Let the Church declare and display Christ together: Dutch report and reflections from the fourth Lausanne Congress
From 22 to 28 October 2024, the fourth Lausanne Congress met in Incheon, Seoul (1) Around 5400 delegates from more than 200 countries, connected with about 2000 online participants, came together to reflect on the meaning of the missionary calling and on developments in the worldwide mission of God through his church. It was a privilege to be here as part of the Dutch delegation in order to be encouraged and challenged by testimonies and perspectives from other parts of the world in view of our own context in the Netherlands.
This congress was also an opportunity to look back to the first congress in Lausanne in 1974. Lausanne has set a lot in motion in those fifty years. This may also be because, unlike the WEA, the World Evangelical Alliance, it is not primarily a club that represents a certain segment of world Christianity. The congress has an evangelical identity, but the focus is on the desire to be part of and to include others in the worldwide mission movement. (2) In this sense, the movement also understands itself as the heir to the first World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, motivated by the desire to "reach the whole world with the whole Gospel with the whole church."
South Korea
After Lausanne (1974), Manila (1989) and Cape Town (2010), the fourth congress was held in Incheon, a suburb of Seoul, where almost everyone lives in high-rise buildings. We were welcomed by local churches that, as I understand, also supported the congress financially. The more than 1600 Korean volunteers were very visible to the guests: they met us already at the entrance of the congress centre with signs saying 'Welcome to the Lausanne congress' and made huge efforts to ensure that this mega-operation runs smoothly. The Korean praise band, interspersed with the more Irish style of the Getty band, provided a strong local presence on stage. The Korean-American Michael Oh also reflected in his role as CEO of the Lausanne movement how the leadership is increasingly multicultural, but how the movement has also become a multinational and – for better and for worse – is moving with the times in its business model.
We were reminded in presentations how the choice of Seoul itself reflects the shifts in the world mission movement. The church in Korea is relatively young. The country was closed for a long time to western influence, and the first Catholic priests only arrived in Korea in 1794, but their work was complicated by an initial period of persecution that began in 1801. Mission work continued from China with which there were trade contacts. In Manchuria parts of the Bible were translated into Korean. The first Western missionaries only settled in the country in 1884.
After the revival in 1906 in Pyongyang (now North Korea), the Protestant churches began to grow rapidly. In the rest of the century, the church, like the country, had an eventful history. Under Japanese colonial rule, Christians were suspect because of their link to churches in Europe and North America and were persecuted because of the refusal of pastors and church members to recognize the divinity of the emperor. The Korean War of 1950-1953 made 3.9 million (!) victims. This war led to a separation of North and South that has been in place for 70 years now, which has deepened in recent years after a period of cautious rapprochement. In the period that followed the Korean war, South Korea went through far-reaching social changes. After the ceasefire of 1953, it was one of the ten poorest countries in the world and poorer than North Korea. Since then, South Korea has experienced both a rapid process of industrialization and democratization, becoming one of the early Asian economic miracles.
From the 1970s onwards, South Korea has become known for what were then the largest megachurches in the world. The most famous is the Yoido Full Gospel Church founded by Paul Yonggi Cho. I was told that they have one million members of which 500,000 come to one of the services every Sunday. Other examples are the Onurri Church led by Jae Hoon Lee, the co-chair of the congress, and the SaRang Church, which recently built the largest underground church hall in the world with its own entrance to the metro and two office towers above it, one for the activities of its own community and one for mission and service in the world near and far.
This great attention to missions beyond its own borders has been characteristic of the Korean church for decades, currently one of the most important sending countries in the international missionary movement. Christian mission is sometimes dismissed as a colonial project, and Dutch and other churches in countries with a colonial history are far from finished thinking critically about the relationships between their missionary and colonial history. But three of the most important sending countries today, South Korea, Brazil and Nigeria (also visibly present at the congress) have a history as colonized countries themselves and bring that experience to the world missionary movement.
At the same time, the representatives of the South Korean churches were very honest about their recent history. Since the 1990s, the growth of the church has stagnated, and the relative number of Christians have begun to decline. They indicated that they have great difficulty with the transmission of the faith to the next generation, which means that there are also fewer younger missionaries. They shared painful results of a survey that showed that there is little respect for evangelical Christians among the population, less than for Catholics and much less than for Buddhists. Evangelical Christians are seen as materialistic and divided. When you consider that this is a shame-based culture, it is even more striking that after the presentation of their churches, Korean church leaders not only thanked God, but also confessed guilt for their failures. What should we in the Netherlands confess guilt about regarding the relationship between church and world? We are at the moment rightly processing the slavery and colonial past. But when we think of church decline and the missing young generations, we easily think of irreversible sociological processes of which the church is mainly a victim. Does the speed of church decline and the broad resistance and indifference towards the Christian message perhaps also have to do with ways of being church in recent history and today that call for repentance?
Trends
The first Lausanne Congress in 1974 gave the worldwide evangelical mission movement a shared identity. Many organisations use the Lausanne Declaration to indicate their identity. Through the contribution of the Latin American evangelicals, the first Lausanne Congress gave misión integral broad traction in the missionary consciousness in a way that the initiators of the congress, Billy Graham and John Stott, I think, had not foreseen. In a review article, the Swiss missiologist Hannes Wiher sees the second Lausanne congress in Manila (1989) as decisive for the 'cultural turn' in the evangelical missionary movement and the third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town (2010) as characterized by a 'theological turn', after which the missionary call is much more thoroughly theologically thought out and embedded. (3)
Of course, this does not mean that the attention for holistic mission, culture or missionary theology arises for the first time at those specific congresses, but rather that the Lausanne congresses have been stages through which dimensions of missionary work received particular attention and thus became a broadly shared integral part of the missiological reflection. I think it is still too early to draw conclusions about what will stick from the multitude of themes that were discussed at this last congress. I would like to point out two trends that I expect to receive more and more attention and of which, looking back, we may say that Lausanne 4 had a decisive role in the broader missionary awakening: workplace ministry and digitization.
Every workplace as work in God's Kingdom
An important point of attention during the conference was what was called 'workplace ministry'. In the Dutch Reformed tradition, it is fairly common to also see secular professions as a place where we can serve God, our neighbours, society and creation, but in other church contexts it is still common to call only work in the church a 'full-time Christian ministry' and to see that as the highest Christian calling. For people who do not work full-time for the church, the involvement in church and kingdom is then something for Sunday and volunteer work. Theologically, it may be easy to critique this perspective by acknowledging Christ as Lord of all domains of life. In practice, it is not so easy, because many societies, especially in the North Atlantic world, separate work and private life. Of course, this neglect for the workplace is also reinforced because church life in practice is largely determined by people who have chosen to work in the church, so that this type of work automatically receives more attention. It was therefore an important development that for the first time there were more than 1300 delegates at the congress who work in secular workplaces and not in churches or Christian organisations. In addition, the entire Thursday was dedicated to serving God in secular work and there was also a special track on this theme throughout the conference.
This focus on 'workplace ministry' is also related to the last of the four objectives formulated by the Lausanne movement.
The gospel for every person
Disciple-making churches for every people and place
Christ-like leaders for every church and sector
and kingdom impact in every sphere of society. (4)
In my opinion, there is a danger with this focus on the search for impact of the Kingdom in every area of society. It can easily become an attempt to regain the influence that Christians have lost in society in recent decades, while we should in my view rather recognize that the place of the church in at least my own context in post-Christendom Europe has radically altered. The church needs to learn faithfulness in this changed context, rather than hanker back to a supposed ‘golden age’ of Christianity in Europe. Yet, in this new context, it is also of great importance to discover the meaning and practice of discipleship of Christ in the workplace and in other secular settings such as leisure.
“We should in my view rather recognize that the place of the church in at least my own context in post-Christendom Europe has radically altered”
Part of the programme was devoted to 25 so-called 'gaps', domains in which the missionary movement experience particular challenges and in which groups of conference-goers from different parts of the world church look together for ways forward. Examples of such gaps were the aging world population, the new middle class, Islam, Artificial Intelligence and transhumanism. (5) I myself had chosen the 'secularisation' gap in order to explore with delegates from all parts of the world at how to proclaim Christ and make it visible in secular spheres of life. In addition, the language used by North Atlantic participants in particular regularly showed the desire to re-Christianise the post-Christian countries and bring them under the authority of the Gospel. This does not seem to me to be a healthy objective in the post-Christian world, because as long as Christians cannot take leave from the desire to dominate different social spheres, it cannot counter the resistance to the Christian faith as a power factor from the past. It was more widely noted that secularisation should therefore not be seen as a gap to be closed, but rather as a context in which we are asked to declare and display Christ. 'Kingdom impact in every sphere of society' does not require writing a program to close this gap. We need to acknowledge this gap, but precisely because of this gap, we are called to seek how believers in all vulnerability can share the good news and good things they have received in Christ in new ways.
In the group that dealt with secularisation, the difference and the relationship between what the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC) calls the 'gathered church' and the 'scattered church' was regularly referred to. The 'gathered church' is the faith community as it comes together in worship and in other church meetings. The 'scattered church' is the faith community that lives in the world, as part of families, workplaces, volunteer associations and so on. One of the aims of the worship service is to help the members of the congregation to build their faith so that they can again go out into the world. This also ties in with the emphasis on following Jesus in the 'Arusha Call to Discipleship' of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (2018) (6). In contexts where many people never see a church from the inside, whether in Europe or Asia, the discipleship of all believers is how what we have received in Christ becomes visible in the world. It is an exciting question how we keep the ‘declare Christ’ and the 'display Christ' together. In practice, the 'display' in secular contexts is often difficult enough and then the 'declare' remains mainly a task of church professionals. Not only will most people see nothing of Christ if they do not see it in the lives of their colleagues, but they will not hear of it if that life does not become meaningful through the words that give it meaning. New attention to the discipleship of all believers in a secular context also means that we must look for a Christian lifestyle beyond the widespread experiences of speechlessness. 'Display and declare’ in this context means that we look for more natural and casual ways to share what we live out. It was rightly noted that this is not only about the context of paid work, but also about other spheres of life such as that of family, friends and leisure time.
Digitisation
A second important trend is digitisation. In preparation for Lausanne 4, the Lausanne Movement has issued the 506-page State of the Great Commission report. (7) The research team chose to focus on certain trends and present their own interpretations. At the same time, it is a particularly valuable overview due to its comprehensiveness and the combination of all kinds of statistical data and cultural analyses. It also contains specialist-written analyses of developments in all major regions. I expect that in the coming years it will be an important point of reference in the reflection on missionary challenges of our time. The developments in the digital domain that were also central to a number of 'gap' groups receive elaborate attention in this report. It discusses the profound cultural and social changes linked to the fact that large parts of the world's population, and in particular the young generations, spend a significant part of their time in the digital world. What does this mean for church communities and faith formation that are traditionally organised around physical encounters? At the same time, these developments also offer all kinds of new possibilities for reaching groups that have hardly been reached with the gospel so far.
During his opening speech (8), Yaehoon Lee, pastor of the Onnuri Church in Seoul, referred to different phases in modern Protestant missionary history. The first missionary associations focused mainly on the coastal areas of Africa and Asia. Then came the faith missions that were inspired by Hudson Taylor. They realized that there were many unreached people living inland behind the coastal regions and so missionary organizations such as the China Inland Mission and Sudan Interior Mission came into being. During the first Lausanne congress, a new development was initiated. Then the missiologist Ralph Winter introduced the concept of the 'unreached people groups': even if there are already churches in certain regions, there can still be groups that never meet Christians from whom they can hear the Gospel in their own social and cultural context. Lee asked the question what the next paradigm could be. Later in the congress, the digital world was pointed out a number of times as the next challenge for mission worldwide. In this case, the challenge does not concern existing communities that are so far not reached with the gospel, but new communities that are newly emerging.
We must remember that these are no longer merely 'virtual' communities, if this means that they are surrogate rather than real communities. For a growing group of people, these are the most important communities to which they belong. 'This is the world in which young people live.' (9) For some, their community lives gravitate towards the digital world. Others live with both digital and physical communities. And many communities naturally function in hybrid ways: in WhatsApp or other groups on social media, where some members may meet physically regularly, but others hardly at all.
“For a growing group of people, online communities are the most important communities to which they belong”
Fortunately, a lot is happening missionally in this area. During the conference, there was a market of organisations that work in this area and use relatively simple means or the very latest digital possibilities. This development has also made a huge leap in the church, especially due to the Covid crisis. An example is the work of a former student from my time in Oxford whom I met in Incheon, the Egyptian pastor Rafik Wagdy. Before Covid, he had a TV programme in addition to his church congregation in Egypt, during the pandemic that programme became increasingly important and now he lives in Canada where he makes TV programmes and works through social media channels that focus on the Arab world. Around this, new digital communities are also emerging, partly in contexts such as Libya and Algeria, where physical contact with fellow believers is very difficult due to distance or oppression.
I see the opportunities and challenges to reach and serve new groups who otherwise cannot hear the gospel. In my fifties, I find it difficult to see this as a 'real community'. It continues to feel second-rate. But this may be very different for Generation Z, the first generation that grew up with social media from an early age. For them, online and hybrid communities are part of the real world in which they live. The authors of this part of the report predict that between now and 2050, "digital communities will become the main social unit where human communications take place." (10) This is a complex and multifaceted challenge that raises both ecclesiological and practical questions that are difficult for an aging church where many pastors find it hard to understand how the younger generation functions in this regard. What does it mean for the 'Mosaic of church places' (11) if certain target groups live an important part of their lives in cyberspace? What opportunities does it offer if church members increasingly and simultaneously identify with different Christian communities in our fluid society, some of which can be online communities?
Division, diversity and unity
During the congress, the unity and diversity of the worldwide evangelical mission movement – or at least a significant section of it – became visible. Delegates from Europe and North America no longer made up the majority of the participants. Whereas the Chinese delegation did not receive visa for Cape Town 2010, they were present at Lausanne 4 with a representation of about 100 people. The Bible readings and other presentations came from different continents and showed diverse faces of world Christianity. We heard not only from the megachurches from Seoul, but also representatives of the persecuted church in Iran, Pakistan and China. We heard speakers from the Middle East representing faith communities dating back to the time of the New Testament, but also from among the indigenous population in Latin America. We regularly hear that the centre of gravity of the church has shifted to the southern hemisphere. Here it became visible in the new relationships in the hall and on stage, even where Western churches were still relatively overrepresented due to economic inequality.
Yet at times the tensions also surfaced. Some were unspoken. On the one hand, there were presentations that approached the mission from a modern Western business model. How can we plan and work together as well as possible to use the available resources as efficiently and innovatively as possible so that the mission assignment can be fulfilled as effectively as possible. 'Strategy' and 'effectiveness' were recurring concepts in Michael Oh's speeches. On the other hand, we were challenged by the Bible studies to wait for God's Spirit, because it is God's mission and not ours. On the one hand, we saw the church as a successful business reflected in the 80-meter-long LED screen behind the stage and in the smooth presentations of the young leaders who talked the programs together. On the other hand, a number of testimonies showed the significance of what is hardly noticeable: the testimonies of faith in Pakistan and in the Amazon and the struggle for justice in Costa Rica (12)
The sometimes not so very subcutaneous tensions also surfaced around theological positions. Ruth Padilla DeBorst, as a representative of the misión integral, gave a presentation in which she was critical of Christians who, from a dispensationalist theology, support Israel so much that they seem numb for the suffering of the Palestinians. The leadership of the congress promptly apologized in an e-mail that they apparently had not sufficiently critically tested this speech – after which an open letter from Padilla DeBorst with her rebuttal was eventually shared with the conference attendees. Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe's plea for care for creation was not appreciated by everyone. Behind the scenes, there were meetings in which critical questions were asked about the language of the 'Seoul Statement' (13) about gender and sexuality. Doesn't the Statement focus too much on gender issues and on demarcating boundaries and too little on understanding the pain and resistance that traditional Christian positions evoke? And at the same time, criticism from certain churches in the South resulted in final changes to the document that weakened the attention for the pain that people with a different sexual orientation in the church experience (14)
A postcolonial analysis will draw attention to the tensions between the also financially influential American conservative groups on the one hand and of emerging churches and theologians in the South on the other, for whom mission is obviously misión integral. This attention to a holistic understanding of mission was already introduced in the first Lausanne Congress by René Padilla and other theologians from Latin America, but it still evokes tensions in certain ecclesiastical circles in the North. That is not surprising. For many wealthy Christians, it may not be comfortable to accept the sharp criticism of the unjust economic relations in the world, because the origins of their own wealth are at stake.
Such an analysis can bring these distinct interests and the underlying power struggle into sharp focus. But it seems to me that there is more going on here than it can reveal. This congress is also a reflection of deep tensions in the wider world, with respect to which different parts of the church often have different and opposing loyalties. The difficulty to really listen to each other also plays out at a congress like this. In light of that, the unity that became visible at the congress was much more striking than the tensions. That unity was not only orchestrated and guarded by the organizers, but as far as I could see, it was largely shared by the participants.
“This congress is also a reflection of deep tensions in the wider world, with respect to which different parts of the church often have different and opposing loyalties.”
The shared love for Christ and the shared desire to proclaim Him and make Him visible gives participants the desire and courage to move beyond those differences, to work together and to seek mutual understanding. How many places are there where people with such different views and sensitivities meet, where a MAGA Christian from the US listens to a left-wing Latina theologian? Of course, at such a conference you also easily spend the most time with people with whom you feel related. But the set-up and the program constantly invite you to step out of your own bubble into a world that is bigger than yourself and your own subculture. Egyptian biblical scholar Anne Zaki spoke in one of the plenary Bible readings on Acts 15 about ‘the lost art of church conversations. (15) Sadly, the Congress program, was so full and so strictly managed that apart from the table sessions and gap sessions there was limited time for such in-depth conversations. (16) It is of course a challenge to include such in-depth conversations at a packed and massive meeting like this, but the congress does provide an invitation to such ongoing in-depth conversations within the worldwide mission movement. This is part of the challenge the congress presents to let ourselves be carried along in the missionary movement of the Spirit of Christ to all corners of this world, the Spirit who as we saw often moves in unexpected ways.
Benno van den Toren is Professor of Intercultural Theology at the Protestant Theological University, Utrecht, with a special teaching assignment 'Global perspectives on local missionary calling' on behalf of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands.
Endnotes
1. An earlier version of this article appeared in Dutch as Benno van den Toren, ‘“Let the Church Declare and Display Christ Together.” Verslag En Overwegingen Bij Het Vierde Lausanne Congres, Incheon, Seoul, 22-28 Oktober 2024’, Inspirare, no. 2 (April 2025): 8–17.
2. In this respect, there is a shift in the ‘Seoul Statement’ where, compared to previous declarations of Lausanne congresses, the identity of the movement shifts more from the shared missionary vocation to the elaboration of specific theological positions that are less missional in focus. See: ‘The Seoul Statement’, Lausanne Movement, accessed 28 January 2025, https://lausanne.org/statement/the-seoul-statement.
3. Hannes Wiher, ‘50 Years of the Lausanne Movement’, Evangelical Review of Theology 48, no. 3 (August 2024): 197–214.
4. Lausanne Movement, ‘A Vision for Accelerating Global Mission’, Lausanne Movement, accessed 27 January 2025, https://lausanne.org/devotional-series/fourfold-vision cursivering van BvdT.
5. Lausanne Movement, ‘The 25 “Collaborate” Session Gaps’, The Fourth Lausanne Congress, accessed 27 January 2025, https://congress.lausanne.org/the-25-collaborate-session-gaps/.
6. World Council of Churches, ‘The Arusha Call to Discipleship’, 13 March 2018, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/commissions/mission-and-evangelism/the-arusha-call-to-discipleship.
7. State of the Great Commission: Report Prepared for Lausanne Global Congress Seoul-Incheon 2024’ (Lausanne Movement, 2024), https://www.scribd.com/document/768456385/State-of-the-Great-Commission-Full-Report-8-26-24.
8. The Global Church Together in God’s Mission (Lausanne Movement, 2024), https://lausanne.org/video/the-global-church-together-in-gods-mission.
9. Looking Ahead: Global Collaboration for the Great Commission (Lausanne Movement, 2024), https://lausanne.org/video/looking-ahead-global-collaboration-for-the-great-commission.
10. ‘State of the Great Commission: Report Prepared for Lausanne Global Congress Seoul-Incheon 2024’, 320.
11. Vgl. ‘Mozaïek van Kerkplekken. Over Verbinding Tussen Bestaande En Nieuwe Vormen van Kerk-Zijn’ (Utrecht: Dienstenorganisatie Protestantse Kerk, April 2019), https://www.protestantsekerk.nl/download8174.
12. Zie over deze spanningen ook de scherpe analyse van Jay Matenga, ‘Personal Reflections on Lausanne 4 | Jay’s World’, accessed 15 January 2025, https://jaymatenga.com/l4-reflections/.
13. ‘The Seoul Statement’.
14. Timothy Goropevsek, ‘Lausanne Edits Seoul Statement’s Paragraphs on Homosexuality - Christian Daily International’, 24 September 2024, https://www.christiandaily.com/news/lausanne-edits-seoul-statements-paragraphs-on-homosexuality.
15. Confronting Division: Pursuing Unity Through the Spirit, The Fourth Lausanne Congress, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6vTZNJ9sFY.
16. This point was underlined by Rev. Jan Wessels in his reflections during the meeting ‘The fruits of Lausanne IV’, Utrecht, 8 May 2025.