Lausanne Movement taps South Korea for key leaders' meeting

The Lausanne Movement will hold its biennial meeting at the Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary (PCTS) in Seoul June 8-12.

The International Leadership Meeting is the last gathering of international leaders before “Lausanne III: Cape Town 2010”, the third International Congress on World Evangelisation, which will be held in October 2010.

There has been much anticipation building up ahead of next month’s meeting as South Korea is a country that has witnessed massive growth in Christianity in the past few decades and is the most wired nation in the world. The technological assistance the believers of the country can offer is expected to contribute greatly in facilitating the movement.

For nearly four decades, the Lausanne Movement has been focused on world evangelisation with its celebrated slogan being “The whole church taking the whole Gospel to the whole world”.

TIME magazine has described the Lausanne Congress as “a formidable forum, possibly the widest-ranging meeting of Christians ever held”.

The Lausanne Movement officially started in 1974 when the first International Congress on World Evangelisation (Lausanne I) was called by a committee headed by the Rev Billy Graham and held in Lausanne, Switzerland. The gathering drew more than 2,700 evangelical leaders from 150 countries.

The movement was the culmination of the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, organised and sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christianity Today magazine. It was followed by continental congresses in Singapore (1968), Minneapolis (1969), Bogota (1969) and Amsterdam (1971).

The upcoming Congress, Lausanne III, will be held from October 16 to 25, 2010, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre in Cape Town, South Africa.

Over 4,000 leaders from 200 countries are expected to attend the gathering, which is being held in collaboration with the World Evangelical Alliance. Thousands more are expected to participate online and through other media.

To prepare for the Third International Congress, a five-day-long planning session for the gathering will be held during the International Leadership Meeting in Seoul.

In explaining the choice of South Korea as the site of their last leadership meeting, Kwang-soon Lee, a professor at the Presbyterian College & Theological Seminary (PSTS) and director of the International Leadership Meeting, said that world church leaders wanted to have "deep spiritual influence" before Lausanne III and felt the "necessity" of IT development for evangelisation.

"We believe that Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary is the best suited for these two conditions," he said.

The gathering in Seoul will bring together about 250 church leaders from 60 countries, who will proceed in a similar way to the Lausanne III Congress next year. The leaders are expected to discuss the engagement of 4,000 on-site participants at Cape Town 2010 and how to develop the online involvement of thousands more through the Cape Town GlobaLink and the Lausanne Global Conversation.

"I take this meeting in Korea seriously," commented the Rev Doug Birdsall, executive chair of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation.

“I look forward to Korea churches' passion," added Birdsall, who visited Korea last October.