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PUBLISHER'S MEMO

Lausanne: From Pattaya to Port Dickson to the Future

By Tetsunao Yamamori

Time flies when you are enjoying doing the Lord's work. It seems like only yesterday when I assumed the responsibility of International Director of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) at Pattaya, Thailand. It is hard to believe that was two years ago. Now it is my delight to hand over the baton to Lindsay Brown. It is also time to reflect over the past two years of my Lausanne ministry.

Two years ago, I had a feeling of ambivalence about the future of Lausanne, but this is no longer the case. I wanted to believe that all would be well for the movement that had such a remarkable beginning in 1974. At the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, Billy Graham articulated the urgency of the evangelistic task. The Lausanne Covenant, a product of the Congress, has served as a unifying document for evangelicals around the world; it is focused on the singular task of evangelization.

Lausanne has a holistic understanding of evangelization. The Covenant emphatically declares, "Although reconciliation with man is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless, we affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty" (Section 5). The Lausanne mandate is to call the whole Church to take the holistic gospel to the peoples of the world.

Lausanne 2004 Forum for World Evangelization in Pattaya
The Lausanne Movement went through some quiet years following Lausanne II in 1989. But at Pattaya, Thailand, the 2004 Forum for World Evangelization assembled over 1,500 evangelical leaders from 130 countries to define the obstacles to effective evangelism in the twenty-first century. The Forum indeed contributed to the revitalization of Lausanne.

The Lausanne mandate is to call the whole Church to take the holistic gospel to the peoples of the world. 
 

Each of the thirty-one Issue Groups organized for the Forum produced a 25,000-word paper on its assigned topic. Reports of the thirty-one Issue Groups were placed online as the Lausanne Occasional Papers. David Claydon, former International Director, edited the Forum papers as the compendium in three volumes entitled A New Vision, A New Heart, A Renewed Call.