A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  For obvious symbolic reasons, and also because it would be a popular choice with delegates, Graham leaned toward Rome as the site for the conference, but the possibility of rankling Catholic feelings or of raising Fundamentalist suspicions that he was planning to have all the delegates kiss the pope’s toe dictated the choice of a more neutral site, the magnificent Palais de Beaulieu conference center in Lausanne. As soon as Don Hoke and Walter Smyth settled on Lausanne, Graham dispatched several key people from his association to help prepare for the congress. Though he insisted throughout that he and his team should not dominate the planning and execution of the gathering, both Dain and Leighton Ford acknowledged that “he was the recognized, unquestioned leader.” As Ford observed, “It would not have been possible without Billy. He had traveled throughout the world and met Evangelical leaders worldwide. Evangelicals of every stripe had worked together in practical ecumenism on Billy’s crusades, and they got to know him and trust him.” Still, though Graham clearly “could have been an autocrat, settling all the policies, [he] chose not to be.”

  Graham did insist on at least two points. To the disappointment of some, he refused to style the congress as an anti-WCC gathering, explaining that he was pro-Evangelical but not anti-ecumenical. His second demand concerned the criteria for choosing participants, and he made it clear that no liberals need apply. “Radical theology has had its heyday,” he declared. “In the next world congress, every participant must be totally and thoroughly Evangelical.” Jack Dain readily agreed with Graham, contending that wrangling over basic questions of belief would undermine the effectiveness of such a meeting. He professed to believe there is a proper place for dialogue but added, “Lausanne . . . is not it.”

  In Graham’s vision of the meeting, every country in the world that allowed people to attend would be represented. At least half the participants would be from the Third World. Fully one third would be laypeople; the rest would be involved in cross-cultural mission efforts, full-time evangelistic ministries such as crusades and radio, denominational or parachurch mission agencies, theological and mission education, and other activities concerned with evangelization, which was seen as involving not just proclamation (evangelism), but the entire process of incorporating converts into churches and training them to teach and serve others. To make sure that what was learned would not be lost on those too old to put it into practice, Graham urged that 60 percent of the participants be under forty-five, with only 10 percent of the invitations going to elder statesmen over sixty-five. In a significant departure from the common Evangelical practice of barring women from public roles, Graham suggested that 10 percent of the participants be women. Inevitably, regional leaders fudged a bit to make sure that some of their cronies got invitations, but the final list of 2,400 included an impressive mix of cultures, ages, abilities, experience, and points of view. (Originally, Graham had wanted to invite 3,000 participants, but the cost, increased by three successive boosts in airfare in one year, forced a cutback.) Not everyone who was invited was able or willing to attend. Citing objections to the size and expense of the conference, more than half of the UK invitees declined their invitations, even though the British Evangelical Alliance put together a package that included travel and ten days in a Lausanne hotel for a hundred pounds. The East German government, apparently still regarding Billy Graham as an enemy, refused visas to all forty GDR delegates. In surprising contrast, Cuba not only permitted four men to attend the conference but loaned two of them money for the trip.

  As with any BGEA project, little was left to chance. Planning in every area was extensive and meticulous, but no aspect received more attention than the program itself. Rather than risk having veteran speakers rely on glibness rather than on thorough preparation, Leighton Ford’s committee not only insisted that papers be submitted months in advance but distributed copies to all invitees, inviting them to submit any responses they might have, as a condition of attending the congress, and instructing each speaker to prepare a revised address that incorporated the feedback. The final published compendium contained both the original and revised versions of the papers, making clear that the exercise was not taken lightly. One controversial paper received more than twelve hundred responses; in Haiti two hundred clergymen worked on the papers, though only one had been invited to Lausanne. An official working with Ford’s committee explained, “We are trying to pick the brains of the church around the world.” Given such unprecedented participation by Evangelical Christians from almost every nation in the world, Don Hoke felt justified in daring to hope that the Lausanne Congress would become a sort of twentieth-century Pentecost, an explosion of imagination and energy that would generate “a great spiritual fission whose chain reaction worldwide will speed the completion of Christ’s great commission in this century.”

  By the time the congress opened in mid-July, it seemed clear something remarkable was in the offing. In his keynote address, which some associates have characterized as the most carefully crafted presentation of his career, Graham observed that the decline of evangelism in liberal churches could be traced to three primary causes: the loss of confidence in the Bible and thus in the authority of the gospel message; preoccupation with social and political problems, particularly at the leadership levels of denominations and interchurch agencies; and greater concern with an artificial organizational unity than with unity that develops naturally around a common task—-specifically, evangelism. To counteract those ever-present dangers, he called for reaffirmation of the authority of Scripture and the formulation of a biblical declaration on evangelism that would not only serve as a rallying point for Evangelicals but would challenge the World Council of Churches, which would hold its septennial meeting in Djakarta the following year. Next, he expressed his hope that the conference would help clarify the proper relationship between evangelism and social responsibility, so that Evangelicals neither denied their obligation to meet tangible human needs nor became so consumed with social concerns that they, like the WCC, abandoned evangelism. In this connection, he warned against identifying the Christian gospel with any particular political program or culture—again drawing warm applause, particularly from Third World participants—and noted that “when I go to preach the Gospel, I go as an ambassador for the Kingdom of God—not America.” And finally, following his unextinguishable ecumenical instincts, Graham expressed a strong hope that the gathering would help Evangelicals of every stripe in every nation feel they were part of a worldwide movement, and that it would encourage them to examine ways to identify and pool their resources to accomplish the awesome task of world evangelization.

  The Lausanne Congress resembled the 1966 Berlin meeting in many ways. Once again, the lobby of the main convention hall was dominated by a “population clock” that ticked off the number of unsaved folk being born every minute—nearly two million by the time the meeting adjourned. And once again, some participants evinced great surprise to learn that so many others believed as they did. In Berlin it had been the formerly murderous Auca Indians; at Lausanne it was the more civilized but similarly isolated Cuban delegation. Don Hoke remembered that on about the third day of the congress, the four Cuban ministers stopped him in the huge almost-empty lobby. “They were about this high,” he recalled, placing his hand at his sternum. “They were dancing around me and just dancing with joy. I don’t speak any Spanish, but one of them spoke English. What they felt was an exuberance to find out there were so many Christians in the world, that these people all believed what they believed, that people from all over the world sang the same songs they sang and heard the same Bible passages preached. They had never dreamed they were anything but a persecuted minority, and here they found people from many nations and churches, all united in biblical evangelism. It just blew their minds, as the young people say.” More widely traveled but also aglow with delight at seeing the melange of believers from 150 nations, Ugandan bishop Festo Kivengere observed that “you didn’t have to say, ‘They are one.’
You saw it. It was a demonstration of how Christians can be one in spite of their different backgrounds.”

  Despite such similarities, Lausanne moved beyond Berlin in important ways. At the earlier meeting, the population clock hammered home the fact that millions being born might never hear of Jesus Christ. At Lausanne an attempt was made to identify those people and locate where they lived. Most Evangelical observers credit the Lausanne Congress with giving high-profile visibility to the concept of “unreached peoples,” which has dominated mission efforts since 1974. The concept itself was not new; for generations, missionaries raised money and traveled to far countries to take the Christian gospel to those never before exposed to it. It had, however, been brought into sharper focus and refined by Evangelicalism’s unquestioned experts in missiology, Donald McGavran and Ralph Winter, both of whom taught at the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission, which came into being after delegates at the Berlin Congress strongly encouraged McGavran to found a school dedicated entirely to mission endeavors. Because some form of Christianity can be found in most nations of the world, some assumed that the need for foreign mission efforts had passed. McGavran and Winter’s contribution was to demonstrate unmistakably that most peoples, defined as sizable sociological groupings of “people who perceive themselves to have a common affinity for one another”—groups united, for example, by ethnic, religious, political, or other cultural attributes—were unreached, defined as having “no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize [their] people group without outside (cross-cultural) assistance.” These concepts served to destroy complacency about the success of Christian missions. Westerners reading that Billy Graham had preached to 100,000 in Nagaland might imagine that Christianity was about to drive the last remants of Hinduism into the Ganges. In fact, it was largely confined to distinct and anomalous subcultural pockets scattered here and there around the country, and Christian believers made up no more than approximately 2 percent of India’s population. In southern India, for example, nearly all Christians were drawn from only five of the one hundred subcastes, or peoples, found in that state. Similar examples exist in virtually every country. Identifying such groups made it possible not only to determine who needed to be evangelized but also to tailor mission efforts to a particular people, much as a secular advertiser attempts to target a specific audience. Instead of deciding to be a missionary to Bolivia, one might now train to work primarily among that nation’s Aymara Indians. Instead of taking a gospel shotgun to Nigeria, a properly equipped missionary might aim a redemption rifle at the Maguzawas, a people known to dislike Islam and therefore possibly open to Christianity.

  To drive home the scope and specific dimensions of the mission challenge, the congress’s steering committee commissioned World Vision, the respected Evangelical benevolent agency with extensive international contacts, to collaborate with the Fuller School of World Mission to produce a Handbook of Unreached Peoples, containing a detailed analysis of the state of Christianity in virtually every country in the world, with specific attention to the people groups deemed most in need and most amenable to evangelization. Realization that of the 2.7 billion non-Christians in the world, nearly 2 billion were in areas without a significant Christian witness of any kind, and that many people groups in countries where Christianity was reasonably strong had been overlooked, had a stunning and lasting effect on congress participants. In subsequent years World Vision has continued to produce an annual Handbook, regarded as a basic reference tool for world mission. Its 1982 publication, the 1,400-page World Christian Encyclopedia, also funded in part by the Lausanne Committee, a continuation organization spawned by the congress, is regarded by many as perhaps the most impressive demographic study of Christianity ever assembled. In addition, the concept of unreached peoples has become one of the fundamental principles of Evangelical Christian mission. To reach the unreached, Winter and McGavran explicitly rejected the liberal view that cross-cultural mission efforts are no longer appropriate. They readily admitted that evangelism is easiest and most effective when performed by people similar to those they are trying to convert. Upper-middle-class white Americans are more likely to be attracted to an upper-middle-class church in their own neighborhood than to a black Pentecostal church in a ghetto storefront. Conversely, Presbyterian converts from Islam will find it difficult to share their newfound faith with upper-caste Hindus. But since “near-neighbor evangelism” is impossible when none of the neighbors are Christians, cross-cultural evangelism is imperative if people in unreached areas are to be won to Christ. And since Evangelicals devoutly believe that those not won to Christ will spend eternity in hell, there is little choice for compassionate souls but to accept the challenge and do the job as well as they can, despite the inevitable difficulties.

  At Lausanne, in what some Evangelicals regard as “one of the milestone events in missiology,” Winter delineated three types of evangelism, which he code-named El (near-neighbor evangelism, in which the only barrier is the gospel), E2 (evangelism involving “significant but not monumental differences of language and culture,” as when North American missionaries attempt to establish Evangelical churches in Scandinavia or in the major cities of South America), and E3 (evangelism involving radical differences in culture, as when educated Western Christians plunge into African jungles or when Korean charismatics employed in Saudi oil refineries try to share their enthusiastic faith with their Arab co-workers). Obviously, Winter conceded, E3 evangelism is the most difficult, the most expensive, the least likely to succeed. But if Christians are to take seriously Jesus’ final instruction to his disciples, they have no choice but to attempt it. The master pattern for world evangelization, he and McGavran contended, is to use E3 and E2 evangelism to cross cultural barriers and establish strong indigenous churches, and then to step back and allow those churches to perform the easier and more fruitful E1 evangelism.

  That clarion call to a renewed emphasis on cross-cultural evangelism, coming at a time when both the institutional church and formal mission efforts were under sharp criticism, not only in ecumenical circles but also among some Evangelicals, was not the most popular address at Lausanne, but it may have been the most influential. Don Hoke observed that “those concepts were an in-house thing at Fuller. It would have taken years to get them out to the church. But Lausanne gave them instant worldwide visibility.” Not long afterward, tension on the Fuller faculty led Winter to leave the seminary to found the U.S. Center for World Mission, also headquartered in Pasadena and now regarded as perhaps even more important and influential than the program at Fuller. While acknowledging that Winter’s own abilities and efforts were the primary force in these developments, Hoke pointed out that Lausanne played a crucial role: “By giving Ralph that platform, we gave him worldwide visibility in one night. The press picked it up, mission leaders picked it up, and the whole thing has gone forward since then.”

  The resistance to cross-cultural evangelism stemmed largely from resentment of attempts by Western missionaries to impose aspects of Western culture on target peoples as if those aspects were part of the gospel itself. Many participants noted the need for greater cultural sensitivity when presenting the gospel to other cultures, citing such offenses as the use of music deemed irreverent or secular, inappropriate dress, disregard of dietary customs, and particularly among young people, activities in which males and females were expected to mingle in ways that might be perfectly normal at an American church camp but appeared scandalous in less permissive cultures. Participants also urged greater understanding after conversion occurred. Winter observed that if African converts from Islam want to pray five times a day and hold services on Friday (the Muslim day of worship), there was no pressing need to dissuade them from such practices. On a matter of greater significance, a majority of those who prepared a report on evangelizing polygamous cultures concluded that converts should not leave their spouses after becoming Christians, though they should be instructe
d not to acquire any additional partners.

  Lausanne also moved beyond Berlin by giving greater attention to Christian social responsibility. At the earlier meeting, concern for social action, particularly with respect to race, came primarily from the floor rather than from scheduled speakers and was regarded as something of a protest against a carefully controlled individualistic emphasis. At Lausanne plenary speakers provided the stimulus that led to a deserved identification of the congress with renewed concern in Evangelical circles for social action. The two most significant statements were those of Argentinian Rene Padilla and Canadian (with Latin roots) Samuel Escobar. Padilla sharply criticized the tendency of American Evangelicals to identify Christianity with a politically and economically conservative middle-class American way of life. Such a standpoint, he charged, created “innumerable prejudices” against Christianity in Third World countries and lent support to the Marxist critique of religion as the “opium of the people.” Effective mission, he insisted, could not be exclusively otherworldly. Perhaps thinking of the dramatic population clock in the lobby, he observed that “there is no place for statistics on ‘how many souls die without Christ every minute,’ if they do not take into account how many of those who die, die victims of hunger.” Escobar mounted a similar attack on the biased social views of American Evangelicals, noting their tendency to oppose the violence of revolution but not the violence of war, to condemn the totalitarianism of the Left, but not that of the Right; to speak openly in favor of Israel, but to say little about the plight of Palestinian refugees; to tell the poor to be content with their poverty, but not to call on the rich exploiter to surrender his possessions; to encourage the victims of racial discrimination to look forward to a color-blind heaven, but not to condemn segregation if that might cause their churches to lose members; and to condemn “all the sins that well-behaved middle-class people condemn, but say nothing about exploitation, intrigue, and dirty political maneuvering done by great multinational corporations around the world.” As for Billy Graham’s contention that concentration on the social implications of the gospel would lead to abandonment of evangelism, Escobar stated flatly, “I would like to affirm that I do not believe in that statement. I think the social gospel . . . deterioriated because of poor theology. The sad thing is that those who have the right theology have not applied it to social issues.” With a bit more balance than Padilla, Escobar acknowledged that many First World missionaries in Latin America gave their lives in selfless service to the poor and oppressed, and that many indigenous Evangelicals displayed little concern for their countrymen. Still, because the lion’s share of resources were concentrated in Western nations, Western Christians must take seriously the “complex issues and ambiguities by which the missionary task is surrounded” and must not only proclaim that “the end is at hand” but also seek to make this world “a bit less unjust and cruel, as an evidence of our expectation of a new creation.”