Preamble

Last month I had the privilege of participating, together with other over twenty Evangelical theologians in the last meeting of the Lausanne Theology Working Group (TWG), under the able leadership of Dr. Chris Wright, before the Third Lausanne Congress that will take place in October 2010 in Capetown, South Africa.

Here is the final statement of this important theological reunion.

The Lausanne Theology Working Group hosted a consultation in Beirut, Lebanon, 14-19 February 2010. 23 people from 14 countries convened and worked together around 4 plenary papers and 16 case studies, which provided us with a very wide variety of perspectives on what is meant by “the whole world”.  We met in the comfortable facilities kindly provided by the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary, and in collaboration with the WEA-Theological Commission.

Each morning we studied Colossians together, since in it Paul makes crystal clear the cosmic significance of Jesus Christ – in creating, sustaining and reconciling the whole world to God – and the correspondingly vast relevance of the gospel to the whole world at every level. The biblical themes that arose from our study each day informed and infused our reflection on papers and case-studies, and we have tried to integrate such insights where possible in the paragraphs below.

The topic, “The Whole World” is the third in a series of consultations on the theological significance of the three phrases of the Lausanne Covenant, “The whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world”. The first consultation took place in February 2008 in Chiang Mai on “The Whole Gospel”, and the second took place in January 2009 in Panama on “The Whole Church”.  These are part of the contribution of the Theology Working Group to the preparation for Lausanne III Congress, Cape Town 2010.

When the three-fold expression was first used, it was probably meant primarily in a quantitative and geographical sense. It meant that the gospel should be shared with all the people who live in every place on earth. That is certainly a vital dimension of its meaning. We still face the fact that millions of the world’s inhabitants have never heard the name of Jesus Christ or the good news of the salvation that God has accomplished through him. We affirm and pray for all those in the Lausanne Movement whose calling focuses primarily on the world of the unevangelized, including particularly the Lausanne Strategy Working Group along with other Working Groups and Special Interest Groups.

As we reflect on “the whole world” in the light of the Bible, there are also qualitative dimensions that we need to address, and which the gospel certainly does address.

Our conference was initially framed around six major themes:

• The World in the Bible
• The World of God’s Creation
• The World of Religions
• The World of the Globalised Public Square
• The World of Violence
• The World of Poverty and Injustice

The findings below summarise some of what we learned together. They are not final or comprehensive but reflect the ongoing nature of doing theology – it is “theology on the way” and the results of a consultation of a working group.

Advertisement