PATTAYA, Thailand - The highly-anticipated, upcoming third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation will be addressing emerging threats and concerns to Christian missions, informed the head of the Lausanne Congress on Monday at a major evangelical conference.
With new forms of hostility towards Christianity emerging, S Douglas Birdsall, the executive chair of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation, said the 2010 gathering in Cape Town, South Africa, is needed to bring together the best minds in the evangelical world to develop unified responses to challenges to the faith.
"You might ask is there a need for an international congress that deals with world evangelisation," said Birdsall at the 2008 World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) General Assembly in Thailand.
"I would say that throughout history, such a gathering is only necessary when the future of the life of the church is threatened by some type of challenge - either internal challenge or external pressure," he contended.
Birdsall listed examples such as the Jerusalem Council, the Council of Nicaea, and the first Lausanne Congress in 1974.
"Whatever it was," the Lausanne head said, "there were issues that the church had to wrestle with."
Today, the church has three major crises that it has to wrestle with - an intellectual crisis, a cultural crisis, and a leadership crisis.
Birdsall observed that in a post-modern, pluralistic world, there is growing opposition to claims about an absolute truth. Christianity, with its assertion that Jesus taught the truth and is the only way to salvation, directly opposes this worldview.
Another challenge is the cultural crisis fuelled by shifts in global secular powers including China, a historically Buddhist country; India, a Hindu country; and the Arab world, made up of Muslim countries.
Christianity, meanwhile, is undergoing its own so-called power shift with new leaders emerging from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
