This week roughly 5,000 Christian leaders from around the world are gathering in South Korea to talk about sharing the gospel as the body of Christ.
The theme for this year's Lausanne 4 event is “Let the Church Declare and Display Christ Together,” Lausanne 4, and focuses on what evangelism looks like up to 2050. It is running Sept. 22-28 in Incheon.
Michael Oh is the global executive director of the Lausanne Movement. Oh and his wife were previously missionaries in Japan. During his opening speech, Oh implored the group to get rid of pride, parochialism, isolation and arrogance.
"We repent of not so much saying with our words but feeling in our heart or showing through our actions those four dangerous words that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 12(21-27): 'I don't need you.' And we have said those to each other, and we have said those to God. But God reminds us, 'apart from me you can do nothing' (John 15:5)," Oh said, lamenting the "isolation" and "competition" among various ministry groups," said Oh.
This movement started in 1974 when Billy Graham gathered Christian leaders in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the First International Congress on World Evangelization. During this time, the 2,300 present all signed the Lausanne Covenant, a document that is still considered one of the most influential in modern Christianity.
The covenant stressed 15 points of evangelism, ending with the conclusion to "enter into a solemn covenant with God and with each other, to pray, to plan and to work together for the evangelization of the whole world."
The second Lausanne Congress took place in 1989 in Manila, Philippines. The third Congress met in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2010.
In 2024, the leaders will talk through what discipling the nations might look like amid the challenges and opportunities of ministry in the digital age, the quest for humanness, the new Middle Class, and a global aging population.
"One of the greatest reasons for the ineffectiveness of the Body is the failure to incorporate the whole Body into God's mission," said Oh.
Oh has seen the impact of the Church working together to share the gospel in his own life. Over 100 years ago missionaries planted the first churches in Incheon, which helped bring Oh's mother to a saving faith in Jesus. Oh shared, "[without the work of those men and women], "I might not be here today."
South Korea is now the second-largest missionary-sending nation in the world, with the U.S.A. as the first. Hundreds of churches in South Korea came together to put on Lausanne 4 and about 4,000 South Koreans committed to pray over the event.
"The reputation of the bride of Christ in many places around the world is not good," Oh said. "Rather than people stumbling over the message of the Gospel, as we see in Romans 9, too many are stumbling over the messengers. Our failures today in a world of social media are more public and profoundly felt and seen globally than ever before. And so, we continue, 50 years later, to be moved to penetrance by our failures, or at least we need to be."
Some of the speakers lined up for the week-long event include Anne Zaki (Egypt), Ronaldo Lidório (Brazil), Bishop Hwa Yung (Malaysia), and Rick Warren (United States).
Lausanne 4 not only offers collective worship and speakers, the venue also has arts spaces and installations, storytelling booths where participants can share their reflections and testimonies, optional sessions for those interested in workplace ministry and learning more about North Korea, and a Digital Discovery Center that showcases 40 ministries and projects that are influencing this critical mission arena.