts to discourage religious practice.

LATIN AMERICA

Machismo Reconsidered

Frank discussion about sex has for the most part been off limits throughout Central and South America. But this appears to be changing as Latin America, like the rest of the world, confronts the spread of AIDS.

Euphemisms for sexual practice were cast aside when experts gathered last month in Brazil for a conference on AIDS in Latin America. According to the Pan-American Health Organization, over 10,000 AIDS cases have been reported in Latin America and the Caribbean; experts believe the actual number is considerably higher.

Some at the conference challenged the perception of a culture that celebrates masculinity. According to researchers who have studied sexual behavior, the number of homosexual and bisexual men throughout Latin America is far greater than was previously believed.

SPAIN

Scientologists Detained

Religious and legal scholars from the United States and Canada have expressed concern about the arrests of 71 members of the Church of Scientology in Spain late last year and the continued detention of several, including American Hebert Jentzsch, the church’s president.

Barry Fisher, chairman of the religious freedom subcommittee of the American Bar Association, and Dean M. Kelley, director for religious liberty for the National Council of Churches, are among those who have appealed to U.S. authorities on behalf of the Scientologists.

Franklin H. Littell, professor emeritus of religion at Temple University and a church-state scholar, said the action against the Scientologists violated not only the Spanish Constitution, but also the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration on Religious Freedom of the Second Vatican Council.

EL SALVADOR

Lutheran Offices Bombed

An explosion did massive damage to the offices of the Lutheran Salvadorian synod in the capital city of San Salvador, December 28. According to the news service of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a bomb may have been planted in the office of Lutheran Bishop Medardo Gomez; it was broken into prior to the blast.

A few days earlier Gomez had received a death threat; an anonymous caller alleged that Gomez was responsible for the December bombings of the government’s Defense Ministry and military headquarters. Lutheran officials in El Salvador believe church personnel were also targets of a January 10 explosion that killed one person and injured five in the village of Panchimilama. Two Lutheran relief workers were injured in this blast.

The Lutheran Church in El Salvador has worked extensively with refugees trying to escape violence in the country. Some in the military suspect refugees of supporting antigovernment forces, ELCA Bishop Herbert Chilstrom, who visited El Salvador last summer, expressed confidence that Gomez and the work he oversees are politically neutral. Said Chilstrom, “[Gomez] and the church feel that they help people on the basis of need, not on the basis of political affiliation.”

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