4 Themes in Lausanne’s ‘State of the Great Commission’
By Trevin Wax, TGC.
This September, 5,000 participants from every region of the world will gather in South Korea for the Fourth International Congress on World Evangelization, hosted by the Lausanne Movement. (Thousands more will engage the Congress through satellite sites.)
This will be the 50th anniversary of the First Lausanne Congress, which saw the release of The Lausanne Covenant with John Stott as the chief architect. That document remains a rallying cry for evangelicals around the world. (See my selection of some of the best quotes.)
State of the Great Commission
This week, the Lausanne Movement released “The State of the Great Commission,” a compendium of dozens of charts, graphs, and essays from more than 100 contributors around the globe, looking at world Christianity in light of current trends, with an eye to enhancing evangelical mission efforts in both declaring and displaying Christ in the world.
As with most multicontributor projects, this one is a mixed bag—some essays are fantastic, others do a dutiful job in summing up current thinking without breaking new ground, and a handful make unqualified statements or veer into disputable theological territory among those who affirm the Lausanne Covenant.
Reading through this volume, I noticed four major themes that kept resurfacing—four aspects of mission in the modern world worthy of consideration.
1. Polycentric Mission
This graph from the World Christian Encyclopedia floored me—the shift from 1900 to 2050 in the regional distribution of Christianity.
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