Padilla decries “superficial” evangelism
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA—"Superficial evangelism is not going to get the job done," says René Padilla, a renowned evangelical scholar from Latin America, currently living in Argentina. "Jesus talked about making disciples who learned to obey everything he has taught."
Padilla, a long time champion of a holistic approach to mission, is highly critical of some of the presentations from the platform at Cape Town 2010, the third Lausanne Congress on Word Evangelization. He was a key figure at the first Congress back in 1974, when he and several colleagues lobbied long and hard to include radical discipleship and social responsibility into the influential Lausanne Covenant.
In Cape Town, Padilla referred to a plenary session on evangelization led by Paul Eshleman of Campus Crusade for Christ International to be largely "a waste of time."
The key question, according to Eshleman, is: "Where is the church not present and what are we going to do about it?" To that end he provided information about 632 "unreached" or "unengaged" people groups "with populations more than 50,000 who are still beyond the reach of the gospel of Jesus Christ." And he asked participants to commit themselves or their organizations to finding ways to evangelize specific groups.
To Padilla, however, Eshleman's session demonstrated "the syncretism of American evangelicalism," which he characterized as "the market mentality and the obsession with numbers and calculation." He and others were also surprised by the data itself. "It shows that no serious research was done," he said, citing several errors from Argentina.
Padilla was also unhappy with John Piper's strongly stated desire for the global church represented by the Lausanne movement to agree, "for Christ's sake, we Christians care about all suffering—especially eternal suffering."
"Why especially?" asks Padilla. Why are the needs of people after they die a higher priority than their needs now? "This doesn't mean we don't proclaim. But proclamation is not the first thing." He points to Ephesians 2:14-18: "Jesus is our peace, does our peace and proclaims our peace. To be; to do; to say. Why say that the most important thing is to say? To be; to do; to say. Put them in that order. Christ is our peace."
Padilla is encouraged that "a lot of third world people at the congress are critical of the strategy for the evangelization of the whole world." The three key global issues, he contends, are discipleship, globalization (poverty) and stewardship of creation. "In a congress like this, these are the key issues we should be exploring to see what we can do about it.
"But here we are again with the obsession for numbers—how to make more converts; how to build megachurches. I wonder when U.S. people are going to learn to listen to what others are saying, all over the world," says Padilla.
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