Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

I do not wish to take for granted all the work that has been done to make this publication possible in time for Lausanne III, and thus would like to express my gratitude to Pieter Kwant and his team at Langham Literature, and to the Langham Partnership, for their most valuable help in preparing this anniversary edition of this book. In particular, I would like to express my deep appreciation to Gretchen Abernathy, who updated the text to take account of changes in language usage since these essays were written, to Virginia Robinson who checked that the quotations from the Bible matched the New Revised Standard Version, and to Isobel Stevenson, for her editorial work.

Preface to the First Edition

All the essays included in this volume have been written within the last decade and reflect my involvement in a number of conferences beginning with the International Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne, Switzerland, 16–25 July 1974. All of them have appeared in various publications in English, some of them were part of a collection of essays published in Spanish under the title El Evangelio Hoy.[1] Except for slight changes, they are printed here in their original form.[2]

The 1974 Lausanne Congress was described by Time magazine as a formidable forum, possibly the widest-ranging meeting of Christians ever held. What the reporter who wrote these words probably had in mind was the fact that the congress had gathered 2,473 participants and close to 1000 observers representing 150 countries and 135 Protestant denominations. More important than that, however, was the impact that the congress produced around the world. As evangelist Leighton Ford has put it, If there has ever been a moment in history when evangelists were in tune with the times, it surely must have been in July of 1974. Lausanne burst upon us like a bombshell. It became an awakening experience for those who attended and thousands of Christians in numerous countries who read about it.

The first part of the second essay in this collection, Evangelism and the World, was one of the papers circulated in English, Spanish, French, German, and Indonesian to delegates in preparation for the congress. The second part of this essay was one of the main presentations at the congress, an attempt to respond to questions and observations that had come to me from all over the world. The two parts were previously published in the official reference volume Let the Earth Hear His Voice, edited by J. D. Douglas.[3]

One of the most valuable results of the congress was the Lausanne Covenant, a 2,700-word, fifteen-point document drafted under the leadership of John Stott. With this covenant, evangelicals took a stand against a mutilated gospel and a narrow view of the Christian mission. In keeping with the desire that the Lausanne Congress be regarded as a process more than an event, a number of us undertook the task of carrying on the debate that had taken place at Lausanne. For that purpose we put together a symposium dealing with the fifteen sections of the covenant. The results were published under the title The New Face of Evangelicalism.[4] The third essay in this volume, Spiritual Conflict, was my contribution to that symposium.

I originally presented What Is the Gospel? (the fourth essay herein) in August of 1975 at the IX General Assembly of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, a student movement within which I have sharpened my theological reflection on the Christian mission for over two decades. It was previously published in preparation for the event in The Gospel Today.[5]

To that same year belongs The Contextualization of the Gospel, a paper I originally read at an international consultation on evangelical literature for Latin America held in June at the Pinebrook Conference Center in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, under the sponsorship of Partnership in Mission and the David C. Cook Foundation. It was subsequently included in the collection Readings in Dynamic Indigeneity, edited by Charles H. Kraft and Tom N. Wisley.[6] A part of it was also included in Hermeneutics and Culture: A Theological Perspective, a paper I read at the Consultation on Gospel and Culture (another outgrowth of the 1974 Lausanne Congress), which was held at Willowbank, Bermuda, in January of 1978. This consultation was sponsored by the Theology and Education Group and the Strategy Working Group of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE), and its proceedings appeared in Gospel and Culture, edited by John Stott and Robert T. Coote.[7]

In November of 1979 the Latin American Theological Fraternity held CLADE II (the Second Latin American Congress on Evangelization) in Lima, Peru. In sharp contrast to CLADE I (which was held in Bogotá in November of 1969), this congress viewed evangelization as inseparable from social and political concerns. Under the motto Let Latin America Hear His Voice, it took the Lausanne Covenant as its frame of reference but sought to relate its message to the concrete reality of poverty and oppression, moral corruption and abuse of power in this area of the world. Christ and Antichrist in the Proclamation of the Gospel (essay six herein) was the paper I read on that occasion. It was originally published in Spanish in Pastoralia magazine (vol. 2, nos. 4–5, November 1980). The English translation appeared in the Theological Fraternity Bulletin (January-March 1981).

The Fullness of Mission was circulated at the Fourth Conference of the International Association for Mission Studies held at Maryknoll, New York, in August of 1978. It was a sort of presentation card with which I became a member of an association that has given me many satisfactions since then. It was later published in the Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research (January 1979).

The Lausanne Covenant is critical of the worldliness involved in compromising the Christian message, manipulating hearers through pressure techniques, and becoming unduly preoccupied with statistics or even dishonest in our use of them (para. 12). That critique took up an objection I raised in my Lausanne paper to the use of the so-called homogeneous unit principle as a basis for church growth. In order to have the whole issue openly debated, the LCWE Theology and Education Group organized a consultation that took place at the headquarters of the Fuller School of World Mission in Pasadena, California, in June of 1977. At that conference I read a paper entitled The Unity of the Church and the Homogeneous Unit Principle. It appeared later in a revised form in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (January 1982) and was reprinted in a book edited by Wilbert R. Shenk, Exploring Church Growth.[8] It is included as the eighth essay in this volume.

Another concern expressed in the Lausanne Covenant provided the subject matter for a worldwide consultation sponsored by the LCWE Theology and Education Group and the Ethics and Society Unit of the Theological Commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship. The signatories of the covenant living in affluent circumstances had accepted their duty to develop a simple lifestyle in order to contribute more generously to both relief and evangelism (para. 9). The meaning of that commitment was explored at the Consultation on Simple Lifestyle held in Hoddesdon, England, in March of 1980. My paper New Testament Perspectives on Simple Lifestyle (essay nine herein) was read at the consultation and later published as part of the proceedings in Lifestyle in the Eighties: An Evangelical Commitment to Simple Lifestyle, edited by Ronald J. Sider.[9]

The tenth and final essay in this collection, The Mission of the Church in Light of the Kingdom of God, previously appeared in the April–June 1984 issue of Transformation magazine. Before that, I had delivered a slightly different version of the essay at the consultation on the Relationship between Evangelism and Social Responsibility (Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 1982), another conference organized by the group that had sponsored the conference on Christian lifestyle. The purpose of the conference was to generate a face-to-face discussion among people stressing two different statements made in the Lausanne Covenant—that evangelism and sociopolitical involvement are both part of our Christian duty (para. 5) and that in the church’s mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary (para. 6). My assignment was to respond to a major paper read by Arthur P. Johnston on The Kingdom in Relation to the Church and the World.

It will by now be very obvious to the reader that most of the essays in this volume reflect the international theological dialogue that has been taking place in evangelical circles since the 1974 Lausanne Congress. As a matter of fact, I doubt that they would ever have been written had the promoters of that dialogue, notably John Stott and Ronald Sider, not kindly drawn me into it. To them and to the many partners in this exciting dialogue, I am deeply grateful. I also want to thank my wife and colleague, Catharine Feser Padilla, for all her encouragement and help throughout these years.

In his prologue to The New Face of Evangelicalism: An international symposium on the Lausanne Covenant[10] John Stott says that in his view the face of evangelicalism presented at Lausanne was still the true evangelical face but that it was wearing a different expression. The old face now wears a new seriousness, he concludes, it is lit with a new smile of joyful confidence in God, and is newly turned in the direction of the contemporary world’s agony and need. Ever since the Lausanne Congress I have seen myself as a highly privileged witness to what the Spirit of God has been doing to give his people a renewed sense of holistic mission. If with these essays I have contributed in a small way toward turning the face of evangelicalism in the direction of a suffering world, let God be praised!

C.R.P.

Buenos Aires

October 1984

1

From Lausanne I to Lausanne III

The First International Congress on World Evangelism (Lausanne I), which took place in Lausanne, Switzerland, from the 16 to 24 July 1974, will pass into history as one of the most significant worldwide missionary events in the twentieth century. It was attended by nearly 2500 participants and 1000 observers from 150 countries and 135 Protestant denominations, and turned out to be a big step forward for evangelicals with its affirmation that social and political responsibility is an essential aspect of the mission of the church. This basic affirmation appears in paragraph 5 of the Lausanne Covenant in the following terms:

We affirm that God is both the Creator and the Judge of all men. We therefore should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of men from every kind of oppression. Because mankind is made in the image of God, every person, regardless of race, religion, color, culture, class, sex or age, has an intrinsic dignity because of which he should be respected and served, not exploited. Here too we express penitence both for our neglect and for having sometimes regarded evangelism and social concern as mutually exclusive. Although reconciliation with man is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless we affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and man, our love for our neighbor and our obedience to Jesus Christ. The message of salvation implies also a message of judgment upon every form of alienation, oppression and discrimination, and we should not be afraid to denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist. When people receive Christ they are born again into his kingdom and must seek not only to exhibit but also to spread its righteousness in the midst of an unrighteous world. The salvation we claim should be transforming us in the totality of our personal and social responsibilities. Faith without works is dead.[1]

This statement synthesized the thinking on a question of vital importance for the life and mission of the church all over the world that had been taking shape in evangelical circles since the beginning of the 1960s. In this introduction to the revised edition of Mission Between the Times, I will attempt to show the valuable contribution that Latin Americans, and especially the Latin American Theological Fellowship (FTL, its acronym in Spanish) made to that development.

The New Awakening of the Evangelical Social Conscience

One of the signs of the times that characterize the last few decades is the awakening of the evangelical social conscience around the world. Evidence of that awakening is the inclusion of this theme among the topics of congresses and assemblies, seminars and consultations organized by a wide range of evangelical churches and denominations.[2]

At least in the Majority World today, there is increasingly less discussion on whether there are cultural, social, and even political tasks that the church is called upon to fulfill as an essential aspect of her mission. The question now is how to go about fulfilling those tasks in faithfulness to the Lord who called his church to be his witness in word as well as in deed.

Historical Perspective

This type of involvement on the part of evangelical churches is not as new as we sometimes imagine. This is not the place to outline the contribution that evangelical Christians have made to the cultural, social, and political life of their countries. Suffice it to mention, by way of illustration, the case of Britain. According to several historians, the spiritual revivals under Wesley and Whitefield in the eighteenth century had such an impact on social structures that there is good reason to believe that those revivals were the main reason why radical social change took place without a bloody revolution like the one that affected France toward the end of that century.[3] The influence that evangelical Christianity exercised on the social and political life in the United States during the 1800s and 1900s has also attracted the attention of scholars.[4]

Unfortunately, the greatest expansion of the gospel on a worldwide scale (probably the largest one in the history of the church) took place during a period marked by what David Moberg has called the great reversal[5]—the departure from social concern on the part of evangelicalism in the United States, especially during the first decades of the twentieth century—and during the decade following World War II. As a result, many of the churches that the modern missionary movement from the West established around the world had a very limited vision of the social dimension of the Christian mission.

The Latin American Theological Fellowship

A sign of the revival of the evangelical social conscience in the last few decades is that several international and interdenominational conferences have been held in various places since the middle of the 1960s. In the Latin American region, the phenomenon was made evident by the First Latin American Congress on Evangelism (CLADE I, its acronym in Spanish)[6] held in Bogotá, Colombia, in November 1969. When Samuel Escobar, a staff member of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), spoke at a plenary session on The Social Responsibility of the Church,[7] his speech was received with an ovation that lasted several minutes. In view of the impact of his presentation, it was not surprising that it was echoed in the Declaración Evangélica de Bogotá (Evangelical Declaration of Bogotá), which underlined the need for Christians to incarnate Jesus’ example in the critical Latin American situation marked by underdevelopment, injustice, hunger, violence and hopelessness.[8]

CLADE I had been planned by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to serve as a launching platform for a strategy to evangelize the whole Latin American continent. That strategy, however, was not appropriated by the churches; consequently it was never implemented. The only concrete result of CLADE I was something that had not been planned by the organizers but was closely related to the concerns expressed by Escobar: the formation of the Latin American Theological Fellowship (FTL), which took place a year later, in November 1970, in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Right from the start, the FTL became a meeting place for people who acknowledged the importance of theological reflection not as an end in itself but in the service of the Christian mission in the world.[9]

Two years later, in December 1972, the second consultation of the FTL took place in Lima, Peru, with the general theme The Kingdom of God and Latin America.[10] Beginning with that consultation, much of the rich theological production of the FTL in succeeding years would contribute to the articulation of a missiology that regards the kingdom of God that has already come in Jesus Christ and is yet to come in its fullness as the basis for the Christian mission.

Lausanne I

The centrality of the kingdom of God for a correct understanding of both the Christian mission and the role of the church in the great symphony of God’s universal purpose was clearly sounded at the First International Congress on World Evangelism held in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974 under the slogan, Let the Earth Hear His Voice. It was heard especially from plenary speakers related to the FTL[11] and from Howard A. Snyder,[12] a plenary speaker with missionary experience in Brazil. It was also very loudly heard through the document entitled Theological Implications of Radical Discipleship,[13] written by an ad hoc group spontaneously formed after the congress had started and signed by about four hundred of the participants, including John Stott.[14] Therein the gospel is defined as God’s Good News in Jesus Christ … Good News of the reign he proclaims and embodies … Good News of liberation, of restoration, of wholeness, and of salvation that is personal, social, global and cosmic.[15]

The input from Latin America, the radical discipleship document, formal and informal discussions on the social dimension of the Christian mission during the congress, and John Stott’s role as chairman of the drafting committee resulted in the inclusion of various important topics related to Christian social responsibility, radical discipleship and church renewal and unity in the Lausanne Covenant.[16] These topics were included without leaving aside others that would be regarded as essential to an evangelical position, such as the truthfulness and authority of Scripture, the uniqueness and universality of Jesus Christ, and evangelism. Despite its shortcomings—especially its failure to point to the inextricable relation between evangelism and social responsibility—the covenant was a death blow to the traditional reduction of the Christian mission to the multiplication of Christians and churches.

From Lausanne I to Lausanne II

For the Lausanne Movement, the years following Lausanne I were characterized by the unpacking of several of the most debatable issues raised in the Lausanne Covenant. By decision of the Lausanne Continuation Committee, in charge of the follow-up to the congress, the task was divided into four functions: intercession, theology, strategy, and communication.

The Lausanne Theology and Education Group, later renamed the Theology Working Group (TWG), was appointed to promote theological reflection on issues related to world evangelization and, in particular, to explore the implications of the Lausanne Covenant.[17] Under the leadership of John Stott, this theological group organized four consultations between 1977 and 1982.[18] I regard it as a God-given privilege to have been invited to participate in all four of them, three times as one of the plenary speakers and once as the person in charge of responding to one of the main papers. The three consultations at which I presented plenary papers were the following:

• Consultation on the Homogeneous Unit Principle, June 1977, Fuller School of World Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. Paper: The Homogeneous Unit Principle and the Unity of the Church (chapter 8 in this book)

• Consultation on Gospel and Culture, January 1978, Willowbank, Bermuda. Paper: Hermeneutics and Culture: A Theological Perspective (chapter 5 in this book)

• Consultation on Simple Lifestyle, March 1980, Hoddesdon, England. Paper: New Testament Perspectives on Simple Lifestyle (chapter 9 in this book)

The underlying assumption in all these consultations was that, as paragraph 5 of the Lausanne Covenant puts it, evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. The following quotation taken from the Commitment that summarized the findings of the Consultation on Simple Lifestyle clearly exemplifies the way in which these consultations ratified the bold statement made in the 1974 document:

The Christian church, along with the rest of society, is inevitably involved in politics which is the art of living in community. Servants of Christ must express his lordship in their political, social and economic commitments and their love for their neighbours by taking part in the political process.[19]

In no way, however, was that understanding of the Christian mission commonly accepted by people related to the Lausanne Movement. That was made quite evident only a few months later by the Consultation on World Evangelization (Pattaya, Thailand, June 1980), organized by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) under the motto How Shall They Hear? Planned as a working consultation with the main objective of developing realistic evangelistic strategies to reach for Christ hitherto unreached peoples of the world, it was almost exclusively focused on people-groups, the homogeneous unit principle and the verbal communication of the gospel.[20] Despite the tight control exercised by the leadership during the conference to make sure that the social aspect of mission would not divert attention from evangelism, the creative thinking that went on in the miniconsultations broke away from the official concern for evangelistic strategies and provided the basis for a Statement of Concern on the Future of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization.[21] This document summoned the Lausanne Movement to help Christians to identify not only people-groups, but also social, economic, and political institutions that determine their lives and the structures behind them that hinder evangelism and to give guidance on how evangelicals lending support to repressive regimes or unjust economic policies can be reached with the whole biblical gospel and be challenged to repent and work for justice.

Although the statement addressed to the LCWE was presented as a serious attempt to build bridges between Christians who did not agree on the relationship between evangelism and socio-political action, the leadership ignored this concern and did not allow it to be openly discussed. The official document issued at the end of the consultation formally ratified Christian commitment to both evangelism and social action but it also reaffirmed the primacy of evangelism. Moreover, it stated that "nothing contained in the Lausanne Covenant is beyond our concern, so long as it is clearly related to world evangelization (emphasis added). David Bosch is quite correct in commenting that the significance of this sentence lies in what it does not say–that nothing in LC is beyond our concern, so long as it clearly fosters involvement in society."[22]

Quite clearly, the Pattaya Consultation on World Evangelization failed to cope with the debatable issue of the relationship between evangelism and social responsibility. The tension already present in the Lausanne Covenant between the statements that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty (paragraph 5) and that in the church’s mission of sacrificial service evangelism is primary (paragraph 6) remained unresolved. This issue was squarely faced at the fourth and last of the consultations organized by the Theology Working Group of the Lausanne Continuation Committee under John Stott’s leadership (this time in collaboration with the Theological Commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship): the Consultation on the Relationship between Evangelism and Social Responsibility (CRESR), which took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan in June 1982.

The plenary paper presented at this consultation by Arthur P. Johnston, a speaker fully accredited by the missionary establishment, on The Kingdom in Relation to the Church and the World[23] threw into relief the rationale behind the traditional approach to the Christian mission, prevalent especially in the West, with its emphasis on the salvation of souls and the planting of churches through evangelism understood as the verbal witness of the church.[24] It made quite clear that this view of the mission is closely related to the concept of the kingdom of God as a spiritual reality subjectively experienced by Christian believers. As Johnston puts it, the kingdom of God is the present inner rule of God in the moral and spiritual dispositions of the soul with its seat in the heart. God does rule as King in the lives of those ‘born again’.[25] From this perspective, evangelism [the verbal witness of the church] as the mission of the church represents the highest vindication of the reconciling work of the cross and the greatest benefit to the world’s poor and oppressed flows from multiple lives made new in Christ Jesus.[26]

From this perspective, the kingdom of God that Jesus Christ announced as a new socio-political order inaugurated and made present in his own person and work becomes irrelevant. The eschatological tension between the already and the not yet—a tension that is taken for granted throughout the New Testament—disappears and the possibility of understanding the kingdom of God—God’s reign present in history—as the basis for the Christian mission is thus removed.

In my response to Johnston (included as chapter 10 in this book under the title The Mission of the Church in Light of the Kingdom of God) I argue for a view of the kingdom of God that gives proper weight to Jesus’ teaching regarding his own role in the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. As a matter of fact, I said, this the basic thrust of the New Testament—that in Jesus’ person and work the kingdom of God has become a present reality and provides the basis for the mission of the church. Between the times of Christ, the church looks back to the already that has been accomplished through Jesus’ first coming and also to the not yet that points to the future completion of God’s redemptive purpose at Jesus’ second coming. Seen in the light of the kingdom of God, I concluded, both evangelism and social responsibility belong together. The gospel is good news about the kingdom of God. Good works, on the other hand, are the signs of the kingdom for which we were created in Christ Jesus. Both word and deed are inextricably united in the mission of Jesus and his apostles, and we must continue to hold both together in the mission of the church, in which Jesus’ mission is prolonged until the end of time.[27]

The document that synthesized the findings of the Grand Rapids Consultation on the Relationship between Evangelism and Social Responsibility