Lausanne at 50: Effective Mission Still Depends on Right Theology

Fifty years ago this week, the Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland, hosted the First International Congress on World Evangelization (known as Lausanne 1, or Lausanne ’74), a gathering Time referred to as “a formidable forum, possibly the widest-ranging meeting of Christians ever held.” Specifically, over 2,300 Christian leaders from 150 countries gathered around the theme “Let the Earth Hear His Voice.”

The call to convene came from key leaders including Billy Graham and John Stott. When these leaders looked at the world around them, they saw global angst, brokenness, and, above all, lostness. When they looked at the church, they saw a divided community. On the one hand, churches were tempted by the sophistry and acceptability of the liberal, humanistic cause of the mainline denominations. On the other hand, the conservative, fundamentalist wing of the church was tempted to withdraw into a bunkered Christian ghetto.

So the impulse for the congress was both theological and missional. How might we call the evangelical church to a joyful confidence in Scripture’s truths and to join arms together to reach a world that doesn’t know Christ? The mission is too big to do alone and too important to ignore.

Response to Theological Drift

While many see Lausanne ’74 as a watershed in global missions (more on that momentarily), it never could have happened in existing global networks amid the theological drift of mainline denominations. By the middle of the 20th century, liberal critical scholarship had filled the seminaries and, in turn, the congregations of many of the bodies making up the World Council of Churches. The Bible’s authority, humanity’s lostness, and Jesus’s uniqueness were cardinal doctrines being jettisoned.

While many see Lausanne ’74 as a watershed in global missions, it never could have happened in existing global networks amid the theological drift of mainline denominations.

The Lausanne Congress gathered to reaffirm the historic Christian faith. This is captured in the Lausanne Covenant, a mission-informed statement of faith drafted a few months before the congress and drawn from early drafts of congress plenary manuscripts. The draft went through two rounds of revisions before the congress and then received hundreds of suggested edits during the gathering itself. Though Stott is considered the covenant’s architect (certainly his famously analytical brain made significant contributions), it was a product of the congress as a whole.

And what does the covenant affirm? Among other historic Christian doctrines, it states the following:

Article 2: The Authority and Power of the Bible. “We affirm the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice.”
Article 3: The Uniqueness and Universality of Christ. “We affirm that there is only one Saviour and only one gospel. . . . [Jesus Christ] gave himself as the only ransom for sinners. . . . There is no other name by which we must be saved. All men and women are perishing because of sin.”

Theology Drives Mission

Beyond reaffirming historic evangelical doctrine, the Lausanne Covenant calls the church to theologically informed action. If people are lost without the gospel, we need to know what parts of the world still have no access to the good news.

In a 10-minute plenary address, Ralph Winter challenged a prevailing philosophy within missions of the day that argued the Great Commission was complete since there were believers in every nation-state on the planet. Winter countered that the task of the Great Commission (making disciples of all nations) wasn’t primarily about having some believers in every country but about establishing the church as a gospel witness within every ethne, or people group.  He estimated at the time that there were roughly 16,000 “hidden” people groups with little to no gospel access. Today, we refer to them as “unreached peoples.”

While the mainline denominations called for a moratorium on missions, Winter called for a renewed commitment to missionary sending. Over the last 50 years, one would be hard-pressed to find a concept that has shaped global missions more than this emphasis on reaching the unreached.

Beyond the vision provided by Winter’s address, article 10 of the covenant (Evangelism and Culture) also provided theological help on the relationship between the gospel and culture. When I become a Christian, do I have to change my name from Krishna or Muhammad to Caleb or Mark? When I go to church, do I need to wear a suit or dress, or can I wear a djellaba or sari? And when we worship together, do we have to sing only hymns in English, or can we praise God in the language and musical style of our own culture?

While the mainline denominations were calling for a moratorium on missions, Winter called for a renewed commitment to missionary sending.

Perhaps these questions seem odd to our 21st-century ears. But these were significant issues for the church in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where missionaries sometimes confused the gospel with their own cultural ideas of “civilization.”

Daniel Bourdanné, a Chadian leader and former general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (InterVarsity in the U.S.), shared how these discussions released many African leaders to declare, “Not only is the gospel for us, but we can even be involved in God’s mission!”  Today, there are more Christians in Africa than any other continent. It’s estimated that half of all Christians will be African by 2050.

Missional Unity Within Evangelical Diversity

Lausanne gathered evangelicals from around the world. There wasn’t only geographic and ethnic diversity (50 percent of attendees were from the Majority World—no small feat at the time) but also a diversity of denominations and traditions. What could unite such a group when it’s hard enough to get churches within a single denomination to work together?

Today, we speak of “theological triage.” We recognize some doctrines are indispensable to the faith, and should those doctrines be tampered with, you lose Christianity altogether. The Trinity and salvation by grace through faith are such doctrines. We rightly guard them without compromise. Other doctrines are important but aren’t first-order issues. These may include questions about church order or the sacraments.

The Lausanne Covenant made it possible for a diverse body to gather around the central doctrines of the faith for the sake of global missions even as they recognized secondary and tertiary theological differences. And those missional partnerships could manifest in a variety of ways. For example, ministries focused on Bible translation could share language lists and best practices. Meanwhile, missions agencies working among unreached peoples could coordinate to minimize competition and maximize the number of peoples being engaged for the first time. Christians recognized we could actually pray together, worship together, encourage each other, and cheer one another on in global missions.

Following the congress, a continuing committee was formed, and Gottfried Osei-Mensah, a Ghanaian pastor serving in Kenya in 1974, was appointed the first international director for Lausanne. Osei-Mensah traveled the world with a suitcase in one hand and the Lausanne Covenant in the other. He challenged church leaders in each region to work together with the covenant as a theological basis for interdenominational partnership. The fruit from those travels continues today in the form of pastor and mission networks, alliances, and coalitions. In the last few years, I’ve heard testimonies of God continuing to use the document in similar ways.

Trajectories: Challenges and Opportunities

One challenge facing Lausanne is the relationship between ministries of proclamation and ministries of mercy. But it may not be as big a divide as some think. Ramez Atallah, former general secretary of the Bible Society of Egypt, recalls John Stott being asked, “What are your views on abortion?” His answer in the 1960s was “I’m a pastor; I don’t have a view on abortion.”

Stott eventually changed his view on Christian social responsibility, in many ways providing the theological basis for what’s now called holistic or integral mission. Today, regardless of where you land on the prioritism versus holism debate, we can’t imagine the above response from a Christian leader. The separation of faith and mission from so-called social issues is in a completely different space now in 2024. Of course, how mercy ministries relate to evangelism, disciple making, and church planting is still debated. But we’d do well to recognize how the conversation has progressed in the last five decades.

Having said that, it’s always easier to recruit volunteers to meet felt needs than to engage in Word ministry and evangelism. Western and Majority World leaders alike are asking whether Lausanne, and the wider Great Commission community, can keep proclamation at the heart of the mission or if such gospel work will be sidelined and replaced by the endless demands of felt needs in the world. This is despite the fact that the Lausanne Covenant declares in article 6, “In the Church’s mission of sacrificial service, evangelism is primary.”

Another challenge for the global missions community is its attraction to innovation. What’s the next cutting-edge trend in mission? What’s the next big mission idea? How should we rethink missions in the 21st century? Lausanne hears these questions regularly, and there’s a temptation to look for some new idea when the old, old story is left untold. Our postmodern penchant for the novel and our aversion to the often hard and humiliating work of evangelism and church planting make the search for the missional silver bullet a real temptation. A long obedience in Great Commission work will always be God’s plan.

Our postmodern penchant for the novel and our aversion to the often hard and humiliating work of evangelism and church planting makes the search for the missional silver bullet a real temptation.

The historic and present work of Lausanne also presents some opportunities. First, there’s an inheritance of trust that Lausanne holds within the global church. We who lead the movement today can take no credit for that. We stand on the shoulders of godly men and women. The fact that the two men credited with founding Lausanne (Graham and Stott) lived lives as long, fruitful, and faithful as they did seems miraculous these days.

This cache of trust is one that Lausanne takes seriously as we continue to call church and missions leaders to be “H.I.S.” Leaders—leaders of humility, integrity, and simplicity (following Chris Wright’s challenge in 2010 at the Third Congress on World Evangelization to reject the idols of pride, sex, and money). Worldwide, and seemingly in every network and denomination, we’ve watched leaders fall and finish poorly. How can we offer hope, especially to younger leaders who wonder if Christian ministry is a doomed enterprise? By God’s grace, we point to faithful forebears of whom the world was not worthy, and say humbly, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.”

The ’74 Congress occurred at a time when Marxist critical theory was infecting seminaries, denominations, and the wider missions community. Biblical fidelity was discarded, and the church drew dividing lines according to the spirit of the age. Does that sound familiar? It’s shocking to realize how similar that historical moment was to our own. Reading the Lausanne Covenant today gives you the sense our times aren’t entirely unprecedented. This also suggests God could work again in our day just as he did 50 years ago, bringing both theological clarity and missional priority.

By God’s kindness, Lausanne ’74 was able to build missional unity across denominational, ethnic, and sociopolitical divisions by calling the church to greater biblical fidelity. Perhaps God’s work in the past can provide an example for the church today even as Lausanne prepares for the Fourth Congress in Seoul-Incheon, Korea, this September. I pray it will.

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