|PIC1|The Rev S Douglas Birdsall has been International Chairman of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation since the body's global forum in Pattaya, Thailand, in 2004.

Since then, he has been driving the global network forward towards the next major congress, Lausanne III: Cape Town 2010, which will bring together 4,000 Christians in the South African city to assess the challenges and opportunities in respect of world evangelisation.

Most recently, Christians in mission-related work gathered from around the world for the Lausanne Bi-Annual International Leadership Meeting in Budapest, Hungary, last week to pray, plan and work together for Lausanne III.

Rev Birdsall took time out from the conference to speak with Christian Today about Lausanne III and the shape of world mission today.

CT: Lausanne I was defined by the Lausanne Covenant. Lausanne II gave birth to the Manila Manifesto. What can we expect from Lausanne III?

DB: I think at Lausanne III we will be able to look at critiquing the church as thoroughly as we analyse the world. Chris Wright [head of the Langham Partnership] reminded us that the Reformation without mission was deficient but mission without a reformation of the church can be equally dangerous. So, I think the fact that there are so many things in the church that really do obstruct the advance of the Gospel is one area that we have to work on very closely.

I think another major area has to do with involving the laity. If Lausanne I helped us to really think about the nature of holistic ministry and unreached people and Lausanne II brought Pentecostals and evangelicals together, it may be that Lausanne III will release the enormous human resource for world evangelisation in the laity.

Much of evangelisation is done in adverse and hostile situations and evangelisation, which is really 'good newsing', is often confused with proselytising. Proselytising almost always involves coercive behaviour and a lack of ethics. I think we have to really take a look at that because I think many people in the world would like to say 'let the Christians be Christians, let the Hindus be Hindus, but let's not interfere with one another'. So, I think that we really have to make the case for the legitimacy of evangelising and it has to come in the context of both religious freedom and human rights. I think that is a very important issue.

And then related to that is the uniqueness of Christ. In a pluralistic world we have to be able to reaffirm that and then have to be able to share it in a way that really is compelling. But we also know that the cross is an offence so we have to do it courageously - even when people will stone us. There have to be models of courage.



CT: So, we have some challenges ahead.

DB: Yes, I think that there are some very big issues. And that validates the necessity of a congress. We heard last night, again from Christ Wright, evangelicalism today described in terms that are as scandalous as the pre-Reformation church. We see people who have enormous wealth - ministers - and they are extracting that wealth from the people under the guise of a prosperity gospel. If you tithe or do this, God will bless you. But the people who are blessed the most are the ministers who are living like kings. And that is scandalous.

I also think we will experience more suffering in the 21st century. We have already had the tsunami, SARS, Aids, terrorism. We have the capacity to do so much good with technology but we also have the capacity to do so much harm.

If you read the letters of Paul, Peter and John, and you see the life of Jesus, they experienced suffering in such courageous ways and embraced it for its redemptive values. Today we see the church which is experiencing the prosperity gospel, and that's when they'll say Karl Marx was right: this is the religion that is just the opiate of the people that just numbs them to their pain.

If we don't have a theology of suffering that is biblically grounded, culturally relevant, that is really understood and embraced and then preached around the world, then we really run the danger of invalidating the Gospel. The Gospel cannot be seen as Good News if those who bring it are bad news.

CT: There has been a lot of discussion over the course of Lausanne about the use of the term 'evangelical'. Do you think the term 'evangelical' has become a barrier to world mission?

DB: I'm not sure that it has. Just because a term is not completely understood doesn't mean that you abandon it. And one of the reasons that I like the term is that it is a biblical term, euangelion. It was the announcement of a regime change; it was the runner who came to announce the victory in battle. And we are here to announce a regime change, that the Kingdom has come.

However, if within the context of a serious global conversation, and among people who are biblically grounded and embrace the Lausanne Covenant, it has become a pejorative term and a better term can be discovered, then we use words that help to convey the message.

We don't want to become idolatrists with our words. Nor do we want to abandon them too quickly. You could say 'should we get rid of the cross cos that's kind of a tough point?!' Absolutely not.

In Antioch they were first called Christians, not evangelicals. So maybe global Christianity simply needs to reclaim what it means to be Christians, because that's what we are with a capital C. But I am reticent to abandoning the term too quickly.

CT: Lausanne has the enormous vision of the whole church taking the whole Gospel to the whole world. Yet there are some very big challenges - secularisation, hostility to the Gospel, around 3000 people groups still without a witness for the Lord. Are you daunted in the face of such challenges?

DB: No, I embrace the biblical theology and I believe that God is Sovereign and God will accomplish His purposes and that allows us to relax. I've been with mission colleagues who put so much pressure on themselves to get it done - we've got to work harder, we've got to work faster. I don't know how they can sleep at night! But I don't want to imply that we take our role too lightly because the God of the universe did choose us to be His partners and we become the means by which the Gospel is lived and proclaimed in this world.

But with the 3,000 people groups that are there to be reached, it's not intimidating because the resources are there to reach them. It's a matter of re-allocating. It doesn't always mean you have to have people from half way around the world going over to find these people groups because many of them are in diaspora. We need to ask 'who are the people both in cultural and geographical proximity?' If there is, for example, an unreached people group in Malaysia, then these are not hidden people who live in the jungle and haven't been discovered yet. These are people who live in big cities and have a distinctive language and culture.

I think there are ways we can be more effective and efficient with our resources and that comes from looking at where the church is and where the church is not and how we get it from here to there.

CT: And the challenges are not only coming from without Christianity but within. You have also spoken repeatedly of the "scandal of fragmentation" within the body of Christ. Is that something Lausanne is going to address and carry through to Lausanne III?

DB: I think it's something we need to continually address until Christ returns. And I think Lausanne III can play a role in that. When we are talking about the whole church taking the whole Gospel to the whole world, that is an aspiration, a yearning.

It could sound presumptuous and arrogant, that we are the whole church taking the whole Gospel to the whole world, as if we are going to be triumphalistic, but that is the desire of our heart, to be part of a movement whereby the church is united - the whole church.

I really do see authentic unity as a precondition for prophetic witness. So, we have no choice. The reason I say that it is a scandal is because there is the danger that we just take disunity as normative and accept it.

If we are the body of Christ, and we are tearing the body of Christ apart, and we are indifferent to it, and say 'oh that's just the way Protestants are', then we pay no attention to this prayer of Christ that we be one.

As Kingdom colonisers, people should be able to look at our lives and say 'that gives us an idea of Heaven'. But that is very difficult right now. There are so many tensions that could divide us and unfortunately we live in a world in which radical single issue politics seem to dominate. Even we evangelicals can subconsciously become the same way. Forget about the 99 things you and I agree on, there is this one we don't agree on, so see you later.

Let's think about those things that are essential and let's focus on the things that are complementary in our life and in our faith and not the things that are contradictory. We've got to work on church unity.

CT: Lausanne has sometimes been criticised as a talking shop. What would you say to those people who fear that Lausanne III might become just that?

DB: I would say it's very likely that it will be. It is a talking shop. In one sense it is a global think tank. If it were a chit-chat shop, then yes, that is a huge waste of time. If there is only talk and no consequences or action then that is a deficiency.

But in order to act right we have to think right and we have to have an accurate understanding. That's why we bring the right people together to speak and to listen, with the assumption that what we talk about is in search of the truth and better practice.

We want to get the right 4,000 people to Lausanne III and the pre-condition to their coming is that they take the fruit of the congress and process it in their context, their church, their region, their specialisation. We would say that the fruit of Lausanne always grows on other people's trees. We are not a ministry that does church planting or theological education or grassroots evangelism. We bring people together who do that and then we talk about how we can do it better, learning from one another. It is a talk-shop, unashamedly and unapologetically so.

CT: Lausanne was founded by world renowned visionaries like Billy Graham and John Stott. It's now moving to put vision at the forefront. Has that thrown up any new challenges for Lausanne?

DB: I would say new challenges and new opportunities. There are those of us who wish that we had a Billy Graham or John Stott in our generation. We don't. But that doesn't mean that we all hibernate until someone suddenly appears. There are times when all of us need to be aligned behind a vision and either God blesses us with vision and we are visionaries, or we align ourselves with someone else's vision.

The tremendous gift we have received is the vision for world evangelisation and the model of partnership, the Lausanne Covenant. Those are wonderful gifts and wonderfully compelling. This is perhaps a time to identify and help to develop and encourage the next generation, which may include a Billy Graham or John Stott.

And what I find so encouraging is to see so many younger people coming together around the vision and Covenant of Lausanne and saying 'together we can do better'. And that is really our desire, that we leave things better than we found them. We take things forward so that the next generation say 'thank God for the work they did; now hopefully we'll take it higher'. If we could make the church in the world just a little bit better then hopefully we will have fulfilled the purposes of God in our generation.