Editor’s note: This article is part of forum discussing the fourth Lausanne Congress. It is not an official Lausanne Movement forum but an opportunity for Lausanne delegates to share their thoughts about the fourth Lausanne Congress, the Seoul Statement, and the future of the mission. You can read the entire series, from diverse voices around the world here.

I serve as president of Gordon College, a 135-year old Christian institution that is deeply intertwined with the story of global ministry and American evangelicalism. My office was formerly occupied by Harold John Ockenga, first president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

It was an honor to be a part of the fourth Lausanne Congress (L4), a beautiful demonstration of the church across the world, celebrating together and focusing on the timeless principles of the Bible and the good news of the Gospel. It was mentioned that there was more diversity assembled in Incheon than at the Olympics. Two hundred and five nations sent athletes to the 2024 Olympics, and a similar number of regions sent delegates to the Lausanne Congress, perhaps more given that over 6,000 joined virtually. Lausanne’s manifestation of the church—not defined by geography nor by time—can lift evangelicalism above the internecine debates which often inhibit the Great Commission in the United States and elsewhere.

Whether the term evangelical is preferred or not, the global church rooted in core Christian faith beliefs celebrated communion, recited the Apostle’s Creed, worshipped and prayed together, and responded to an ongoing call to action. For the many Christian colleges and organizations wrestling with how to describe their Christian identity and mission, the Lausanne movement and documents provide a consistent articulation of serious, orthodox belief and faithfulness rising above the material and political agendas that may confuse or dilute the power of the gospel. 

And yet, controversial opinions around the Seoul Statement created a buzz alongside the activities in the convention hall, partially due to a different process than had been deployed for the Lausanne Covenant of 1974, Manila Manifesto of 1989, and the Capetown Commitment in 2010. These documents are important assertions of the evangelical approach to spreading the gospel and reaffirming the core beliefs of the church around the world. When these documents, including the Seoul Statement, demonstrate agreement, there is a beautiful reflection of unity around the authority of Scripture and the church worldwide.

When there is controversy or disagreement, we can also celebrate the opportunity for deeper discussion toward understanding. One need not be discouraged by the differences over the Seoul Statement or disagreements over topics such as Israel-Palestine, climate change, the Holy Spirit, or even dispensational eschatology. When these conflicts and differences over strategies for collaborative action are discussed, the Church can model productive disagreement rooted in a common source of truth. 

For today’s college students, there are not many exemplary moments like these that can show a process, even one evolving in real time, that brings those differences to the surface and calls on the courage of participants to respect their differing opinions. The Lausanne movement can allow for contrary opinions but point back to a common source of truth that guides obedience and experience. We have seen in recent years many ministry leaders yielding to the temptation toward political or cultural disagreement that sour many on the truth and beauty of the Gospel.

At Gordon, our campus research on rising generations suggests that the entrepreneurial spirit of young Christians leads them away from older models of Christian organizations and toward ownership of new initiatives of Christian spiritual formation. This was on display at the Lausanne Congress as younger participants were fully engaged in worship and collaborative action. Our college students are often compelled to grow deeper in their walk with Jesus Christ by artistic creativity such as we witnessed by painters Bryn Gillette and Lexie Newsom as well as music by Korean church choirs, the Gettys, and Isaiah6tyOne worship band. We heard testimonies from the Younger Leaders Gatherings and from those who were engaged with worship and the arts.

As younger Christians steer away from traditional structures of faith engagement, there are opportunities for them to shape the Church of the future in positive directions. At Lausanne, the focus on the arts, the workplace, collaborative action, and the work of the Holy Spirit in revival and repentance showed that the church of the future may take a different form but can still promote the Gospel. 

As the 50-year legacy of Lausanne was celebrated and invoked often, it made clear that Christian organizations started in 19th and 20th centuries must adapt or die. We have found this true in the realm of Christian higher education and it applies to the array of evangelical mission-driven organizations, many of which were present at Lausanne. The story arc of post-Enlightenment modernization and industrialization shaped the way that Christian churches, missionary movements, parachurch organizations, and colleges were founded over the last century or more.

This organizing impulse created a benevolent empire during the Second Great Awakening, which was repeated in the founding of global missions outreach in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, youth ministries in the mid-20th century, and media-focused evangelistic ministries in the latter 20th century. However, with a rising rate of controversies and moral crises over the past four decades, confidence in personality-driven ministries has rapidly declined.

In place of many of the evangelical subculture of organizations will be a renewed emphasis on integrating Christian faith into the workplace and endeavors across the business, scientific, and nonprofit landscape. The Christian workplace faith movement is already decades old and growing rapidly with pointed challenges for the public reading of the Bible, openness to integrating Christian principles into business practices, and a robust debate on the role of faith and reason in corporate and scientific spaces. Aligned with this emphasis on the workplace as one of the more effectives venues for declaring and displaying Christ is the emphasis on action to address the most pressing issues of our day, including gap areas which the state of the Great Commission identified as stagnant areas of engagement in need of new energy. 

Editor’s note: This article is part of forum discussing the fourth Lausanne Congress. It is not an official Lausanne Movement forum but an opportunity for Lausanne delegates to share their thoughts about the fourth Lausanne Congress, the Seoul Statement, and the future of the mission. You can read the entire series, from diverse voices around the world here.

As a professor and pastor, Lausanne was a privilege to attend because it brought together my identity as an “evangélico” in the tradition of Samuel Escobar and René Padilla, and my research and teaching on the Brown Church. Fifty years ago, when asked by Billy Graham to serve on the planning committee for the first Lausanne, Escobar worried that “Lausanne would cheer a ‘mutilated Gospel,’ an American middle-class gospel tainted by the ‘American way of life’ and loyalties to conservative politics” (Kirkpatrick, A Gospel for the Poor, 19). 

Despite his concerns, Escobar went ahead with his participation: “I think that our presence and our contribution in this committee…is worth the time, work and patience involved in it” (Kirkpatrick, 19). In his now-famous plenary talk at Lausanne I, René Padilla introduced the world to the concept of “misión integral,” or holistic mission, which had been recently been developed by Latin American evangelicals in the context of military dictatorships, poverty, and civil war: “Concern for man’s reconciliation with God cannot be separated from concern for social justice…the mission of the church is indivisible from its life. I refuse, therefore, to drive a wedge between a primary task, namely the proclamation of the Gospel, and a secondary task (at best) or even optional (at worst) task of the church” (Kirkpatrick, 21).

According to Padilla, any dichotomy between social action and evangelism is a false dichotomy. Christian mission is like a plane with two wings—one wing consists of the verbal proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ and the other the embodiment of the Gospel through justice and love of neighbor.  If either wing is missing, the Gospel plane will crash.  

The unflagging advocacy of Padilla, Escobar, John Stott, and others, led to Lausanne’s current stated approach of Proclamation and Action. With much enthusiasm, I came to Incheon to follow in the footsteps of these three heroes of mine, be inspired in faith and action, and explore the current state of the global Evangelical movement. To be honest, I was warned by some friends that I might encounter the same “mutilated gospel” and “American middle-class gospel” that Escobar described five decades before. 

The joy of Lausanne for me was connecting with new friends and family members of the global church. It was like a big family reunion. For the first time in my life, I truly worshipped together with people of every tribe, language, nation and tongue. Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe. U.S. North Americans were only 500 out of the 5,000 gathered.  It was a living picture of Revelation 7:9.

I also came to see firsthand what Andrew Walls, Samuel Escobar, Philip Jenkins, and others have been saying for the past several decades—the pendulum of Christianity has now shifted to the Global South. As Western Christianity sadly faces decline, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and immigrant churches in North America are the new vital centers of global Christianity. This pattern has repeated throughout the past 2,000 years all around the world—for a time Christianity flourishes in one geographic center, followed by decline and rebirth in a new cultural center. The Gospel cannot be stopped, Christianity is infinitely translatable, and the Gospel is a “liberator of culture” (Walls, “The Missionary Movement,” 3, 22). As the Great Commission extends to the ends of the earth, Christ sanctifies us individually, and our cultures corporately, allowing our cultural treasures to shine more brightly as a sweet offering to our Savior for eternity (Revelation 21:26). 

Comprised of sisters and brothers from Niger, Ghana, Singapore, the Philippines, and the US, my table group was a highlight celebrating the new reality of Christianity’s geographic pendulum shift. Unplanned and unexpectedly, I even met a brother whose parents were part of my grandparents’ ministry in China in the 1940s. My grandfather, Calvin Chao, planted InterVarsity in China in the 1940s and was called the “Billy Graham of China.” One of the biggest highlights was celebrating communion together led by pastors from Korea and Japan, and as a sign of the healing which Christ can bring between nations centuries at war. Revelation 22:2 experienced now, a foretaste of the future, God’s restoration of all things and healing of the nations. 

Like any family reunion, however, it’s just a matter of time before familiar dysfunctions rise to the surface. They are always painful and always come with a sting of surprise, although in hindsight they should have been expected. This happened at Lausanne, too. I share some of these pains now because I want the Lausanne family to heal and grow, and I care deeply about the Church. I also share these honest words because, as a UCLA professor since 2005, I know that our Christian public witness is on the line. As shared by Dr. Anne Zaki, such truth telling is costly but necessary. 

As Latinos/as sometimes we get invited to speak in predominantly white ministry spaces because, at best, conveners intuit that our voices have a meaningful contribution to make, or, at worst, because they feel obliged but don’t really understand the value of our diverse perspectives. For Lausanne, I have no reason to believe that it was the latter, but it still turned out quite badly.

Like her father 50 years ago, Dr. Ruth Padilla DeBorst was invited as a plenary speaker to speak about justice and the social implications of the Gospel. Dr. Padilla is one of the leading theological voices representing the Latino community in the global church today, and she is the modern heir of the misión integral movement begun by Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar.  

Dr. Ruth Padilla shared a compelling message on the topic of justice on Monday night of the conference. In fact, it was the only plenary talk on the subject. Her talk was wide ranging, and several sentences of her 15-minute presentation spoke to the deadly injustices occurring among the Palestinian people. To the dismay and deep anger of myself and many others, Lausanne sent out an email several days after Dr. Padilla’s talk, apologizing for it (even though Lausanne leadership was given an advance copy which they approved), and shaming her publicly in front of the 5,000 physical attendees and thousands more participating in the conference virtually. 

Editor’s note: This article is part of forum discussing the fourth Lausanne Congress. It is not an official Lausanne Movement forum but an opportunity for Lausanne delegates to share their thoughts about the fourth Lausanne Congress, the Seoul Statement, and the future of the mission. You can read the entire series, from diverse voices around the world here.

An overlooked feature in the early response to the Seoul Statement is that it is, well, a statement. It is not a covenant, a manifesto, or a commitment, but a statement. As such, it differs not only in content and focus from the documents produced by the earlier Lausanne Congresses but also in purpose.

Unlike the three earlier Congress documents, the Seoul Statement does not attempt to combine a statement of faith with a call to mission action and commitment. Instead, the statement seeks to set out a carefully considered set of theological issues that were judged to be of particular concern at the present moment for undergirding faithful Christian mission in the decades to come. The challenge from the Lausanne leadership was to be biblical but also prophetic; to be faithful to Scripture but also to discern those areas where the faithfulness of Christ’s church is likely to be most severely tested as it seeks to obey Christ’s commission in years to come.

Before turning to the way in which this understanding of purpose gave rise to certain features of the Seoul Statement, let me say a bit more about what the statement is not. First, though it is a statement, it is not a statement of faith, for the simple reason that the statements of faith embedded in the previous Congress documents (especially those of the Lausanne Covenant and the Cape Town Commitment) have served and continue to serve the Lausanne movement well. Thus, there are a number of core doctrinal commitments to which the Statement does not devote extended attention, though all are present in a narrated form in the opening section of the Statement. 

Second, though the Seoul Statement is a document prepared for a Congress on world evangelization, it says relatively little about mission practice and does not issue in a call to mission action. This was because the Seoul Statement, unlike previous Congress documents was released with a companion document—the State of the Great Commission Report. During the Congress, this latter document served as the basis for the call to Congress participants to commit themselves to collaborative action in a number of areas identified as strategically important in the ongoing task of obeying Christ’s commission.

Whatever one thinks of this particular feature of L4, it is important to see that, in distinction from previous Congress documents, this was not the aim of the Seoul Statement: to the extent that it can be understood as a call to anything, it is a call to faithfulness.   

This particular focus of the statement is evident in every section, but Gospel faithfulness must, of course, must begin with the Gospel itself. So that is where the statement begins. There are many places in the world in which Christians have struggled to communicate the Gospel and struggled to live lives formed by the Gospel, because the story within which the good news of a crucified and risen Messiah makes sense has been distorted or poorly understood. This is a story that moves from creation to new creation and addresses the fundamental problem of human rebellion against God and the consequent refusal of the good of his creation. The stories about the world told by modern-day gnostics, the prophets of prosperity, or the ideologues of populism, progressive secularism, or garden-variety liberalism render the world in a very different way and diagnose the primary problem of humanity in very different terms.

Too often Christians have unwittingly inhabited one of these alternative stories and inevitably end up telling a distorted Gospel. Unless Christians turn from these alternative stories and consciously inhabit and skillfully tell the story about God and his world told in Scripture, Christian discipleship will falter and Christian mission to make disciples will fail. 

That the Seoul Statement begins with an attempt to distill the story of Scripture—to show rather than tell—had a (hopefully) short-term downside. The early reaction to the statement tended to overlook what the Statement shows and to focus instead on what was said (or not said) on particular issues. Following the elucidation of the gospel as “the story we live and tell,” in Section I, the remaining sections can be understood as an attempt to draw out particular implications of the fact that the Gospel means what it means inside a particular a story, that is, as a story that we tell as we live and live as we tell—a story we only tell as well as we live and only live as well as we tell. This is to claim no more than what is already foundational within the Great Commission: Christ gives his commission to make disciples to disciples.

It is a mistake to try to work out whether it is more important to be a disciple or to make disciples. The Statement should thus be read as an attempt to provide theological grounding for faithful discipleship both as a presupposition and as an aim of Christian mission.  

Here in North America, much of the early reaction to the Statement looked especially for how it would define mission, and, in particular, how it would define the relationship between verbal proclamation of the Gospel to pursuit of social justice. This was understandable, given the fact that the relationship between these two activities has been central to discussions of mission within Lausanne since the original Congress. This helped give rise to 50 years of missiological discussion of “integralism,” “prioritism,” or “integral prioritism.” So many early readings of the Statement naturally looked for how it would speak about this discussion.