Canadian content (and discontent)
Canadian evangelical Christians were vital participants in Cape Town 2010, the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, which gathered in South Africa October 17-24. While Canada supplied its quota of just 50 of some 4,200 official participants, our countrymen and women were involved in a variety of volunteer and organizational positions. In all, nearly 100 Canadians were part and parcel of this major event.
People such as Glenn Smith of Christian Direction in Montreal, for example, worked to develop the program. Imago director John Franklin headed the visual arts component. Ann Chow of InterVarsity handled program personnel logistics. Dan Sinclair of Toronto directed information technology arrangements. And the service list could be much longer. Canadians were significant contributors to the global gathering of mission-minded Christians.
While there was much to affirm during the Congress ("a lot of redeeming moments," as one put it), the eight days of meetings also raised questions for many of the Canadians who attended.
One discouraging piece was an apparent tension between plenary speakers who seemed to widen a divide between evangelism (proclamation) and social action. This is a conversation that most of the Canadian evangelical practitioners thought was long settled. "We grappled well with cross-cultural diversity," commented one participant who was wowed by the range embodied in a gathering of people from nearly 200 countries. "But I feel we didn't grapple with theological diversity. That bi-polarity challenged me all week."
Raising hackles
What else raised Canadian hackles? A presentation on truth by renowned author and social critic Os Guinness did not sit well. His colonial tone and finger-wagging certainty do not communicate effectively in our post-modern context. Paul Eshleman of the Finishing the Task movement led a session on defining and reaching currently unreached people groups. But the brusquely managerial approach (and suspect research) along with old-school pledge cards calling for agencies to commit themselves to particular people groups left many people feeling manipulated.
Additionally, renowned pastor John Piper's agenda to highlight hell as a place of eternal torment and to priorize preaching over social care was deemed unnecessary and polarizing by countless participants from all over the world.
In a debriefing session, one Canadian participant expressed concern that the congress presented evangelicalism as primarily cerebral. "Everything we're doing is about thought. I'm looking for a supernatural process that leads us into the things of God as revealed in Scripture. I've been tremendously encouraged, but am in despair that we haven't been encouraged in the life of the Spirit."
Tyndale University College and Seminary president Gary Nelson, who will be amplifying the point at the EFC's Hinge conference in mid-November, commented how "we missed some of the voices that needed to be heard, which are probably the voices of the future. They would allow us to hear where we're headed rather than the voices drawing us back into fights we already had.
Younger participants like Nigel Barham of Toronto also found the congress a little old. "There was a lot of good stuff, but it was also out of touch. What massive moments of God are coming in the next generation?" he asked. Cape Town provided few clues for him.
Canadian complexity
Perhaps the most pervasive Canadian complaint was the sense that the formal program did little to address the complexity of the world we live in, particularly the challenges of secularity in the Western context. "We were schooled in the basics of evangelism," observed a missionary from Toronto. "We talked about some of this in our table groups, but Canada is 30 years down the road."
The challenge to our country's participants will be to collect a healthy portion of the enthusiasm, inspiration, information and relationships from Cape Town 2010 and shape it to the Canadian context. Many good resources and relationships were forged at the congress. Bringing the helpful parts home and turning them into positive Christian witness is where the rubber meets the road.
Or, as a Kenyan presenter put it, "where the grass turns in to goat."
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