The Lausanne Covenant

The Lausanne Covenant is a documented covenant between 150 leaders of the evangelical community in 1974. Some leaders include John Stott, author of The Cross of Christ, and Billy Graham. The covenant is extremely interesting and has very good fundamental truths that many evangelicals today have forgotten. I enjoyed Chris Wright's of Langham Partnership International statement regarding this piece of work.

21ST CENTURY REFORMATION

‘My concern,’ said Chris Wright, ‘is not just that the world church should become more evangelical, but that world evangelicals should become more biblical. We need repentance and renewal in the church, as well as renewed passion for world mission. Otherwise, we may become, as the Lausanne Covenant put it, “a stumbling block to evangelism… a betrayal of the Gospel”. Indeed,’ he concluded, ‘my hope for Cape Town 2010 is that it would launch and foster nothing less than a 21st Century Reformation – among evangelicals, who need it as much as any other Christian bloc.’

For there are scandals and abuses in the evangelical world that are reminiscent of the worst features of the pre-reformation medieval church in Europe.

• There are some mega leaders, like ancient prelates, wielding vast wealth, power and control – unaccountable, unattractive and unChristlike.
• There are multitudes of ordinary Christians going to so-called evangelical churches, where they never hear the Bible preached or taught.
• Instead they are offered, in the ‘prosperity gospel’ a form of 21st century indulgences, except that you pay your money not for release from pains after death, but for material ‘blessings’ here and now.
• And there are evangelicals parading ungodly alliances with secular power – political, economic and military – identifying themselves (and the gospel they claim to preach) with agendas and ideologies that reflect human empire not the kingdom of God in Christ.

Will we have the courage to identify and renounce such scandals and to seek a reformation of heart, mind and practice?

The 16th Century Reformation was criticized because it lacked missionary awareness and energy until much later. They were so obsessed with tackling abuses in the church that they neglected world mission. How ironic and tragic will it be if 21st Century evangelicals are so obsessed with world mission that we neglect abuses in the church, blind to our own idolatries and syncretism?

• If reformation without mission was defective,
• then mission without reformation will be deluded, self-defeating and even dangerous.

The Lausanne Covenant, like the Bible itself, commits us to the integration of both.