As more than 5,000 Christian leaders from more than 200 countries and territories gathered in Incheon, Korea for the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, Christian Daily International sat down with Chris Wright to talk about the theological dynamics that have influenced Lausanne over the past 50 years. Talking about his journey to becoming the chief architect of the 2010 Cape Town Commitment, Wright also highlights what he considers to be key issues for the Church today, and what he hopes to see come out of Lausanne 4.
“I was first involved with Lausanne by going to the 1989 second Lausanne Congress in Manila. But that was very much just as a participant,” he says. His close relationship with John Stott who had been the lead theologian behind the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 meant that Wright always had some awareness of what Lausanne stood for.
“I was particularly struck with the way the Lausanne Covenant and John Stott himself were so passionately committed to the integration of evangelism and social action,” he says. “And in the 1970s and 80s, there was a whole bunch of us who were younger evangelicals in the UK who were very passionate about that ourselves.”
They believed it is important for believers to be involved in society, in culture, in the arts, in business, and so on, he says. “And John Stott was our guru really. He was playing that tune very loudly. So, Lausanne resonated with my own theological assumptions.”
In the years after the Manila event, there was less activity surrounding Lausanne, Wright recalls, also because of a variety of evangelistic initiatives by personalities like Luis Bush during the “big decade of evangelism in the nineties.”
It was only after Doug Birdsall took on the leadership and organized the 2004 conference in Pattaya, Thailand, that Wright was again invited to participate.
He admits that at the time, he was not sure what the future would hold for Lausanne because there was not as much theology as he would have hoped for.
“But then at that conference, Doug Birdsall took me for a meeting with him over a cup of tea and said that he and his senior committee were unanimous that they wanted to invite me to take on the chair of the Theology Working Group,” Wright recalls.
He was so astonished that he excused himself to the bathroom so he could pray. “And I said: ‘Lord, what are you saying?’”
It took more than a year for him to eventually accept the role, with the permission of his employer, the Langham Partnership, which had been founded by John Stott and in which he was still influential. With their agreement, he took on the role and began building a team. It included several Langham scholars and others who shared the kind of integrated holistic theology of mission that went back to John Stott and previous centuries of evangelicals. And from 2007 up to the 2010 Cape Town Congress, Wright facilitated theological consultations.
One of the first tasks the group took on was looking at Lausanne’s vision that speaks about the whole Church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.
“We thought, it's a lovely slogan, but what does it mean? What is the whole church? What is the whole gospel? And what do we mean by the whole world? Because we don't mean those things in a purely kind of numerical sense. They must have some qualitative meaning as well,” Wright recalls.
Several conferences were held, including a gathering of twenty different theologians from all around the world who met for three days in December 2009. They were tasked with coming up with a fresh statement of evangelical belief for the global Church, but “almost as expected with a bunch of theologians for three days, it just got nowhere,” Wright says.
Following the consultation, the Lausanne leadership asked him if he could take some time over the winter months to try to write something that could ultimately lead to a statement. Only very reluctantly, he took on that task.
“I mean, how can you write a theology for the whole global Church?” he wondered. And looking at church history, there are the Creeds and the great Confessions of the Reformation, he thought, “so who am I to start putting anything together?”
Then in January 2010, less than a year before the Third Lausanne Congress was due to take place in Cape Town, Wright drove for about five hours to spend a week at John Stott’s writing retreat place in Wales.
“And as I was driving, I was praying: ‘Lord, what on earth? How do I start this? What's the most important thing? What really has ‘primacy’?’” he recalls. “And it was almost as if I heard a voice in the car saying: ‘The first and greatest commandment is, love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. And the second is, love your neighbor as yourself. There's no other commandment greater than these.’”
And he remembers thinking: “Ah yes, Lord, You actually did tell us what the first thing was!”
Continuing to reflect on these verses, he then pondered about his own faith, “Why am I a Christian? Why am I engaged in mission? Because I love the Lord Jesus. Because I love the Bible. I love God's people. I try to love the world. It's because of these love commitments that I believe the gospel and so on.”
He wondered if it would be possible to frame a statement in a way that expresses this love for God and everything that has to do with God, similar to the passage in Deuteronomy. He began thinking about different phrases like love God's Word, love God's people, love God, love God's Son, love the gospel. And after reaching the retreat place, he decided to call John Stott to ask him whether he thought this might be a good way forward.
“And John Stott said, ‘yes,’” Wright says, adding that Stott “hadn't thought of any evangelical statement of faith that used that kind of language. It was always ‘we believe’ or ‘we affirm’ or ‘we deny’ or ‘we denounce’, and then usually followed by a series of abstract nouns.”
After that phone call, he remembers thinking, “Well, if I've heard from the Lord and John Stott agrees, it's probably not a bad idea.”
So, Wright spent the whole week praying and crafting what would eventually become the first draft of part one of the Cape Town Commitment.
He sent it back to the working group and received helpful comments, and at their March 2010 meeting in Beirut, “they went through it line by line with a fine-tooth comb,” while retaining the basic structure of the love commitments.
The legacy and impact of the Cape Town Commitment is in God’s hands, Wright says
Asked what he thought of the impact of the Cape Town Commitment on evangelicalism in general and global missions in particular, Wright expressed hesitation about trying to somehow measure it.
“I do get encouraging emails from time to time from people saying that they're using Cape Time Commitment part one as a statement of faith for their organization or their church,” he says. He also mentions that Seoul 2024 Congress Co-Chair and senior pastor of Onnuri church Rev. Jae-Hoon Lee made his elders work through the document paragraph by paragraph in the lead up to the event in Incheon.
He is also encouraged when he hears of churches and believers affirming the Commitment’s integrated theology of word and deed, saying “if this is what we believe, then biblically this is how we must live.”
“In other words, like Jesus said, covenantal love means: if you love me, you keep my commandments. This is the one who loves me, the one who obeys me,” he says. “So, you can't claim to love God and not do the things He said.”
Wright sees this as an anecdotal sign of the document’s impact on the Church but leaves the wider question up to God.
He is generally wary of trying to numerically or statistically measure impact of what he does and recalls Stott’s response to similar questions. “Whenever people would ask John Stott how many books he had written, he would always say, ‘well, I've never really counted, because look what happened to King David when he counted his soldiers,’” Wright says.
“There's a certain danger in doing a census of your own capacities, so I take that sort of seriously.”
There never was any division between proclamation and social action: ‘we separated it’
Asked about a speech by fellow theologian Valdir Steuernagel in the lead up to the Fourth Congress where he called on Lausanne to “keep the gate open” for new emerging voices and to hold onto the legacy of a theology of holistic mission, Wright struck a hopeful tone.
He remembers working alongside Steuernagel and others in the Theological Working Group and then also the Statement Working Group for the Congress in 2010, saying, “We had made sure that the theological work was being done by people who actually believed in an integrated gospel.”
They wanted to avoid a tension between strategy and theology and rather see them as one, he recalls. And he believes “that the heart of Lausanne still is an integrated understanding of holistic mission.”
Looking at the core documents, including the recently released State of the Great Commission Report, he says that evangelism, proclamation and church planting will always need to be an utterly essential, non-negotiable part of mission. “There's no way, in which one could ever say that's simply marginal. It is part of the very centrality of the gospel,” Wright says.
“But the centrality of the gospel is also the reason why we do all the other things,” he adds, pointing to the various sessions and collaboration groups that cover a wide range of issues, such as disability, poverty, justice and creation, all of which are “valid expressions of a Lausanne theology of integrated mission.”
“We engage in all those ways precisely because there is good news about the God who created the world, loves the world, and has redeemed the world through Christ. That is the center that holds everything else together – that’s what integration means,” Wright says.
He laments the tension that arose between the emphasis on proclamation versus social action and hopes that they could be reunited again, emphasizing that “we wouldn't have to relate them if we hadn't separated them in the first place.”
The dichotomy largely goes back to the early years of the 20th century “when liberals went off in a very social gospel direction and stopped believing in evangelism and the power of the cross and the need for conversion and so on.”
Evangelicals then reacted against that saying they needed to concentrate on evangelism, which resulted in this bifurcation, Wright says. Before then, it was definitive of evangelicals that they were engaged in social action.
“You look back to 18th and 19th century evangelicalism: they were notorious for the number of societies they founded for the relief of poverty, for care for children. The Royal Society for the Protection of Animals was founded by evangelicals as well,” he says.
“Evangelicals were engaged in society until the early years of the 20th century. They didn't have to relate [the two]. They were evangelists: they preached the gospel, and they got engaged in society.”
Wright hopes that the Church would find its way back to seeing itself as one body with multiple gifts.
When he teaches about the “five marks of mission” (an expression that was coined by the global Anglican Communion in 1984), including evangelism, discipling, works of compassionate mercy, seeking justice and caring for creation, “there's always somebody who will say: ‘Well, that's an awful lot of things to be doing, and there's only one of me.’ And I say: ‘Oh yeah, I think God probably thought of that too, which is why he created the Church.’”
“Everybody doesn't have to do everything,” Wright says, but everyone should be intentional in using their gifting. No one would criticize the Langham Partnership for not building hospitals and curing the sick. They are called to focus on theological education, which is part of the mission. Equally, they wouldn’t criticize the leprosy mission for not running seminaries and teaching theology, because they should do what they are called to do, Wright argues.
When it comes to local churches, he believes they should do something like a missional audit and ask themselves if they are ready as a body to commit themselves to multiple dimensions of mission, with the gospel at the center.
“If we've lost the good news of the cross and resurrection of Christ, then we might as well give up. There's no hope for the world,” Wright emphasizes. “It's because there is good news that we can legitimately and with authority go to serve the poor and the homeless and the sick and the needy and seek justice and all of that.”
“It's all part of mission provided you keep the gospel at the center, which is where I would put the Great Commission,” he says, pointing out that the Great Commission does not begin with “go and make disciples of all nations”, instead it begins with Jesus saying, “all authority in heaven and earth is given to me.”
“The gospel is central because it is the good news of what God has done through Christ, and every aspect of the Church’s obedient response to Christ flows from that center, as we participate in what God is doing in the world for His ultimate mission of reconciling the whole creation through the blood of the cross,” Wright says.
Therefore, it all revolves around the Lordship of Christ, which essentially is the gospel, he says. Jesus is Lord of the kingdom of God.
“So that's why in my theology, I don't like this constant question” about whether he is more for proclamation or more for social action, Wright says. “I don't recognize those distinctions. I'm committed to holistic mission, the fulfillment of the Great Commission, which must include bearing witness to the gospel and being engaged in society, by obeying all that Jesus commanded – which is a lot!”
Environment, migration, human sexuality as today’s key issues
For Lausanne 4, Wright highlights three areas he sees as especially relevant and urgent for today’s Church to address, also because they have become much more public – at least in the western world where he lives. Other issues, he realizes, will be painfully dominant in other places.
The first is the issue of the environment, creation care and climate change. He believes the Lausanne Creation Care Network has become much stronger as a result of the Cape Town Congress.
“They've had several conferences, they put out statements, and they are here in Seoul,” he says, and emphasizes that nowadays, the issue is seen as culturally and publicly important. “The whole world is talking about climate change, and Christians are now taking it much more seriously than they used to. Thank God they are.”
The second issue is the whole question of migration, asylum seekers, displaced person that Lausanne 3 already touched on. Today, however, there is a much greater awareness of the “massive numbers in diaspora, old diasporas and new diasporas, and migration from not just the south to the north, but even from south to south. Huge numbers of people, millions and millions of people,” he says.
Therefore, the question arises how the Church will missionally respond to that reality: both in terms of the responsibility towards displaced people, migrants and refugees, but also considering how God engages with migration and diaspora peoples, especially those who migrate from cultures where Christianity is strong and move to other places.
The third issue, which was also mentioned briefly in the Cape Town Commitment, is the pressing need to respond to the whole identity and sexuality issue, Wright says.
“Of course, we know that in the West, this has become almost a criterion of belonging to society at all,” he says. The societal view has become the idolatry of the ‘self’, “that you make your own identity. You can construct what you want to be, and that includes your gender as well as everything else.”
This stands somewhat in contrast with the majority world where there has been a much stronger reaction against this ideology due to the more traditional cultures. This does not only include traditional Christian cultures, Wright says. There are generally more traditional perspectives and hierarchies that constrain the issue of sexuality, and in some cases, this includes biblical ways of thinking about what it means to be male and female, and more generally to be human.
According to Wright, the issue is “both serious biblically, but also very sensitive because of its pastoral nature and the importance of treating all people with dignity and love and honor and acceptance, while at the same time upholding the standards that God teaches in the Bible.”
And it's almost impossible to do both, he says, “because if you try to uphold what the Bible says about sex, you are accused of being judgmental and homophobic and everything else, even if you're not. But if you say that we need to be loving and accepting towards those who are same sex attracted, then you're being accused of being gay-affirming without biblical teaching, which again is not true.”
Wright likes to refer to Jesus’ role model in dealing with these kinds of issues, pointing out that “Jesus managed to teach a fully biblical understanding of marriage – and in fact, to reaffirm it from Genesis chapters one and two, and yet he became known as the friend of tax collectors and sinners and prostitutes.”
“How much time did he spend with people like that to be known as their friend? And he showed them love and forgiveness,” he says.
Therefore, Wright’s tagline is: “We need to teach what Jesus taught, but we also need to love like Jesus loved.”
Holding those together is challenging, especially for a church, he acknowledges. For any church with a mixed membership “where people haven't been well taught and don't always understand the issues or haven't really read their Bibles, that can be quite a difficult one.”
‘I hope Lausanne will stay true to its DNA’
Considering all these theological dynamics and contemporary issues that the Church faces today, Wright says his hope for the Fourth Congress is that it will “maintain the integrity of what Lausanne has always stood for in terms of a gospel-centered holistic understanding of mission that includes the whole of life, individual and society and creation.”
And he also hopes that Lausanne will maintain its identity as a catalytic movement. “I think Doug Birdsall put it well when he said that Lausanne’s fruit grows best on other people's trees, by which he meant Lausanne doesn't need to become a big organization itself,” Wright says.
“It's not Lausanne doing mission. It's Lausanne catalyzing, facilitating, and then letting other people do the research and the networking and the activities, which will serve God's Church around the world. I think that's always been Lausanne’s strength: as a catalytic networking movement rather than organizational, operational kind of agency,” he said.
“I hope Lausanne will stay true to its DNA.”
