Lausanne Part 3: The Whole ChurchClaude Marsh - 2 Nov 2010
The Lausanne Congress in South Africa is over and most of those who were present are now home, each one taking back something from the global body to their local body.
Our last night there was a celebration of communion which included a time of repentance and recommitment to God. There was repentance of having turned away from the first love and ignoring the Father heart of God and recommitment to God’s love and the Great Commission, which includes holistic transformation of our society and justice for the poor and oppressed.
As a whole I saw a couple of things in the congress that are important for the global Church to walk into. The most important was the call for women to recognise their calling and gifting and then walk in it. This requires partnership between men and women, where men recognise women’s gifting and empower them instead of pushing them aside because of their gender. Then there was an appeal for the Global Church to send workers to the entire world, rather than one part of the world only receiving or only sending money and other parts sending workers. The whole Church needs to be involved in every aspect of the Great Commission.
The Lausanne Movement’s motto is “The whole Church, taking the whole Gospel, to the whole World”. The Church on the whole has ignored the market place, shied away from government, entertainment, arts and so on, to close ourselves in a little bubble we call church. While some might not have taken this away from the congress there was a definite sense that that is what the Church needs to walk into, breaking the sacred-secular divide to bring transformation to all of society with the Gospel of Christ.
A Personal Highlight
On the 21st of October I joined a bus load of delegates, most from Africa for a free tour in Wellington, a small town about an hour North of Cape Town. This is the town where Andrew Murray (not the tennis player!) lived for the last years of his life, here he built a college for women (with an emblem proclaiming “Africa for Christ”), a Missions School (500 labourers sent into Africa), a home for children whose parent were on the field and three Church buildings. As we were in the children’s home there was a time of prayer for these schools to return to their original purpose, they are now private institutions, and for labourers to be sent out from there once again. A West African brother, probably in his 70s wept and many joined in powerful intercession crying out for a new African missionary movement.
Thank you all who prayed with us, continue praying for the Global Church to walk in Her first love and accomplish the Great Commission out of Christ’s compelling love.