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This chapter was written for the second edition of
my book Recent trends Among Evangelicals during Easter 1991, eighteen
months after the Lausanne II in Manila Conference on World Evangelization
(July 11-20, 1989). It is deliberately impressionistic – a montage
of quotes, ideas and my reactions. It is still too early for a
serious evaluation.

The 3200 participants (4,336 total attenders, 24%
women) from 180-190 countries made Lausanne II the most universal
gathering of Christian leaders ever. The statistics and trends
outlined here are still generally current.

The theme for the conference was ‘Proclaim Christ
until He comes!’ Sub-theme: ‘The whole Gospel (Jesus makes us
whole) to the whole world (disciple every ethnic group) by the
whole church (all the people of God).’

In addition to plenary sessions, 326 leaders ran
48 subject tracks and 425 workshops. The 190 Australians comprised
the second largest contingent after the U.S. Forty people from
many nations came at their own expense to pray non-stop.

We met in a nation described by Philippines Senator
Jovito Salonga in his welcome address as the most Christian and
the most corrupt in Asia. ‘In our newspapers you can believe only
three sections: classified ads, death notices, and comics!’ Eighty-one
families control most of the wealth; 85% of the children are malnourished;
the overseas debt is $30 billion (40% of the budget). In Metro
Manila 30% are street people or slum dwellers: squatters in their
own country.

Our Father’s World.

During the conference we learned that # Of the world’s
five billion people, 23% are ‘absolutely poor’, 950 million are
hungry, 550 million severely malnourished, 400 million starving,
100 million have no shelter at all; there are 60 million abandoned
children and infants, 600 million sick children, 65 million abortions
a year, 510 million crime victims per year, and 2.6 billion are
denied full religious freedom. # Practising Christians number
1.2 billion; 26,625,000 Christians have been martyred this century
(currently 235,000 pa). # Women comprise 80% of all refugees,
70% of all poor, receive 10% of the world’s income with 62% of
the work, are 66% of the illiterates, own 1% of world property.
200 million are battered. # Nearly 50 two-thirds world countries
have 55% or more under 20. In Surinam it’s 66%! The average age
in Mexico City is 14 1/2 years! # Most Soviet church members now
have a Bible: millions more are needed for the unchurched. # ‘Can
the West be converted?’ (Newbigin). The re-evangelization of Europe
is a high priority: future mission will be ‘from six continents
to six continents’, and will move from paternalism to partnership.
# The largest church in the world (Yoido Full Gospel Church, Seoul,
Korea), numbered 600,000 members (it now has 800,000). # Supermarkets
in Argentina were changing prices every four hours; the price
of petrol went up five times in one day.

Random Impressions

The happiest group in Manila were the Nepalese. (They
were also the poorest: they came early and had to fast for three
days because they had no money; they’d also probably spent more
time in prisons than other delegations). The most serious were
the Russians, whose ‘agents’ apparently gave cues about when to
applaud. They said there was too much levity, and didn’t appreciate
‘galloping gourmet’ Graham Kerr’s jokes. (The Latins and American
blacks said there wasn’t enough celebration. You can’t please
them all). The most anti-charismatic were the Germans and Japanese.
The most pro-charismatic were the Latin Americans and those with
darker skins. Most popular speaker for the better- educated: Os
Guinness. (Others couldn’t understand him; many of the translators
went at their own pace from his script). The smallest contingent
was perhaps the husb- and-wife Campus Crusade team from Bahrein.

My best conference experiences (in order): (1) Net-
working with courageous, interesting, challenging Christian leaders
from all over the world, making new friends. (2) Acting as ‘Robin
Hood’, separating money from Swiss, Germans, Americans and Australians
so Czechs, Russians and Indians could buy theological books from
the conference bookshop. (3) John Stott’s Bible studies. Best
non-conference experiences included getting to know some ‘poorest
of the poor’ street people who slept out in the drizzle, and throwing
a party for 40 of them! (The left-handed definition of an evangelism
conference: ‘talking about what we should be doing!’). Many of
us visited Smoking Mountain garbage dump, where shacks built on
the garbage itself have putrid smoke through them all the time.
A poor person came running with a 100 peso note one of us had
dropped.

In my view the weakest dimensions were in the areas
of spirituality for mission (no evangelical, to my know- ledge,
has yet done a doctoral thesis in this specific area, which says
something about a frontier yet to be conquered); the sacramental
dimension (evangelicals are still too activist); and worship (we
should have allowed the Latins or Africans teach us how to celebrate).
The worship sessions at the World Council of Churches’ Assembly
in Canberra (February 1991) were generally, by contrast, magnificent.
(A lot of other things at that conference weren’t magnificent,
but they will have to wait for another book!).

The two most-talked-about plenaries were Yugoslavian
Peter Kuzmic’s plea, in the wake of the fall of several televangelists:
‘We don’t need better methodology, but more integrity’; and Chinese
evangelist Chen’s recounting how he praised God from a cess-pit.

Australian Anglican Archbishop David Penman, who
launched the first edition of this book, was one of three Bible
study leaders. He was not well at the conference, and became seriously
ill from a heart attack a day or two after he returned. A couple
of months later he lost the battle altogether, and modern evangelicalism
is bereft of one of its ‘greathearts’.

John Stott was the prime mover behind both the 1974
Lausanne Covenant and the Manila Manifesto (see appendix). Stott
is an English Anglican pastor, prolific author, confirmed bachelor,
and amateur ornithologist. (He told a press interviewer, ‘I don’t
believe bird- watchers have nervous breakdowns!’). Evangelism
and social action (‘like the two wings of a bird’) was the main
issue in Manila, he said. Second? – the charismatic movement.
He advocated James 1:19 as a key text for modern evangelicals
– ‘Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to become angry.’ And
it’s a ‘double listening’, he said, both to the Scriptures and
to the modern world, putting the two together. The greatest hindrance
to world evangelization? ‘Sin in the Christ- ian community…
part of which is a by-product of Christian competition, which
some defend because it works in capitalism – a worldly argument!’

A book published just before the Manila Conference
(Essentials: a Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue, by David L. Edwards
and John Stott, Hodder and Stoughton, 1988) contrasted Stott’s
‘radical conservative evangelical’ (his phrase) approach, with
the views of another British (and more liberal) Anglican scholar.
Essentially it boiled down to Stott’s ‘higher’ view of the authority
of Scripture. He applied to David Edwards the words of Luther
to Erasmus: ‘The difference between you and me, Erasmus, is that
you sit above Scripture and judge it, while I sit under Scripture
and let it judge me.’

Key Issues

Lausanne II in Manila met while # history’s greatest
migration (rural poor to cities) was taking place; # the 37 poorest
nations had cut health spending by 50%, education by 25% in the
previous few years to pay huge debts to the West; # Islam (908
million people) was growing 2.7 % pa, vs. Christianity’s 2.1%.
They compose the largest unreached people groups (eg. of 26 million
Kurds fewer than 100 are Christian); # 149 countries reported
AIDS victims (within a few years, WHO predicts, 5-10 million will
be infected with the HIV virus); # China is repressing dissidents
(and probably the 50-70 million Christians: none could be present);
# women are accepting a higher profile (four plenary speakers
at Lausanne II vs. none at Lausanne I); # there’s ambivalence
about lifestyle: simplicity isn’t as popular as prosperity for
evangelicals.

Below is a selection of reactions to the conference,
together with my own editorializing:

Frogs and lizards. Of six or seven major themes,
the attack on clericalism was the most memorable. Ninety per cent
of the church spends 97% of its time scattered. Frogs (clergy)
sit in one place and food (customers) come to them; lizards have
to go foraging. The clergy’s job, affirmed many of the speakers,
is to equip laypeople to be the church and they generally haven’t
done a good job of it! The laity’s mission is more than ‘Pray,
pay and obey!’ One Reformation put the Bible into the hands of
ordinary Christians; another is needed to put the ministry there
as well. ‘We tell people to pray, but we don’t tell them how’,
said Australian Lausanne leader John Mallison.

Good News for the Poor (Luke 4:18) was another recurring
theme. The poor apparently read the Bible differently, so rich
Christians are likely to get it all wrong, said many speakers
with darker skins… Despite malnutrition, western economic imperialism,
unjust local structures, and huge debts to rich nations, the church
of the poor is a joyful one! In 1979 $40 billion p.a. flowed from
north to south; a decade later it was $20 billion p.a. the other
way ($60 billion if we include decreases in commodity prices).
Oppression wears many faces, from helpless Vietnamese boat-people
to powerless Mozambican refugees, to ‘you’ll push us no further’
South African blacks. Unless we serve the poor we do not serve
Christ. And we should serve them as Christ did – going to them,
not expecting them to come to us.

World Evangelization. Christianity’s centre of gravity
is shifting from West to East, North to South. Missions are becoming
internationalized. At Lausanne I, 17,000 people groups needed
evangelizing; now it’s 12,000 – mostly in a belt from West Africa
to Asia, 10 to 40 degrees north of the equator. Only seven in
every 100 missionaries work in these Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist
cultures. Many countries are planning ‘Mission 2000’ crusades.

Women should exercise their God-given ministry. Some
(mostly men) wouldn’t want God to choose a Deborah to lead his
people! Sexist language was used sometimes in Manila (even by
women). Many women urged churches to set up ways for gifted women
to be trained in the use of their public gifts: their ministries
won’t blossom without this encouragement.

A few Catholics were there as participants (so some
conservative Americans stayed home), others as observ- ers. A
perceptive prophecy: ‘We will not evangelize the remaining 12,000
unreached people groups without the help of evangelical Catholics.’
Filipino Catholics are using Lutheran ‘Joy of Discovery’ inductive
Bible study materials to train lay leaders. Conversely, many evang-
elicals are now reading Catholic authors, particularly in the
area of spirituality (eg. Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Anthony
D’Mello).

And Catholics are studying evangelicalism. Under
God: Religion and Politics by Garry Wills (Simon and Schuster)
has an interesting coverage of the 1988 American presidential
elections, and the role evangelicals and fundamentalists played
in it. Michael D’Antonio has written a racy account of the tumbling
televangelists in Fall from Grace (Andre Deutsch) although his
sub-title ‘The Failed Crusade of the Christian Right’ might be
premature. (However, North American evangelicalism’s most prolific
critic, Martin Marty, notes that the ‘evangelical-moralists’ were
disappointed with Jimmy Carter and got little but illusion from
Ronald Reagan. ‘The president of their dreams [Reagan], who identified
with them, gave them little and took much so far as their historic
norms were concerned. Close enough now to running the show that
they can no longer blame a single other camp for misrunning it,
they have entered a period of disarray and sense a need for revising
goals.’ [‘The Years of the Evangelicals’, Christian Century, Feb.
15, 1989]).

Our mission. The Manila Manifesto says ‘Evangelism
is primary’. When will we ever learn? Surely worship is primary.
Authentic mission emanates from authentic worship. Evangelicals
who miss this become triumphalistic. We didn’t celebrate very
well. The agenda was typically Western-dominated: too literate,
wordy, cerebral. We need to take more time to be lost in wonder,
love and praise in the presence of our wonderful Lord. And our
first priority in mission is justice (Micah 6:8, Matthew 23:23,
Luke 11:42), because the essence of who we are as humans is our
being made in God’s image (sin is a reality, but an aberration):
justice addresses our God-like dignity; evangelism our alienation
and lostness. A recurring question for the church is always: Who,
in our community, are what the New Testament calls ‘lost’? The
lost, in the Bible, are oppressed, needing advocacy and justice;
they are suffering pain in many forms, needing mercy and compassion;
or are ‘without Christ and without hope’ needing to hear (and
see) the proclamation of the good news. God has put these three
together so let no one – in this world or under it! – separate
them.

We tried to balance charismatic differences, with
key speakers J I Packer (whom I would describe as ‘warm Reformed’)
and Jack Hayford (‘enlightened Pentecostal’). There are still
serious polarizations on this issue, so the following night Leighton
Ford made a statement about our unity in love, as we express our
diversity. Non- charismatics need less defensiveness, Pentecostals/charismatics
need more sensitivity. In other words we all need more heat and
light! Pentecostals/charismatics now number 340 million, and grew
157% from 1975 to 1985. They are now one-fifth of all Christians,
one-fourth of the full-time workers, are responsible for half
of all conversions to Christ, and have the world’s ten largest
churches.

The Pentecostals/charismatics are teaching us that
truth is not a formula, it is an experience. Orthodoxy is not
as important as orthopraxis. True belief is more than dogma. Catholic
writer Anthony d’Mello says, ‘The word "love" is not
love, and the word "God" is not God. Neither is the
concept. Nobody ever got intoxicated on the word "wine".
No one ever got burnt on the word "fire".’ In the last
five years Scripture choruses have invaded about 95% of Australian
Protestant churches, and probably half now witness prayer for
the sick with the laying on of hands. But there is still a drift
of thoughtful people back to the mainline and evangelical churches,
by those who have had a charismatic experience, attended a Pentecostal
church for about two years, enjoyed their music and worship, but
could not stomach preaching which by-passed the mind. Stuart Briscoe
asks: ‘What part of my being could I have left at home when "going
to church"?’ For many Pentecostals it’s their mind. For many
non-charismatics it’s their enthusiasm! We can still echo what
Ronald Knox wrote about enthusiasms: ‘They are not a wrong tendency
but a false emphasis [but nonetheless] tend to have a powerful
effect in waking us up from religious apathy.’

An important resource for any wanting to research
this whole area: The Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic
Movements (1988: Regency Reference Library, Grand Rapids, Michigan).

And all evangelicals, whether charismatic or not,
need to heed the call of the Consultation on Evangelical Affirmations,
co-sponsored by the American National Association of Evangelicals
and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, May 14-17, 1989: ‘We
affirm the critical need to conjoin faith and practice. To profess
conversion without a genuine change of heart and life violates
biblical teaching and substitutes a dead orthodoxy for a living
faith. Christian leaders bear a heavy responsibility to serve
as spiritual role models and moral examples. Any disjunction between
faith and practice generates hypocrisy. We send forth an urgent
call for the practice of holiness and righteousness. Justification
by faith must issue in sanctification. By the power of the indwelling
Holy Spirit, we are to deny such characteristics of a selfish
nature as immorality, evil desire, and covetousness, to walk in
righteousness and integrity, and to practise justice and love
at all times. Purity of doctrine must be accompanied by purity
of life.’

Racism. For Caesar Molebatsi, Michael Cassidy and
Nico Smith, evangelical identification with the oppressed and
our Christian witness are closely tied. South Africa, they said,
is moving towards a post-apartheid society, but not quickly enough.
Nico Smith, a Dutch Reformed Afrikaner pastor, lives in a black
community to ‘give feet’ to his commitment. With respect to trade
sanctions, for Cassidy his heart says ‘yes’ but his head says
‘no’: 1000 new jobs for blacks are needed each day; and the ‘Afrikaner
psyche’ gets tougher when pushed too hard. Pressures short of
comprehensive sanctions are most appropriate.

Two books about racism in the ‘must read’ category
are Elias Chacour’s Blood Brothers (Kingsway, 1985), a moving,
well-researched story of a Palestinian Christian leader’s struggle
for reconciliation (don’t opinionise about Israel without it!);
and Jan Roberts’ Massacres to Mining (Dove, 1985), a sobering
book about the white colonization of Aboriginal Australia. And
for a thoughtful cinema-event, see the movie Dances With Wolves,
about the coming of white ‘civilization’ to the Sioux Indians…

Modernization, said Os Guinness, is both our greatest
opportunity and the greatest threat since apostolic times. None
of the great religions flourish under modernity, as it destroys
both transcendence and trad- ition. We know more about the immediate,
less about the ultimate (ie. knowledge without wisdom). It’s the
greatest exponent of ‘by bread alone’: our Western youth haven’t
known poverty or much illness. The chairman of McDonald’s in the
U.S. was asked what he believed in: ‘God, family and McDonald’s,
and in my office I reverse the order!’ A supermarket mentality
has invaded theology: an extension of choices has led to an evasion
of choice. Being ‘born again’ is now generalized, not radical
and life-changing. Fundamentalism is now more ‘worldly’ than liberalism
ever was; US. churches are full, sermons empty.

Joni Erickson said 560 million are handicapped (42
million blind, 294 million deaf or hearing impaired etc.). Like
Jesus, the ‘Man of Sorrows’, let us be sensitive to their needs,
not condescending, but help- ing them survive in a world of able-bodied
‘copers’. ‘Who do you invite to your banquets?’ Then blind musician
Ken Medema invited us as ‘the sensorially limited who can see’
to sing a hymn! (At the WCC conference in Canberra, February 1991,
I was confronted with the term ‘differently-abled’ for the first
time).

Before a summary of the conference, here is more
food for thought from my notes:

# The book of Acts appears to be a pilot project
compared with the great ingathering today. # Poor and non-poor
churches must work together and learn from each other. # Dreamers…
are dangerous people (T E Lawrence). # When a Christian sins we
say ‘Don’t look at us, look at Christ’ but that’s not in the Bible.
They are looking at you. We’ve got a good quota of excellent speakers
and miracle workers: what we need is more people like Jesus. #
By 2000, 85% of the world may be closed to traditional missionary
methods: hence the need for many self-supporting ‘tentmakers’.
# ‘How many came to Christ through radio or TV?’ (very few); ‘mass
evangelism?’ (few again); ‘through the witness of an ordinary
Christian friend or family member?’ (more than two-thirds). #
Cities world-wide are magnets: you have an urban future whether
you like it or not. # 95% of all monetary processes in Australia
are speculative, 5% for exchange of goods or services.

Summary

Lausanne II in Manila pointed up the inevitable divergence
of progressive evangelicalism from fund- amentalism. George M.
Marsden’s 1987 book Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary
and the New Evang- elicalism (Eerdmans) makes the same point we
have been labouring in this small book: the sectarian, inward-
looking, anti-intellectual tendencies of fundamentalism have to
be rejected in favour of an evangelical ecumenism, a prophetic
commitment to justice, and an openness to whatever God through
his Spirit wants to renew in his Son’s Church. Fuller Seminary
(which has kindly conferred a degree on this author since the
first edition of this book) insists that faculty members affirm
the orthodoxy of Nicaea, but is pluralistic in its evangelical
theological stance. So it is considered too liberal for the fundamentalists,
and too fundamentalist for the liberals, a posture Fuller has
consciously adopted. The Lausanne movement is just that – a movement.
Its evangelicalism is expressed in its commitment to the Lausanne
Covenant, supplemented by the Manila Manifesto.

Having been immersed for nearly two decades in both
Fuller’s and Lausanne’s evangelicalism, I believe there is a great
need for such a progressive stance, with the growing bifurcation
between the rigid fundamentalism of the right, and the World Council
of Churches’ tendencies towards a radical syncretism with other
faiths and ideologies on the left. Hopefully ‘progressive evangelicalism’
will provide an independent third force, incorporating into its
life and thought what is truly biblical from both right and left.
In the April 11, 1990 Christian Century Fuller’s provost Richard
Mouw wrote: ‘I am more ecumenical at the end of this decade than
I was at the beginning in that I have a deeper appreciation for
the ways in which God’s gracious dealings with the Christian community
make positive use of a variety of theological, denominational
and liturgical schemes. I have become more pluralistic not merely
in accepting plurality as a fact of life, but in con- sidering
some kinds of diversity to be very healthy for Christians.’

Some observers (eg. James D. Hunter in Evangelicalism:
The Coming Generation, Chicago, 1989) fear ‘that the evangelical
worldview will undergo further mutations that will make it even
less similar to the historic faith than it already is’. From the
perspective of the religious right, any move towards the centre
is a flirtation with the heterodoxy further to the left. (And
vice versa: I have met WCC Geneva staff who simply lumped all
fundamentalists, Pentecostalists, charismat- ics and evangelicals
into one right-wing bag). Another recent book, D W Bebbington’s
Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to
the 1980s (Unwin Hyman, 1989) affirms that ‘Nothing could be further
from the truth than the common image of evangelicalism being ever
the same.’ The style and theology of evangelicalism has changed
greatly in the last two and a half cent- uries. And tensions about
inerrancy, eschatology, and ecumenism have always been with us:
indeed in the past there was sometimes more latitude about these
matters than some today would care to admit. (As a footnote, a
recent evangelical ‘Tyndale Paper’ – Whatever Happened to Michael
Griffiths? by Bruce C. Wearne (August 1989) – notes that Australian
evangelicals are becoming more influenced with each passing decade
by their American rather than their British counterparts).

With Jesus, we will not align ourselves with either
right-wing pharisaism or left-wing zealotry. We must learn to
worship with ‘all that is within us’ – mind, heart, will. We must
be open theologically to all that the Spirit is teaching the world’s
churches today, but build on the firm evangelical tradition which
embodies what the same Spirit taught the churches yesterday. Intellectual
integrity must be married with experiential piety; a concern for
orthodoxy with a warm ecumenism; a commitment to theological openness
with apostolic truth.