Nearly four hundred delegates at the Lausanne Bi-Annual International Leadership Meeting in Budapest, Hungary, have heard from Christian experts on the latest challenges facing worldwide mission.
Executive Chair of Lausanne, the Rev S Douglas Birdsall, identified the "scandal of fragmentation" within the body of Christ as one of the issues in most urgent need of addressing."I see authentic unity as a precondition for prophetic witness. We have no choice," he told Christian Today. "Let's focus on the things that are essential and complementary in our life and in our faith and not the things that are contradictory."
Dr Christ Wright, who recently took over leadership of The Langham Partnership from one of Lausanne's founding fathers, the Rev John Stott, warned that the challenges to world evangelisation coming from within the body of Christ were equally great.
"We cannot pick and choose our obediences," he said, as he reminded Christians of the need to follow the teachings of the whole Bible. "The Lausanne Covenant speaks about the authority of the entirety of the Scripture, about all that it upholds. May God protect us from selective hermeneutics ... and fragmented perceptions of the Gospel."
He went on to call for a return to Scripture among evangelicals: "It is the Lausanne purpose not only to see the world church become more evangelical but, more importantly, to see world evangelicals become more biblical," he said.
Dr Wright also reminded conference delegates that the church itself could be a stumbling block to world evangelisation.
"We need a reformation of evangelicals. It seems there are preachers of world evangelicalism today who are involved in as many scandals and abuses as anything we can see in pre-Reformation, medieval Europe," he said.
Earlier in the week, Dr Todd M Johnson, Director of the Center for Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, revealed the extent of the fragmentation of the global body of Christ, as he told Lausanne delegates that there were currently 39,000 Christian denominations worldwide.
He also said that by 2050 only one northern country, the US, would remain in the top five most Christian countries in the world. Christians are also experiencing "unprecedented" suffering worldwide he said, revealing that most of the 70 million Christians believed to have been martyred since the time of Christ were martyred in the last two hundred years.
Dr Johnson warned that although the most effective evangelism remained the personal incarnation of the Gospel message, around 86 per cent of all Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists still did not personally know a Christian.
This presents a "serious problem" for the prospects of global evangelisation, he said.
He added, however, that there was something that Christians could do to reverse the trend: "There is an opportunity for every Christian to reach out across this divide," he said.
The Lausanne conference concludes Friday 22 June.
