In several posts, I would like to offer a review of the Seoul Statement of the Fourth Lausanne Congress, which was held in September, 2024. The Congress itself brought together some 2,700 churches from over 150 countries. Celebrating now 50 years, the Lausanne movement is considered a major weathervane of worldwide Evangelicalism, offering a contrast with similar gatherings and statements produced by the World Council of Churches or Papal Encyclicals. Since Lausanne III (Cape Town) in 2010—and really since the 1980s—‘Evangelicalism’ has undergone a series of challenges, leaving many to wonder what it is anymore and whether it still represents a movement of any note. Thus, we should be interested in what sort of statement has emerged—even if written by a few, chosen persons, as these things always are—about what these Evangelicals affirm.
In this post, I intend to review the Preamble and Section I of the statement. In all, there are seven sections after the Preamble.
The Preamble reaffirms the Lausanne commitment that the mission of the Church is for the whole Church to take the whole Gospel to the whole world. It adds that this mission is twofold: to disciple believers in the faith and equip them against the world’s influence and false teachers:
In the commission of the Lord Jesus to the apostles in Matthew 28:18-20, he made clear that the mandate given to the church—to “make disciples of all nations”—involved two equally important priorities: the evangelistic task of “baptising them into the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” and the pastoral task of “teaching them to obey all that [Christ] had commanded.”
The preamble then focusses on the second matter because it is has been a weakness in missions:
We regret that during the last 50 years of evangelistic harvest, the global church has not adequately provided the teaching necessary to help new believers develop a truly biblical worldview. The church has often failed to nurture new believers to obey Christ’s call to radical discipleship at home, at school, in the church, in our neighbourhoods, and in the marketplace. It has also struggled to equip its leaders to respond to trending social values and to distortions of the gospel, which have threatened to erode the sincere faith of Christians and to destroy the unity and fellowship of the church of the Lord Jesus. Consequently, we are alarmed by the rise of false teachings and pseudo-Christian lifestyles, leading numerous believers away from the essential values of the gospel.
The first article explains the Gospel as a Biblical story of salvation from creation to Christ’s return. The wording is meant to uncontroversial, but it does affirm several points on which there has been some tension or disagreement. Reflecting a theme from Lausanne III (Cape Town), the statement says, that God’s blessing in Jesus was not to bring wealth or health (1.11)—a rejecting of the ‘Prosperity Gospel’. Other convictions sometimes disputed in pulpits or academia are affirmed. Jesus taught His disciples to obey the Law from the heart (1.11). Protestants have given a variety of interpretations of Jesus and Christians relationship to the Old Testament Law, and in our day some have explicitly rejected certain moral teachings of the Law, particularly in sexual ethics. One might add that ‘from the heart’ is not a softening of the commandments but an extension of them; it is not so much a rejection of legalism as it is a rejection on lawlessness by sticking only to the letter of the law (Matthew 5.20-48). Jesus’ death is explained as voluntary and sacrificial (1.11), a penal substitution: Jesus taking on the punishment for our sins (1.12). Certain liberal ‘Churches’ have rejected such teaching. By His death, Jesus ransomed or ‘freed [us] from slavery to sin to love and serve the Lord’ (1.12). Such a basic teaching of the Church begs the question now facing Evangelicals of whether Christians are only forgiven sinners or also transformed by grace to live lives of holiness before God. Such a question is now dividing Evangelicals on the issue of homosexuality. Does the Gospel bring transforming grace to persons caught in certain sins? Are sins not only our actions but also our desires? Do we celebrate the openness of those struggling with sin or restore those caught in transgression (Galatians 6.1)? Do we ordain same-sex attracted, celibate individuals as representative of believers struggling well with sin and living in God’s grace or do we, like Leviticus 21 or 1 Timothy 3, expect the minister to represent a higher calling of holiness? Finally, liberal teaching often rejects Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead, but the Lausanne statement affirms it (1.13).
The Church and local churches are also affirmed in the telling of this Gospel story. The Church is ‘the one people of the one God’. Believers are baptised into Christ’s death, resurrection to new life, and incorporated into His body (1.15). The importance of local churches is explained in 1.16: the role churches play of rehearsing and remembering the Gospel, bringing doctrinal clarity, calling us to conformity to the Gospel’s ‘patterns and commandments’, expressing its effects, goals, and values in our way of life, telling the Gospel to the ends of the earth, and awaiting the consummation of the new creation at Christ’s return. These points are especially relevant in light of the devastating lock-down and avoidance of corporate assembly during the Covid epidemic in 2020.
Some attention should be given to how statements are worded and certain emphases included in this telling of the Gospel. First, the language of ‘story’ is appropriate, though somewhat of an innovation since the 1980s. In the previous 30 years, scholarship spoke of ‘salvation history’. Another innovation is to focus on cultural diversity when speaking of the universality of the Gospel. God’s mandate to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply is curiously stated as a commission ‘to fill the earth with culturally diverse peoples united in the worship of God’ (Preamble). This is at best anachronistic for interpreting Genesis 1-3, but Scripture nowhere celebrates cultural diversity. Later, the statement claims, that God’s ‘people will live under the rule of the Messiah as a unity of peoples whose distinct ways of living God’s gift of eternal life are offered to God as worship’ (1.14). A third innovation is actually a feature of the Lausanne movement since 1974 in its attempt to articulate a ‘holistic’ Gospel or mission (an important alternative). In my view, this has been a weak point for the Lausanne movement from the beginning. While we may well be concerned about the environment, social justice, and communal service, attaching these concerns directly to the Gospel and faith is neither Biblical nor desirable. The result has been a Progressive Evangelicalism that misrepresents the Gospel by linking it to political and social movements outside the Church. The statement implies that this is a matter of faith: ‘By faith, we steward and care for God’s creation and one another; work for his justice in our societies; and seek to live peaceable lives of faithful service’ (1.15). There is no Biblical text that links the Gospel or faith to the creation commandment to all humans to be stewards of creation. The Bible’s concern with justice is clear, but Biblical justice is not the same as ‘social justice’ articulated by activists in secular society. The mission of God’s people is Christocentric and soteriological and must not be diluted through the introduction into this missional focus of other good causes and practices of general concern (environmental ethics, social justice).
This concludes the material in the statement’s Preamble and Section I. I will continue to review the remainder of the Statement in subsequent posts.
English (US) · 