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Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering 2006: Through the Eyes of a Younger Leader

By Michael Oh

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Prayer was important for participants of the Lausanne
Younger Leaders Gathering 2006.

“South Dakota is so wide-open you can see that the earth is round.” Tomoaki Shimatani, my friend and staff at Christ Bible Seminary (who did his masters in business administration in South Dakota, USA), said this to me as he drove me to Nagoya’s Chubu International Airport today for my flight to America. It made me think about the recent week in Malaysia as 550 younger leaders from 112 nations gathered together from all over the world. It was not the geographical landscape that was impressive; instead, it was the cultural and spiritual landscape that moved the heart. Perhaps a fair summation might be: “The global body of Christ that met in Malaysia was so beautifully, culturally-diverse you could see that truly the whole world is the Lord’s.”

And so in this context, the challenge came in the form of a historical statement from the 1974 Lausanne Covenant. This covenant has both a present day and a future urgency: May the whole Church take the whole gospel to the whole world.

Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering 2006
And truly the whole Church was gathered in Malaysia at the invitation of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE), which sought to bring together representatives of the whole world’s Christian leaders from 25 to 35 years of age. The goal of the Gathering was to inform, inspire, develop and connect younger leaders that the whole Church might bring the whole gospel to the whole world. All the participants had been nominated by a leader and invited to apply for the Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering (YLG-06). The selection committee was led by Rick Sessoms.

I was offered the tremendous privilege of giving the keynote address for the Gathering; this was a task clearly beyond both my age and experience! The opportunity came as an expression of the vision, faith and kindness of a man I have come to love, Paul Stanley, the lead organizer of the YLG-06. It was Paul’s vision to have a younger leader open the Gathering.

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Michael Oh is president and founder of Christ Bible Seminary (CBS) outside of Nagoya, Japan. He is also an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America, is actively involved in the ministry of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization and is a member of the Lausanne Network Japan.