In this 11-minute video, Mark Greene, Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (founded by John Stott in 1982) speaks at the Lausanne Movement’s Cape Town 2010 Congress. The Lausanne Movement is the standard-bearer for the evangelical church’s worldwide evangelism, started in 1974 by Billy Graham and others.
Greene challenges church leaders to re-imagine their ministries, because the ongoing strategy for world evangelization is woefully insufficient. The model of mission in most churches is this:
“To recruit the people of God to use some of their leisure time to join the missionary initiatives of church-paid workers.”
But the model we should adopt is this:
“To equip the people of God for fruitful mission in all of their life.”
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Greene makes the point that when church leaders primarily focus on neighborhood evangelism, they are not utilizing the networks of people that the members of the congregation already know in their work environments. We don’t know our neighbors as well as our co-workers, customers, suppliers, clients, etc.
“What might happen if every congregation started to pray by name for the people their members already know in the networks and communities they are already in?”
Greene points to the underlying problem: “The Great Divide.” We still believe that there are things that are “sacred” (like church ministry) and things that are secular (like laypeople’s work).
“We may know in our heads that the gospel embraces every area of life, but this is not the gospel that we have been teaching people to live, or celebrating when they do. It is not the lived gospel. We are not making disciples for the places people find themselves in. There is a crisis in disciplemaking which is leading to a crisis in evangelization.”
Image by Omar Gurnah. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.
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