Taking the gospel to the ends of the earth, in obedience to the Great Commission, is an inescapable imperative. And a definition of world evangelisation that has won assent from Christians of all stripes was memorably summarised in The Lausanne Covenant - substantially crafted by John Stott and affirmed by the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation in 1974: “evangelisation requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world”.
The three wholes embodied in this ringing phrase had been part of Christian discourse long before John Stott drafted The Lausanne Covenant. Indeed, one might well argue they go back to the Apostle Paul, if not to the patriarch Abraham himself, but just to keep the conversation within living memory, a stirring statement by the Dutch theologian Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft in 1961 proves the point:
The command to witness to Christ is given to every member of his Church. It is a commission given to the whole Church to take the whole Gospel to the whole world. When the Church recognises that it is exists for the world, there arises a passionate concern that the blessings of the Gospel of Christ should be brought to every land and to every man and woman.
Visser ’t Hooft’s approach to the three wholes also serves as a reminder that we can underestimate the scope of gospel mission, for he seems to use the word “whole” primarily in a quantitative sense. The whole church for Visser ’t Hooft means every member. The whole world means every man and woman. The whole gospel means all the blessings of the gospel. That is surely better than some missionaries taking some blessings of the gospel to some people in some parts of the world. But the three wholes have more substantial, qualitative implications as well, implications that are worthy of a Global Conversation.
The whole gospel
The phrase “the whole gospel” suggests there may be some versions of the gospel that are less than whole - that are partial, deficient, less than fully biblical.
First, we must give full weight to the spiritual realities of sin and evil, and we must evangelistically proclaim the glories of God’s redemptive achievement in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. There would be no gospel without the cross. Indeed all blessings of the gospel derive from it, from personal salvation through Christ’s death in our place to the reconciling of all creation. The cross is at the heart of The Lausanne Movement, and the theme around which the Cape Town Congress revolves is “God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself”.
The whole gospel must be drawn from the whole Bible. So we also have to ask what contribution the social, economic, and political dimensions of the Old Testament make to Christian mission. For century after century the God of the Bible revealed his passionate concern for social issues: political tyranny, economic exploitation, judicial corruption, the suffering of the poor and oppressed, the evils of brutality and bloodshed. So passionate, indeed, that the laws God gave and the prophets God sent addressed these very matters more than any other issue except idolatry (in fact they regarded such things as idolatry’s tangible manifestations). Meanwhile the psalmists regularly cried out in songs of social protest and lament that we tend to screen out of our Christian worship.
Unfortunately one can still detect a subtle (or occasionally, not subtle at all) sense that somewhere between Malachi and Matthew, all that changed. Is it possible that such things no longer claim God’s attention or spark God’s anger? Or if they do, that it is no longer our business?
This is the same disdain for the Hebrew Scriptures that the church condemned in the second-century heretic Marcion. It makes the alleged God of the New Testament almost unrecognisable as the LORD God, the Holy One of Israel. This alleged God has shed the passionate priorities of the Mosaic Law, and has jettisoned all the burden for justice that he laid on his prophets at such cost to them. The implications for mission are equally dramatic. For if the pressing problems of human society are of no concern to God, they have no place in Christian mission - or at most a decidedly secondary one. God’s mission, in this view, is simply getting souls to heaven, not addressing society on earth.
