4,000 Leaders Gather in South Korea

About 4,000 evangelism leaders gathered in South Korea in May to re-energize their outreach efforts, hoping to establish "a church for every people and the gospel for every person by the year 2000."

AD 2000 and Beyond Movement chairperson Thomas Wang sees the advent of a new millennium as a distinct and historic opportunity to rally Christians for evangelism. Since 1987 he has been using the milestone year of 2000 as a means to motivate mission-minded Christians to accomplish the Great Commission from Jesus Christ to preach the gospel to all people.

"This time-target can stimulate the churches of the world to devote their efforts in evangelism, church planting, and overseas missions," Wang says.

The movement marked a milestone of its own by convening a Global Consultation on World Evangelism (GCOWE '95)-a nine-day event in May that attracted nearly 4,000 delegates from 185 countries to Seoul.

"This consultation is the most strategic mission conference in history," said Kim Joon Gon, chairperson of the Korean preparation committee. "The 4,000 delegates who are here now can become like the 120 disciples in the Upper Room at Pentecost."

Fueled by high-octane worship led by Graham Kendrick and others, the mood was decisively upbeat, including a ceremony in Olympic Stadium where 70,000 Korean young people dedicated themselves to Christian service.

MANAGEMENT MISSIONS: But GCOWE '95 was primarily a working and strategy conference. Participating groups had long been busy breaking the Great Commission task down to its component parts and looking for ways of efficiently dividing the remaining responsibilities. "The track and network concepts are helping us to organize our evangelism efforts," said Dia Diafwila, director of Every Home for Christ in Zaire.

AD 2000 and Beyond is encouraging evangelistic efforts primarily in "the 10/40 Window"—a term describing the area of the world between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude, which stretches from North Africa and southern Spain to Japan and the northern Philippines. AD 2000 stresses that the least evangelized peoples live in countries within the 10/40 Window, and that the area is dominated by three main religions—Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In addition, 80 percent of "the poorest of the poor" live in this area, but only 8 percent of the world's missionaries live there. Intercessory prayer was touted as the chief method of penetration.

A variety of church, missionary, and parachurch organizations are coordinating evangelistic activities in addition to the hundreds of indigenous and mission-oriented church-planting efforts. In a similar way, literature and video distributions and radio broadcast ventures are focusing on the 10/40 Window.

Jun Vencer, international director of World Evangelical Fellowship, said, "The needs confronting the church are overwhelming, not only in the 10/40 Window, but [also] with the new pagans of the West." Some delegates from Western Europe and parts of Africa expressed concern that the 10/40 focus was too narrow and diverted needed energies from their own missionary outreach.

ATTAINABLE GOAL: AD 2000 and Beyond's strategy-based approach hinges on statistics, which comes from the missions data popularized by Operation World author Patrick Johnstone and through the work of Ralph Winter and the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, California. According to Johnstone, "200 years ago there were only a handful of people outside the Atlantic area that had a church. But today 10,000 out of 12,000 people groups have a church among them."

Luis Bush, international director of AD 2000 and Beyond, is encouraged by "a rapid acceleration of divine activity in the world." He cited a "global great awakening related to the prayer movement," the explosive growth of the church in the developing world, and the development of communications technologies that make it possible for people everywhere to be exposed to the gospel message.

"Many leaders believe that genuine collaborative partnerships are the only way to take advantage of the opportunities presented in this last decade of the millennium," he told the assembly.

Bush noted the unprecedented participation by non-Western Christians as a significant step toward the partnership ideal. Two of the largest delegations were from South Korea and Brazil, while the largest delegation came from the United States.

"This is a very catalytic time for the U.S. group," said Evangelical Free Church of America president Paul Cedar, chairperson of AD 2000 and Beyond's international coalition. "In the busyness of our lives, we are seldom, if ever, able to get together to spend so many hours praying and strategizing, communicating, and networking."

LACKING DEPTH? Some 80 percent of the delegates had never attended an international event of this type before. "These are young, grassroots operators," World Vision vice president Sam Kameleson, chairperson of AD 2000's cities track, observed. "These are men and women who will operate whether there is a structure to back them or not."

Kameleson also noted "a lack of theological reflection." Others lamented that worship experiences seemed to replace any sustained engagement with Scripture.

Wilbert Shenk, president of the American Society of Missiology, does not believe that adequate attention has been paid to the theological basis of the movement. He notes that there is "relatively little interaction between those powerful and well-organized movements and the people who are trying to reflect and ask the longer-range questions."

Some also complained about the apparent absence of a social-action dimension to an understanding of the gospel. But timely input from delegates ensured that "compassionate care for physical needs and social justice" at least merited a mention in the GCOWE '95 Declaration. None of these criticisms were unanticipated by AD 2000 and Beyond Movement leaders. As the introduction to the GCOWE '95 handbook puts it, "This is not a conference to discuss the nature of the church but how we can saturate the world with the church of our Lord so that the earth is [as] full of his glory as the waters cover the sea."

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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