I follow the writings of Andy Crouch with great interest. His writings are insightful and edgy. This time he writes about Lausanne II, the congress to which I have just been a witness, but I had no time to write on because of a host of professional responsibilities following this event. Since I agree to a large extent with what Andy writes here, I invite you to evaluate it for yourselves.
’m in Cape Town for the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. Four thousand delegates are here in what is being described as the most representative gathering of Christian leaders in history. But one group is notably underrepresented: prominent figures associated with evangelical Christianity in the United States, especially pastors of large churches. Rather than name names, let me put it this way: pick a celebrated American evangelical church leader, especially one who founded his current congregation, and I will give you 5-1 odds that he (and most of the missing are “he”s) is not here, at least not as part of the official US delegation.
For better and for worse, these absences tell us a lot about power, influence, innovation, and the future of global movements like evangelical Christianity. Here are a few lessons from the ecclesial Realpolitik of the no-shows (in rough order from brutally honest to genuinely hopeful) . . . .
For megapastors, platform time is the price of participation. Entrepreneurial pastors live to speak. Or perhaps more accurately and fairly, they live to influence, and they exercise much of their public influence by speaking. If they are not given a speaking slot, they are likely to conclude that their time can be better spent elsewhere.
Several speakers at Cape Town 2010 have commented on the weighty responsibility of addressing 4,000 of their fellow leaders. But the pastors who aren’t here address audiences that size or larger every week, and the audiences they address are much more willing to follow their lead than a heterogenous group of international representatives. Two prominent American pastors who are here, John Piper and Tim Keller, both were given significant speaking responsibilities. Of course there are very busy leaders, like Wooddale Church’s Leith Anderson and Evergreen Baptist Church’s Ken Fong, who are happy to participate around the tables in the main hall with no special recognition—but they are notable exceptions.
Learning happens in the hallways, not the hall. Sitting in a conference hall hearing presentations is a highly inefficient use of time. You can easily read the text of a twenty-minute talk in five minutes—twice. (Video is even more inefficient—you can read the script of a ten-minute video in under a minute.)
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