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When executive chair Doug Birdsall invited Malaysian Methodist bishop Hwa Yung to work with him in planning Cape Town 2010, Hwa Yung had one question. "Which kind of conference do you want to have? A normal kind of congress dominated by old western leaders? Or one that represents what the church is today?"

Cape Town 2010 was designed to represent the global evangelical church, but the devil is in the details. I spent some of the conference's third day finding out those details.

How did 4,000 church leaders get invited? Who chose them? Who decided how many to invite from the US, or from Burundi, or from China? And how? Here's the short version of what I learned.

The process started with a selection committee, chosen from the Lausanne network including one representative from each of 12 regions globally. That committee chose a selection director for each of 200 countries. According to Lindsay Brown, international director for Cape Town 2010, the committee looked for "Christian statesmen" who would be fair-minded in trying to represent the whole church in their country, not merely their friends or fellow church members. That chair gathered a selection committee, vested with the authority to choose delegates for their country.

How many?

That depended on the number of evangelical Christians that resided in each country, based mainly on statistics from Operation World. The number of delegates was proportional to that population, though additional delegates could be added if the country had a vigorous foreign mission profile and/or a vital and fast-growing church. Out of a total of 4,000 delegates, the United States got to send 400, Canada 50, the UK 80, China 230. There would be far more from Africa than from North America.

A point of contrast: at the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference exactly a century ago, there were 1200 delegates: 500 from the US, 500 from Britain, 4 from Asia, and none at all from Africa. The world has changed.

The national selection committees were tasked ...

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