The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

The International Congress on World Evangelization met at Lausanne in Switzerland from 16 to 25 July 1974 (Stott, The Lausanne Covenant: An Exposition and Commentary, Introduction, A). John Stott, who took part, counts 2,700 participants from more than 150 nations, half of them from what he calls the Third World (Stott, The Lausanne Covenant: An Exposition and Commentary, Introduction, A). The American evangelist Billy Graham, in the opening address, set the meeting in the line of the missionary conference at Edinburgh in 1910 and of a meeting in Berlin eight years before (Graham, Why Lausanne?, pp. 22, 24–25); see the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh. He hoped the congress would frame a biblical declaration on evangelism and state how evangelism is related to social responsibility (Graham, Why Lausanne?, p. 34). He warned against identifying the Gospel with any one political programme or culture, and called this his own danger (Graham, Why Lausanne?, p. 30).

A speaker from Latin America pressed the same point. René Padilla, a student worker based in Buenos Aires (Padilla, Evangelism and the World, p. 116), attacked what he called “culture Christianity”, the identification of the Gospel with a culture, and in his own day with the “American Way of Life”, which made the Gospel a product offered at the lowest possible cost (Padilla, Evangelism and the World, pp. 125–126). Repentance, he argued, has a social dimension. He rejected both a salvation confined to this life, naming the Latin American theology of liberation, and a salvation of the soul that withdraws from society (Padilla, Evangelism and the World, pp. 128–129); compare Medellín and Liberation Theology.

The congress issued the Lausanne Covenant. John Stott, rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, in London, chaired the drafting committee; a third draft was put to all the participants, who sent in many hundreds of comments, and the committee revised the text in their light (Stott, The Lausanne Covenant: An Exposition and Commentary, editorial note and Preface). The covenant speaks for members of the church of Jesus Christ from more than 150 nations and ends with a solemn covenant to pray, plan and work together for the evangelization of the whole world (Lausanne Covenant Introduction and Conclusion). It affirms the Old and New Testaments as the only written word of God, “without error in all that it affirms” (Lausanne Covenant 2). It defines evangelism as the proclamation of the historical, biblical Christ as Saviour and Lord, with a view to persuading people to come to him (Lausanne Covenant 4). On social responsibility it expresses penitence for having sometimes treated evangelism and social concern as mutually exclusive. Social action is not evangelism, it says, and political liberation is not salvation, yet evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of Christian duty (Lausanne Covenant 5). It counts more than 2,700 million people as not yet evangelized and says that those who live in affluence accept a duty to develop a simple style of life (Lausanne Covenant 9).

Two further congresses built on the covenant. At Manila in July 1989 more than 3,000 people from about 170 countries issued a manifesto (Manila Manifesto Introduction), which calls evangelism primary and good news and good works inseparable (Manila Manifesto A, 4 (The Gospel and Social Responsibility)). At Cape Town in October 2010, 4,200 evangelical leaders from 198 countries reaffirmed both documents and noted that at least two thirds of the world’s Christians now lived in the global south and east (Cape Town Commitment Foreword and Preamble).