A key theme of the recent Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Incheon, Korea was collaboration. Participants were encouraged to commit to working together more intentionally with those who share the same concerns. Christian Daily International sat down with Ann Chow who together with David Benson co-designed the process that would steer 5,400 participants towards greater collaboration.
Chow recalled that she and Benson were first invited to the program team two years before the Congress. Then in January 2023, they officially took on the collaboration process at the request of program chair Dr. Patrick Fung. “We said yes, because innovation and collaboration are definitely our heartbeat and our passion,” Chow said, adding that this meant responding to people’s requests for this to be a Working Congress.
“We totally love the plenaries, the expositions, the worship, which is always so good for the Lausanne Movement, but we wanted a new element,” she said. Fung initially described it as a lab where people would come together, Chow said, describing it as “Instead of just facing forward all the time and listening and receiving, we actually want to turn to each other and get some work done.”
As the Lausanne Movement had always brought together thought leaders from around the world, the collaboration space at Lausanne 4 was meant to provide them with an opportunity to meet each other to network and connect around issues, she said.
In the lead up to the Congress, Lausanne published the State of the Great Commission report, a 500-page document featuring 150 authors from every region. It identified 40 “gaps” that are issues that needed to be addressed in the pursuit of the Great Commission. “We selected 25 of what we thought were the most complex of the issues that we couldn’t solve on our own or we would have already solved it,” Chow said. “So, then we were just coming around these issues and saying, ‘Hey, let's gather together, let's brainstorm.’”
The collaboration sessions followed a four-day process with two hours each in the afternoon (with the exception of Wednesday afternoon), totaling in eight hours of discussion space. People had selected their top gap that they wanted to work on and almost all of them were assigned their top choice, Chow said, emphasizing that it was like a miracle and thanks to hard work by the data team that reviewed all the submissions.
As collaboration could take on many forms, the team considered the best options and ultimately decided for a human-centered design process.
“Human-centered design is keeping the person or the people that are impacted by the issue front and center of mind. Because you can just design something that you think is going to solve their problems without actually talking to them, without understanding where they're coming from,” Chow said, and cautioned about the risk of an approach that ignored the people. “You miss the point, and you've wasted time and energy and potentially money designing a product or a solution that does not even remotely address the actual issue.”
The human-centered design meant “we actually talk to the humans, they're at the center of the issue,” she said.
As they knew that there would be participants at the Congress that had been impacted by the various issues, the first afternoon session focused on letting everyone talk and listen to each other. They introduced themselves and responded to the question why they had chosen this particular gap, which would also allow them to share their passion about the issue.
“At the end of the two-hour session, you would have a global snapshot of what the issue or the gap looks like in six parts of the world because there were six people around the table. And that's us listening to humans,” Chow said.
The following afternoon focused on imagine, inviting participants to imagine where the world could be in the year 2050 if the Church truly collaborated together over the next 25 years. They could dream about how the pain would be resolved or alleviated.
The third afternoon session’s theme was create, which asked the question how to get there. “What programs do we need? People feel lonely already, but how do we actually come together, be less lonely, share resources, share ideas, and not create new organizations or new entities or go off by ourselves, but actually how do we work together? How do we brainstorm together? So that was the create,” Chow said, acknowledging that this would have been a lot of hard work. “We wanted them to look at it in five-year chunks, one to five, five to 10, until for 25 years.”
The last afternoon of the Congress was about communicating and talking about “aha moments” that spoke to the participants. Important for the last session was that they would start talking about the issue with the people at home where they may already serve on teams or in churches. Finally, the process culminated in the signing of the commitment card on the last morning where participants were asked to commit themselves to collaboration for the Great Commission.
“What are we committing to? What is our part in the collaboration process? And is there somebody, did I meet somebody – a like-minded kindred spirit – that I'm like, ‘I met this person from Jakarta and that's my person. We are amazingly in sync.’ And then they bring their skills, we bring our skills, and together we think we could actually be better,” Chow said.
Asked how it was possible to facilitate such a process for more than 5,000 people from around the world, she pointed to two approaches.
“Let's compare it to swimming. If you stand up and say, ‘Hey guys, let's talk about the theory of swimming. So there's this thing, it's called water. It feels funny, you can get in it, and if you flap your arms and your legs around you move forward.’ And people are like, ‘Oh, that's great. That sounds like a really good skill to have. I can see that that could be important.’”
“Or we could get in the water and we're going to swim together,” she said, pointing out that there would likely have been some people who are expert swimmers but also quite a few people who never swam before. “But together, we're going to swim together. We will absolutely understand the theory of swimming by actually swimming. And that's what we were hoping to do here at the Congress. We didn’t want to do more talking and lecturing about collaboration. We wanted to actually give people the opportunity to collaborate.”
The focus of the sessions was to facilitate conversations that would lead to collaboration, so people would realize it is neither mysterious nor scary. “If we have a great conversation and ask the right questions, people actually just naturally come up with incredible solutions,” Chow said.
What would be considered success for the collaboration sessions? “Success for me would be that everybody has had a taste of collaboration. And in that taste of collaboration, they see themselves in that picture of collaboration as a part of a solution to these global gaps and these issues that impact our societies and our churches today.”
Chow anticipated that not everyone would connect with each person around the tables of six, but there would be one or two very meaningful connections that formed.
She said that some may wonder if it could have been better to switch tables each afternoon, but said the collaboration sessions sought to go deep, which is why each group was around the same table each afternoon. Spending eight hours together would have provided a foundation to build trust, the most essential ingredient for any sustainable collaboration that will last.
“There's another theory of switching every afternoon, every two hours, switch, switch, switch. Maybe meet with your generation or meet with your region of the world,” Chow said. “But we said, no. We did that in other parts of the Congress. We met in our issue networks, we met in our regions, we met in our generations. But in this collaboration, the more diversity of thought, age, ethnicity, education, experience that we had around the table, the better.”
It was also important not to let people only connect with those they already knew because if that was the solution, the gap would have been resolved already. “You had to have fresh ideas,” she said.
Another sense of success for Chow would be for people to understand this process as a “toolkit” that they could take home and use in their own teams, churches and organizations.
If they went back saying, “Hey, I learned this amazing process that actually was very simple. Let's do this process together and then dream about how we can change our countries and our cities, and ask ourselves who can we collaborate with? Someone who is like-minded that we've always really admired, but now we actually see there's a reason for us to come together.”
“That would be success,” Chow said.
