Everyone thought they knew what to expect when René Padilla took the stage at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the summer of 1974. The theologian had already made his reputation as one of a group of young Latin American radicals who were shaking up the evangelical world. The Lausanne Congress was at that time the largest gathering of evangelical Christian leaders ever, with 2,700 people from around the world coming together in an event sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The evangelicals there – ministers and lay people, racially diverse, the vast majority of them men – already knew that they were at a historic meeting. Indeed those twelve days would become one of post-World War II evangelicalism's most significant moments of self-fashioning.
What they did not know was that Padilla's talk would become a galvanizing moment. Its brilliantly crafted, quietly furious attack on evangelism as usual spoke to, and for, an energized and frustrated group of believers, mostly but not only from the global South. They had come to an event organized by Graham's people with the agenda of challenging Graham's model of Americanized mass evangelism in favor of a larger vision of evangelical transformation, both individual and social. This group of radical evangelicals organized themselves to push for their own brand of theologically conservative Protestantism, one that was more socially engaged – more willing to transform the world – than the individually oriented model of salvation that had dominated the twentieth century.
Like all of the major presenters, Padilla had pre-circulated a paper; his was a rather scholarly treatise on the centrality of repentance to Christian ethics. The audience was not surprised, then, to hear Padilla lecture his fellow participants at Lausanne on the sins of the evangelical church, and on its failure – their own failure – to take seriously Jesus’ call to social action. What was remarkable, however was the fierce indignation emanating from the stage. Padilla challenged the room to remember that Jesus had demanded that his followers confront the “darkness of the world.” But evangelicals, he pronounced, had focussed so long on individual sin that they had forgotten that darkness included materialism, racism, social class, political power, and, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr, “collective egotism.”Footnote 1
This was a jeremiad, and it included a direct attack on the American church; Padilla insisted that the “culture Christianity” coming out of the United States had confused the American way of life with Christianity itself; that it had replaced the demands of a full Christian discipleship with a ridiculous and triumphalist process of counting converts. The rigid equation of social conservatism with evangelism in the United States was a form of conformity to the world, rather than a way of speaking prophetically about the needs of that world. US evangelicals saw themselves as competing in a marketplace of religions, at home and abroad, and had stooped to “selling” Christianity as something simple, a brand that required only “accepting Christ” and not much else. This, he said, was what the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had called “cheap grace.” (The Cost of Discipleship opened with the sentences for which Bonhoeffer would become best known: “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.”Footnote 2 )
Such failures of vision, Padilla went on, “can only be the basis for unfaithful churches, for strongholds of racial and class discrimination, for religious clubs with a message that has no relevance to practical life in the social, the economic, and the political spheres.”Footnote 3 Padilla quoted a colleague who had written to him, “What America is sharing with the world today is a parody of Christianity, tied to a materialistic philosophy and truncated theology.” Padilla told his audience that perhaps it wasn't quite fair. Americans were not the only ones to indulge in a “culture Christianity” that was more decorative than demanding. However, the role played by the United States, both in world affairs and in terms of spreading the Gospel, meant that “this particular form of Christianity, as no other today, has a powerful influence far beyond the borders of the nation.” This, he said, was why he focussed on the dangers of the American Way of Life.Footnote 4 Years later, Padilla recalled that there had been a passionate response by other delegates: “I found that unwittingly I had been voicing something that an awful lot of Third World people wanted to say themselves. I was surprised at the number of Asians and Africans and Latin Americans who felt represented by what I said.”Footnote 5
Padilla was one among many to enthrall the crowd at Lausanne. With ten days of workshops and speeches, attended by some of the most important and talented evangelical ministers and laypeople in the world, the conference was a tour de force of preaching. It was also a series of performances, rituals of self-fashioning. And, not surprisingly for anyone familiar with the Protestant love of conventions, the battle of Lausanne also had its precursors in dozens of previous conferences, big and small.
Padilla was already a leader among a group of evangelicals who had arrived at Lausanne determined to raise “social concern” to an evangelical mantra. Several of these Young Turks came out of the Latin American Theological Fraternity. In calling for radical engagement with the world, they were challenging their own mainstream, going up against the evangelism-first orientation of those who dominated the Congress, including the towering figure of Billy Graham, whose organization sponsored it. These evangelism-first believers were often but not always American, and politically conservative, although they generally disavowed the importance of politics. Crucially, they were no less creative and energized than the social-concern faction. One sign of that richness and complexity in the early 1970s for evangelicals is that both groups – evangelism-first and social-concern – would come to see Lausanne as their moment of triumph.
THE LAUSANNE MOMENT
The Lausanne Congress was an extraordinary event for evangelicals, who in the United States still had a reputation as part of an insular UN-hating subculture. Lausanne displayed, and was intended to display, emerging forms of evangelical internationalism. Participation was by invitation only, and delegates represented 150 countries. Although the organizers touted that most participants were under forty-five, there were, one observer pointed out, “few young people and fewer women.”Footnote 6 The number of participants from the West was limited: North Americans were one-quarter; Europeans were also 25 percent; and Asian, Africans, and Latin Americans were one-half.
By the early 1970s, the demographics of global evangelicalism were changing rapidly, as millions of people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia converted to some form of Protestantism. These new believers were not content to sit quietly on the sidelines while Americans and Europeans continued to presume that they were the moral center of Christendom. Over the next few decades, Christians from Africa, Asia, and Latin America would play ever more prominent roles in the institutions of global evangelicalism. By 2010, more than 50 percent of the world's evangelicals lived outside the United States and Europe.Footnote 7 Leading evangelicals in the US and globally were already well aware of the changing demographics of Christianity. At Lausanne, there was from the beginning an attempt to construct and define globalized evangelicalism as the new normal. During his first speech at the conference, Billy Graham would cheer the visibility and energy of “younger churches,” as he stood before a multinational and racially diverse crowd of four thousand delegates – who themselves spoke forcefully at the meeting as equals, not as missionary objects.Footnote 8
Time magazine ran a long, largely friendly story that described the event as “possibly the widest-ranging gathering of Christians ever held,” although theologically conscribed. Time recognized that the event was a clear-cut challenge to the visibility and social power of the liberal-minded World Council of Churches (WCC). The gathering, it said, “served notice of the vigor of conservative, resolutely biblical, fervently mission-minded Christianity.”Footnote 9 The very choice of Lausanne as the meeting site was a symbolic muscle-flexing for the global evangelical movement. Lausanne was located just thirty miles from Geneva, where the WCC had its headquarters. Organizers hoped to make a statement, to establish their own distinctiveness from what they saw as the overly worldly orientation of mainline Protestantism. (The WCC had recently made headlines for its decision to fund liberation movements in southern Africa as part of its Program to Combat Racism.Footnote 10 ) Graham had declared that “there is a vacuum developing in the world church. Radical theology has had its heyday.” It was time for evangelicals to step in.Footnote 11
Almost every news account and personal reflection also noted the internal tensions at Lausanne. Christianity Today described the division as one between the “data-oriented church growth school and the discipleship-demanding compassion and justice group.”Footnote 12 The two groups at the Congress did not emerge sui generis on the shores of Lake Geneva. They had been making themselves heard in journals and books, they had their own intellectual spokespersons, and they had struggled for power within the multiple institutions of transnational evangelical life: student groups, pastors’ committees, missionary organizations, and aid organizations like World Vision. Evangelism-minded thinkers like Ralph Winter and Donald McGavran had both become well-known missions theorists by the late 1960s, and stalwarts of the influential Fuller Theological Seminary.Footnote 13 The discipleship group had not only Padilla and Escobar, but also the Mennonite theologian and pacifist John Yoder, who had already shaken up evangelical thinking with The Politics of Jesus, published two years before the meeting. And, as I discuss below, several major African American evangelicals such as Tom Skinner had already published on variations on this theme. Even Carl Henry, the long-time editor of Christianity Today, had made a call for evangelicals to pay more attention to social action as far back as 1947 (albeit in a far more limited way than was now being advocated).Footnote 14
In fact, it is questionable whether any US evangelicals ever actually had a “non-worldly” orientation in any pure form. Even those fundamentalists who spurned “the world” in the early parts of the century had plenty to say about the political and social relationships around them. And certainly the neo-evangelicals who played leading roles at Lausanne – from Graham himself and his deputy Leighton Ford, to Carl Henry of Christianity Today and John Stott from the UK – had made their mark by separating themselves from what they saw as the unsophisticated pietism of the pre-World War II era. The founding of Christianity Today was nothing if not a call to make evangelicals more sophisticated, theologically and politically. That sophistication was unquestionably conservative, but it had gone to college, and it eschewed, for example, the end-times theology that was still dominant at highly conservative schools like Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). Fuller Theological Seminary was founded by a group of neo-evangelicals in part to challenge schools like DTS.Footnote 15 The question was less about worldliness per se than about how much an orientation toward social or political issues would be at the center of missionary work; would reaching people in the name of Jesus mean also teaching them that Jesus had a politics?
The division between the two groups at Lausanne was real, but however diverse their political views and theologies, Lausanne attendees agreed on one thing: while (some) of their number might believe in social action as essential, they were not about to compromise genuine evangelical identity. This meant that the debates played out within the terms set by that identity: almost all of the delegates at Lausanne were biblical literalists and Christian exclusivists, deeply wary about ecumenicalism, theological liberalism, and secularism. Therefore the arguments from all sides were made through extensive biblical quotations, scriptural exegesis, homages to literalism, and evocations of Jesus.
EVANGELISM FIRST
The evangelism-first faction certainly had tradition on its side. A long history of evangelism conferences dating back to the nineteenth century had highlighted the importance of reaching the world with the Gospel. Advocates were often emboldened with the hope that Jesus would return once the Gospel had been proclaimed to every nation. In the 1880s, the Student Volunteer Movement had adopted “the evangelization of the world in this generation” as it motto. Other missionary advocates embraced (and revised) this dream, even as the generations followed each other relentlessly.Footnote 16 Proponents of evangelism at Lausanne argued that there is only one major task, proclaiming the Gospel, and only a few basic requirements for salvation (generally understood as repentance, belief, and baptism). For these leaders, Lausanne was designed to set participants aflame with passion for “reaching the unreached.”
By the time the evangelism-first evangelicals arrived at Lausanne, however, they were already on the defensive. For years, Protestants of all stripes had been launching critiques of Billy Graham's style of crusade evangelism. His model – the stadium-filling gatherings in which an evangelist came into a country for only a few days, spoke in the cultural terms he was used to, and then went home – was coming under fire both at home and abroad for being simplistic and shallow. Just a year before Lausanne, for example, Graham had gone to South Africa for the first time; while there, he held integrated events but had refused to categorically condemn apartheid.Footnote 17 One might think that a towering global reputation would have made Graham fearless, but some observers wondered if perhaps the desire to continue to be loved across borders had rendered him captive to the world.
Another problem for evangelism-first delegates who arrived at Lausanne was the worldwide debate over the very practice of First World missions in any format. John Gatu, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, had for several years led the call for a missionary moratorium, saying that missionaries from North America should stay out of Africa until Africans could fully decolonize their own churches.Footnote 18 This call, which recently had been affirmed by the 1974 assembly of the All Africa Conference of Churches, had already made Gatu well known (and embraced) in ecumenical circles. Now Lausanne brought the issue front and center for evangelicals. One discussion group, for example, listed the problems that Africans and others faced in their relations with missionaries: control over finances, “political differences,” missionary distrust of local leaders, and missionaries’ relatively high standards of living.Footnote 19
Many Christians from the global South supported the moratorium or something like it, although there were a number of doubters. The rising evangelical star Byang Kato of Nigeria was vehemently opposed to any limitation on missions. In contrast to many of his African colleagues, Kato described the missionary moratorium as “blasphemous” and “unscriptural.”Footnote 20 Kato had recently received his doctorate from Dallas Theological Seminary, and until his untimely death in 1975, he was a leading voice in promoting conservative theology in Africa. He did speak out against social injustice – “capitalism has been a real curse in Africa,” he told Christianity Today – but also supported the “evangelism-first” model.Footnote 21
In the end, the final document from the Lausanne Congress did suggest that perhaps it was time for a “reduction” in the number of missionaries, in cases where the local church was strong. This was not enough for Gatu, who later made his case more forcefully, arguing that both “sending” countries and “receiving” countries were overly invested in the idea that the Third World churches were poor. “We [in the African church] are very fond of receiving personnel and their salaries,” he wrote, “gifts of old clothing, equipment, theology, and even church organizations and structures.” But the days of paternalism on the one hand and subservience on the other “must go,” along with “the imperialistic tendencies that characterized the years of western colonization.”Footnote 22
At Lausanne, believers from the global South, like Americans and Europeans, occupied a range of positions in the multiple and multifaceted debates over evangelical “social concern.” Over the course of the meeting, it seemed as if the evangelism-first model was on the defensive. Its proponents, however, were hardly inclined to obligingly demote themselves. They argued forcefully that Lausanne was about saving the unreached, the 2·7 billion people who had never even heard the Gospel. The word “hell” was very rarely used at Lausanne, but it hung over the debate: why would you focus on ending earthly poverty, when the real issue was eternal life – or death?
REACHING THE PEOPLE(S)
It was at Lausanne that some of the best-known leaders of the church growth movement (particularly Ralph Winter and Donald McGavran – both of whom would soon become important leaders at Fuller Theological Seminary) cultivated their own contingent. They promised the participants in their workshops that they would be exposed to the latest thinking about missions, thus becoming more sophisticated in their planning.
Some of these sessions had their own insiderish code words: for example, there were trainings on E-1, E-2, and E-3 evangelism – meaning, respectively, evangelism in one's own community, evangelism in similar communities, and cross-cultural evangelism.Footnote 23 Presenters also offered specific evangelistic methods: personal evangelism, evangelism via mass communication, use of drama and art, open-air evangelism, evangelism in high-rise apartment buildings. Some of the social-justice faction made clear they were not giving ground, however, and offered their own panel on evangelism through social action and community development.Footnote 24
But for the evangelical community in the United States, nothing would have as much impact as the concept of “Unreached Peoples.” Just before the meeting, the Missions Advanced Research and Communications Center (MARC) released its massive, if still rough, list of the “Unreached Peoples” of the world. (MARC was a project of World Vision and Fuller Theological Seminary, run by missiologist Ralph Winter.) A booklet was distributed to all the participants at the conference, sent out with advance registration materials. The idea of evangelizing “peoples” – as opposed to “people” – provided an ingenious way of describing the task ahead. It was a way of marking, and marketing, the idea that specific groups of people had not yet been adequately exposed to the Gospel.
The innovation was twofold. First, the term “people groups” was designed to move beyond ideas about nationality as a key category for mapping missions. Instead, it proposed that within one nation there were often many different “groups,” defined by language or culture or location. Second, the term “unreached” referred specifically to unevangelized communities, not individuals. Perhaps, for example, there were individual Mexicans in Mexico City who had not been “reached,” but at least they had had their chance – there were materials in Spanish aplenty and evangelical churches were everywhere. On the other hand, Indian communities in the interior of Mexico might have never really learned about Jesus.
The concept of “Unreached Peoples” also privileged so-called E-3 evangelism, and highlighted missions to more exotic and potentially dangerous locations. As Mission Frontiers magazine explained in 1984, “These Hidden Peoples are found mainly among the Muslim, Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, and tribal peoples of the world. These thousands of bypassed people groups, whether in cities or jungles, are the final frontiers of the gospel.”Footnote 25 This model criticized the claims of success in missions so far and increased the urgency of mobilization: evangelical missionaries may have gone to virtually every nation in the world, but they had missed thousands of “people groups.”
But, at Lausanne, that was still fifteen years in the future. From the Missions Advanced Research and Communications Center’s initial process of defining and finding “unreached peoples” there emerged a distinctly social-scientific tone. MARC began producing computer-assisted and highly quantitative yearly lists of unreached groups, and they were soon joined by other bodies like the World Evangelical Fellowship. Their classification schemes and computer-aided quantifications of gospel-impoverishment led to lists, tasks, strategies, carefully parsed targets of opportunity, and increasingly sophisticated visual images, which, as one sardonic evangelical observer opined, nicely met the “can-do spirit of [American] Baby Boomers looking for a cause.”Footnote 26
For many evangelical intellectuals, however, the idea of a “people group” was controversial from the beginning. There were many unanswered questions about the most basic definitions for the admittedly loose concept.Footnote 27 The first and perhaps most daunting problem was deciding what actually constituted a “people group.” The very term suggested the old “culture concept” in early twentieth-century anthropology, which conjured fantasies of organically homogeneous cultures, neatly bounded in space, where everyone identified clearly with the same identity: to fit, a person could, for example, be slotted into the “Yoruba Muslim” people group, but there would be conceptual problems if she instead saw herself as a Nigerian nationalist or a pan-African socialist – or as all three.
Compounding the problem, the Unreached Peoples teams sometimes identified groups so narrowly as to seem ridiculous – were “Urdu-speaking Muslim farmers of the Punjab” really their own group? Did it make sense to argue, as one 1979 survey did, that there were clear differences between the “Kau Nuba” in Kenya and their near neighbors, the “Mesakin Nuba”? The missions theorist Peter Wagner thought so: the Kau Nuba, he explained, were “described as wild and passionate,” but the Mesakin Nuba were “gentle.”Footnote 28 As some evangelical critics pointed out, this was not particularly useful as a way either of organizing missions work or of understanding the world. Yet, drawing on such oddly precise definitions, Winter and others came up with a totem number: 16,750 unreached people groups.Footnote 29
There were theorists of missionary work who used the concept of culture in more subtle ways. Paul Hiebert of the School of World Missions (where Wagner and others taught) insisted that missionaries and their supporters must take cultural difference more seriously. Starting in the late 1960s, Hiebert argued for the importance of recognizing cultural difference, of seeing one's own culture as specific and thus not the definitive expression of the Gospel. Hiebert became a leading theorist of contextualization, of using the tools of “postmodern” anthropology to promote a holistic view of culture, one that nonetheless recognized the fact that individuals generally lived in the crosscurrents of many different subcultures.Footnote 30
Similarly, in 1978, the Lausanne Committee sponsored a consultation of the Gospel and Culture, in which a number of missionary theorists and theologians from around the world worked together to define culture, to recognize cultural change, and to challenge Western missionary practices that had declared local cultures “unbiblical.” It was not that the Gospel was fully compatible with every cultural practice; instead believers everywhere must scrutinize their own cultures for which practices must be rejected and which might be retained and embraced. These theorists included Padilla, Costas, and Stott, as well as the renowned theologians Kwame Bediako of Ghana and Saphir Athyal of India, among others. They were interested in the culture concept as a way of moving beyond missionary imperialism. As they deliberated, however, the advocates of the Unreached Peoples movement were using the concept of “cultures” quite differently, as a way of dividing missionary opportunities into increasingly smaller and digestible slices.Footnote 31
The people-groups movement produced a certain kind of population to be observed; in hindsight, it is easy to see how it functioned as what Foucault was, at the same moment in the mid-1970s, analyzing as governmentality.Footnote 32 This missions-theory concept was not used by people to define themselves, of course. Urdu-speaking Muslim farmers in the Punjab were not a “people group” in their own minds, and they did little to produce themselves as obedient objects of contemplation by evangelical power. In that sense, people groups refused to populate themselves.
It is important to note that amidst all of their enthusiasm for evangelizing the world, the Unreached Peoples contingent was also offering its own critique of Graham's model of crusade evangelism. What was the point of holding massive revivals in the major cities of Nigeria or Brazil, after all, if most people in the cities were not part of unreached people groups? In fact, perhaps almost all urban missions, or missions to Europe for that matter, were a waste of precious resources, a showering of riches upon the spiritually wealthy. Older missions organizations, including the Southern Baptist Convention's International Missions Board, were initially hostile to the whole concept of “unreached peoples.” The split was serious; as one observer reported, the “people groups movement … has shaken the missions community to its core.”Footnote 33
POPULARITY IN THE PEWS
Intellectual debates aside, believers in the pews seemed to love the whole idea. By the late 1970s, there was an Unreached Peoples magazine, a set of books that listed and illustrated the various groups, and dozens of videos to be used in church education programs.Footnote 34 Some organizations encouraged churches to “adopt a people” as a prayer target; others offered calendars with a daily prayer focus.Footnote 35 The concept also helped to construct the “World Christian,” who consumed its associated products and learning aids, and who would understand herself as part of a border-spanning community that transcended easy nationalism.Footnote 36
This Christian was caring and worldly, certainly, but also a believer who perhaps knew more than others did about the realities of the mission field. The World Christian – there were scores of conferences and meetings, books and articles, even a magazine with the title – was one who took the time and trouble to learn about the issues in the rest of the world. This might involve something as simple as paying attention to hunger or war. More often, however, it involved finding a group of people to learn about and support through prayer and perhaps even missionary work.Footnote 37 After all, it was one thing for Southern Baptist churchgoers to gather up tissues and pencils to send to the Lottie Moon Christmas offering, where the objects of evangelism were traditionally depicted as generalized exotic Others. It was another for an evangelical believer to commit to learning something about one or more people groups in order to strategically pray for them. Focussed, passionate, knowledgeable prayer – the kind of prayer that required both intellect and affect – was at the heart of the Unreached Peoples strategy.
In this, Unreached Peoples, despite its obvious scientism, was no dry intellectual exercise. In a global church that increasingly highlighted the importance of emotionally resonant worship experience and the ongoing presence of “gifts of the spirit,” the arduous work of evangelism was also made rich with the promise of God's immanent and manifest presence among communities who were hearing of Jesus (theoretically) for the first time. The lovely National Geographic-style images that graced the “people groups” literature, the careful study of lifeways of the unreached, the reports of outpouring of the Holy Spirit in previously unreached areas, and tales of great moments of spiritual warfare: these produced a form of affect, inviting believers into both identification and exoticization in one luminous package. Nothing else in the evangelical church so beautifully combined metrics and mysticism.
SOCIAL CONCERN
When the “social-concern” faction showed up at Lausanne, they did so in the wake of a number of sometimes fraught developments. First was the impact of liberation theology, which had been shaking the Catholic world since the 1950s. Padilla, along with Samuel Escobar, Orlando Costas and others from the Theological Fraternity, expressed the conviction that they simply could no longer stand aside as Catholic priests and nuns in Latin America were moving to the front lines of social-justice activism, standing with the poor. They were “tempted” by the Marxist critiques of class and oppression, and they could not ignore the increasing radicalism of the students that many of them worked with.Footnote 38 The Latin Americans were joined by African American evangelists like Tom Skinner and John Perkins, along with more left-wing white Americans like John Yoder. Evangelicals from other parts of the world were also outspoken. Samuel Odunaike, a leader of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar, used his moment at the podium to proclaim that, unless the Congress addressed the broader issues, “we would have had only a grand picnic at great cost and much grief to our Lord.”Footnote 39
The second social issue was racism. Evangelical pieties opposed it; evangelical realities were often different. In reflecting on his own radicalization, Escobar talked about the impact of the South African Michael Cassidy (the evangelical who had invited Billy Graham to South Africa) when Cassidy spoke at the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. At the time, Escobar was a young evangelist working with college students, and he said, “I was very aware of the need to have answers to the social questions of Latin America.” He heard Cassidy talking about apartheid as an obstacle to evangelism, and he was deeply moved. Cassidy, he pointed out, was accused at the time of being a communist by some delegates, who wanted his speech expunged from conference proceedings. Escobar, on the other hand, was galvanized by seeing racism and oppression presented not only as obstacles to conversion, but also as serious structural issues that religious people must address.
Racism was also an issue for a number of the African Americans at Lausanne. Clarence Hilliard was one of only twenty-five African American delegates (out of about six hundred Americans in all), and, writing in the Post American, he challenged – although “challenged” might be too gentle a word – the processes that had led to the underrepresentation of African Americans at the Congress. Hilliard offered a short but rather shocking list of prominent black evangelicals who had not been invited: evangelist Tom Skinner, author of Black and Free (1968) and How Black Is the Gospel? (1970); William Bentley, the long-time president of the National Black Evangelical Association; and John Perkins, the groundbreaking social-justice activist from Mississippi. African delegates were certainly present and visible at Lausanne, but, even in the wake of a civil rights revolution in which Protestant clergy, including some evangelicals, had been central, African Americans were profoundly underrepresented, some of the most important leaders ignored.
Despite, or because of, his frustration with what Hilliard saw as implicit racism by the organizers of the Congress, he joined the network of social-action supporters led by Padilla, Escobar, and others. That loose coalition formed their own ad hoc group on “Theology and Implications of Radical Discipleship.” As every evangelical would have understood, “discipleship” was a kind of Christian shorthand; disciples are not just believers in Jesus, they are followers – disciples were those, fewer in number than the larger church, who give fully, who lived the requirements of faith. At the first meeting of the Radical Discipleship group, five hundred people showed up.
At the end of the meeting the discipleship group issued a statement that affirmed a commitment to evangelism, which they referred to as the necessity of spreading the Gospel “in its fullness” to the whole world. But the group insisted that “we must repudiate as demonic the attempt to drive a wedge between evangelism and social action.” Demonic. There was no pulling punches here. It was time for evangelicals to confess their sins, the group declared, and the list of sins was long and political: we have frequently denied the rights of the underprivileged; we have distorted the Gospel and offered simplistic answers to complex problems; we have been partisan in condemning totalitarianism but ignoring racism. With this in mind, the group resolved to work for renewal in Jesus. The task going forward was “to submit to his Lordship, to know his salvation, to identify in him with the oppressed and work for the liberation of men and women in his name.”Footnote 40
Leaders of this group also worked hard to influence the official Lausanne consensus document issued by the main body of the Congress. And they had some success. The left wing successfully fought for the addition of more political language in the official declaration, including direct references to alienation, oppression, and discrimination. The Covenant also included another reference to Bonhoeffer: “in issuing the Gospel invitation we have no liberty to conceal the cost of discipleship.” Still, the strong hand of the traditionalists showed through in the strained language of the compromise. “Although reconciliation with other people is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless we affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty.”Footnote 41 “Social concern” was not just a set of ideas or a theology of mission; it invoked and demanded a way of being that self-consciously broke with earlier evangelical traditions of a faith-practice oriented toward (only) the cultivation of an inner-oriented spirituality.
LEGACIES
For most of the 1970s, the leaders of the left-wing group believed that they had “won” at Lausanne, and that international evangelicalism had irrevocably committed itself to at least some version of social radicalism. Looking back in 1975, Padilla pronounced that those who had wanted the Congress to be a big festival of numbers-counting had been disappointed, that the Lausanne Covenant – the final consensus document – had been a “death blow” to attempts to “reduce mission to the multiplication of Christians and churches through evangelism.”Footnote 42
At some level, they had won. In the Philippines, India, and Latin America, activist groups promoted a faith that was alive to the world.Footnote 43 In South Africa, in 1986, a multiracial group of evangelicals issued the “Evangelical Witness against Apartheid,” only a few months after a similar denunciation of apartheid by more liberal Protestant churches. In the United States, a determined cohort enthusiastically took up the Covenant's call for believers in affluent circumstances to adopt “a simple lifestyle” and to give more money away. Ron Sider, who would go on to write Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977), headed up a group to consider concrete proposals. After two years’ worth of consultations and meetings, they produced a document that stressed structural economic inequality, but which also pointed to individual responsibility. Excess consumption, they said, was “choking the West with a surfeit of goods, services and waste.”Footnote 44 Various meetings continued, and for almost a decade there were numerous consultations that produced twenty-nine different “Lausanne Occasional Papers,” many of them (although certainly not all) focussed on social-justice issues. The reports were issued, yes, but in retrospect it looked very much like the radical social and political agenda had been neatly relegated to committee.Footnote 45
Church-growth leaders were equally certain they had triumphed, and made every effort to make sure that the follow-ups to Lausanne focussed on evangelism as primary. On the one-year anniversary of the Congress, missionary strategist C. Peter Wagner looked back, decrying what he called the “diversionary tactics” of the social-justice group. Had the radicals gotten their way, he said, they would have “destroyed the central evangelistic nature of the congress.” Fortunately, Wagner explained, the follow-on meeting of the Lausanne Continuation Committee, held six months after the congress, had sidelined such efforts. Instead, the committee declared that “evangelism is primary” and that the concern of the movement should be the 2·7 billion unreached people of the world.Footnote 46 This kind of approach found continued expression in a number of organizations, as well as in in the steamroller that the Unreached Peoples movement became.
Others simply revised the history of what had happened at Lausanne, insisting that the “social-concern” faction had never been that powerful. Christianity Today editor Harold Lindsell appraised the congress as a triumph of the evangelical movement over ecumenical Christianity, arguing that it had outstripped liberals in part by defining the saving of souls as primary. Lausanne, Lindsell said, in a strikingly performative historical revision, had refused to put social concern “on the same plane as the proclamation of the Gospel.”Footnote 47
The ability of both sides to claim victory had to do in part with the dispersed nature of the “movement.” Global evangelicalism is nothing if not a constantly evolving network, and so, as one group enthusiastically took up the issues of economic development, or dangers to the environment, others just as eagerly set up wildly successful programs that sent people overseas to show The Jesus Film – a creaky adaptation of the book of Luke that was dubbed into scores of languages and used as a simple form of “cross-cultural” evangelism. René Padilla himself eventually began to doubt the effectiveness of the radicals’ intervention in 1974. “The Lausanne movement, on the whole,” he said, was ultimately unaffected by the left's intervention. “Because of the tremendous influence of people who would specialize in evangelism and in a certain type of evangelism which majors on numbers,” the “movement” ultimately sidestepped the whole issue of social concern. “Still,” Padilla said, “that is fine. I mean, you know, institutionally the [Lausanne] movement may continue to have certain emphases, but the fact is that people at the grassroots level, especially in the Third World, are thinking otherwise.”Footnote 48
Indeed, scholars of evangelicalism have argued that a broader sense of mission was evidenced by the turn to various forms of humanitarianism among evangelicals. David King argues that the evangelical agency World Vision was perhaps the perfect embodiment of both legacies of Lausanne: it had been one of two founding sponsors of MARC's Unreached Peoples surveys, but the organization ultimately became as focussed on development issues as on evangelism. By the 1990s, World Vision was already the largest privately funded development organization in the world; in 2008, it had a budget of $2.6 billion.Footnote 49 World Vision's leaders increasingly talked about inequality and structural injustice, but in relatively gentle terms that allowed people to do things like skip a meal and donate what they saved. Over several decades, the organization has managed to walk the line that divided delegates at Lausanne; World Vision never fully joined the progressive wing of US evangelicalism but it increasingly responded to calls from its own staff in the global South for a “holistic” gospel – one stripped of its radical origins but willing to critique global inequities.
THE WORLDLY RIGHT
During the 1970s, the notion of a “worldly faith” was also finding an articulation among a very different groups of evangelicals. The Moral Majority was founded just five years after Lausanne, and it brought US evangelicalism firmly into the realm of politics, highlighting different social concerns. There is no reason to think the Congress directly influenced the outsized televangelists who became the best-known leaders of the Religious Right – Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, etc. None of them had been invited to Lausanne, and most were not so quietly spurned by the neo-evangelicals who had organized the congress, and who continued to see themselves as the heart of evangelicalism. No matter that Falwell and company got far more news media attention; they were not the “establishment evangelicals” who had attended Lausanne. Still, as Ron Sider pointed out, it did sometimes seem as if the lessons of the congress about the importance of speaking to “the gospel in its wholeness” had been picked up, so that a generation of leaders were openly willing to make politics a central part of their pastoral mission. But, as Sider put it, “it was just a very different politics.”Footnote 50
Perhaps nothing indicates this shift more clearly than the transformation of Francis Schaeffer. When he arrived at Lausanne, Schaeffer was the highly admired author of The God Who Is There (1968) and Escape from Reason (1968). During the 1960s, he had aggressively challenged the cultural isolation of evangelicalism. Schaeffer had begun his career as a staunch fundamentalist, allied with the resolutely separatist Carl McIntire. In the early 1950s, however, Schaeffer and his wife Edith had made their way to Switzerland as missionaries. In 1955, they founded L'Abri, a retreat center in the Swiss Alps. Something then changed for Schaeffer, who began to welcome all sorts of people to L'Abri – European backpackers, earnest American college students, dropouts, believers, and seekers. Schaeffer slowly built a reputation as a champion of biblical inerrancy who was familiar with, and willing to engage, the grand streams of Western art and literature. He didn't care if his visitors had long hair or declared themselves atheists. In fact, he seemed to relish both. More and more, evangelicals and others made L'Abri a destination, and it developed a cult-like status.
When Schaeffer began to lecture at US college campuses in the early 1960s, he surprised and often thrilled audiences. Schaeffer was already over fifty years old on his first trip, but he showed up to his lectures dressed in Swiss lederhosen, with long hair and a beard.Footnote 51 He used the lectures to make orthodox points about the dangers of relativism and humanism, but he did so by using examples from Michelangelo and Picasso, and from contemporary popular culture – the films of Fellini, the music of John Cage. As his close associate Os Guinness put it, Schaeffer was “a door opener.” He showed that “it was not only okay but right and proper and responsible, as a Christian, to understand the whole of life.”Footnote 52 This was not because Schaeffer was seduced by such culture – his point was to show familiarity in order to diagnose the deadly presuppositions of the secular worldview. But, as his son Frank would later put it, “In evangelical circles, if you wanted to know what Bob Dylan's songs meant, Francis Schaeffer was the man to ask. In the early 60s, he was probably the only fundamentalist who had heard of Bob Dylan.”Footnote 53
Schaeffer was no liberal. Only Christianity, he insisted, could provide a coherent and consistent worldview that could be lived without contradiction.Footnote 54 As a thinker, he played fast and loose with his history and sometimes showed quite shallow understandings of the philosophies he critiqued. His work, however, was at once accessible and serious. On the page and in person, he offered the 1960s generation a culturally expansive and anti-technocratic spirituality.Footnote 55
Taking his place at the pulpit at Lausanne, Schaeffer cut a distinctive figure, with his long, now graying, hair and beard, and casual clothing. He argued that evangelicals needed to embrace their global community. It was unimaginable, he preached, that the fellowship of believers would leave some of its members hungry while others were rich. Evangelicalism must be more than a series of “preaching points and activity generators.” It must encompass every aspect of life, building a true community that would be visible to the world. One observer described Schaeffer's talk as one of the most important examples of social concern at Lausanne.Footnote 56
It might seem surprising, then, that within two years, Schaeffer would move dramatically to the right. From the podium at Lausanne, Schaeffer had spoken about economic justice, but most of his writing up until that time had focussed on the intellectual and moral failure of humanism. After 1974, Schaeffer's long-standing brief against the Enlightenment became more overtly political. In his 1976 book (and 1977 film) How Should We Then Live? Schaeffer reiterated his attacks on those who promoted a rudderless moral universe. He expanded his critique of humanism, which now was represented not only by Michelangelo or the Beatles but by a Western, consumerist mentality that led to political passivity. Lacking a Christian moral foundation, Americans had no independent basis for judging right from wrong. Attending only to their own possessions and comfort, they just accepted the rule of secular elites.
It was from this vantage point that Schaeffer first approached the issue of abortion, which had been legalized in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. For him, abortion was just another example of elites imposing rules and expecting acquiescence. In its decision, the Supreme Court had pronounced on the nature of human life, arbitrarily declaring that a third-trimester fetus was a person but a first-trimester fetus was not.Footnote 57 The Supreme Court decision made no moral claim other than pragmatism, Schaeffer argued, and this was not entirely surprising. A population that cared only about its own comfort, he argued, would value a woman's convenience over the life of a powerless person.
Schaeffer thus drew on a liberal/left tradition of critiquing the dangers of consumerism and selfishness; the Frankfurt school hovered silently over Schaeffer's writings. Thus he wove together three of the most important political and affective stances of what was fast becoming the New Right: anticommunism; antielitism; and antiabortionism. The book was a success, selling forty thousand copies in the first three months after it was published. Although it was Schaeffer's next book-and-film combination, the 1979 antiabortion brief Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, that catapulted him into stardom, it was How Should We Then Live? that set the terms of the debate, bringing the logic of social concern to the politics of abortion. It was that work that allowed Schaeffer to become, as Der Spiegel aptly phrased it, the “philosopher of the Moral Majority.”Footnote 58
For those influenced by Schaeffer – and there were many who, without having read his work, were exposed to his ideas as they filtered through the common sense of evangelical life – opposition to abortion was understood as resistance to a larger “culture of death.” When the Moral Majority took up abortion, it echoed Schaeffer while also refocussing his agenda, linking “abortion on demand” to “pornography, homosexuality, and godless humanism.”Footnote 59 Of these, it was abortion that would eventually compel the greatest moral outrage among US evangelicals. Abortion would become a key issue that linked evangelicals to Catholics at both the conservative and liberal ends of the spectrum. The social-concern evangelicals at Sojourners spoke of a “seamless garment,” and conservatives called for support of the “traditional family,” but both joined Catholics in opposing abortion as the exemplary moral failing of a society that had lost its foundation.Footnote 60
CONCLUSION
If all of this seems far from the issues of global poverty, militarism, and racism that engaged the social-justice faction at Lausanne, it was not. The “social concerns” articulated there might be very different to those posited by the Religious Right in the 1980s, but the determination to live faith out loud was a shared one. Those activists who had called for a socially committed faith in the late 1960s and the 1970s had operated from the logic of their moment, which led many of them to assume that if evangelicals could just be convinced to engage social issues, they would take left liberal positions on poverty and war. The rebels at Lausanne believed in the possibility of a global civil society, one that married evangelism not only with humanitarian aid but also with a radical commitment to addressing oppression. But the call to political commitment cut across political lines, and the Christian Right would enthusiastically take up the idea of an activist faith.
Then, in 1989, the Argentinian-born evangelist Luis Bush rocked the second Lausanne meeting with his proposal that evangelization should focus not just on unreached peoples, but those in the 10/40 Window, a geographical box between 10 degrees and 40 degrees latitude, and wrapping around parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where, he said, the majority of people were held in “slavery” by Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam. The “oppressed’ were here understood as those held in bondage by their religion.Footnote 61 ”
This might seem to be a return of evangelism-first, but it was not without overt politics. Over the next decades, with the 10/40 Window as a focus and as crises heated up in Sudan, Nigeria, and Egypt, opposition to Islam became more central to evangelical identity – in the US, but also in Europe and Africa. The dangers faced by “persecuted Christians,” long a topic of concern, ultimately emerged as the defining mantra of the post-9/11 generation. In the end, those who focussed on evangelism and those who focussed on discipleship came to agree that solidarity with the oppressed meant focussing on Christian believers who were suffering for their faith. The persecuted-Christians movement also allowed American evangelicals to define themselves as victims – linked to their colleagues in the global South through networks of feeling, they eventually constructed a narrative that positioned Christians around the world as the globe's primary victims. This victim status included Americans who faced discrimination in a secular society as well as those Christians who faced imprisonment or death in Muslim or communist countries.Footnote 62 The focus on Islam and persecuted Christians was aided by the “new mobilities” of easy travel, short-term missions trips, and the Internet-fueled intensities of long-distance contacts among evangelicals. This meant not a borderless faith, but definitely a boundary-crossing one. Yet the very things that connected Christians, be it Facebook accounts or trips by American high-school students to African orphanages, were also boundary-making. In particular, the line separating Christian and Muslim was brightly drawn and increasingly patrolled.
The social-concern faction at Lausanne had organized itself around a nexus of affective as well as ideological formations. The history of their commitments is also a history of emotions. There was, for example, the construction of a moral geography of affiliation and solidarity. That was built on anger at injustice, and on forms of love. There was, too, a certain longing for enchantment, built on the 1960s generation's search for intensity, authenticity, and new forms of emotionally saturated righteousness. In the end, however, it was the evangelism-first faction that perhaps understood the future better. The data, scientism, modernity, and knowledge they offered, combined with a promise of worldliness, linked concrete data to enchanted, numinous feelings of connection.
In the 1980s and beyond, then, the social-concern faction in the United States lost ground to both the evangelism-first mission types and to right-wing political activists. Yet groups like the Lausanne Committee and the World Evangelical Fellowship, as well as Intervarsity and others, were sometimes amalgams of all three – left-leaning and right-leaning politics, meshed with an ardent focus on evangelism by numbers.
The globalizing faith of evangelicals in the 1970s, and the short-lived triumph of a particular form of “social concern,” emerged from a rich intersection of postcolonial assertiveness by people from the global South and antiracism both within and beyond the US. The legacy of that triumph was equally multifaceted, creating links between domestic and international politics, and between opponents of the suffering caused by the structures of global poverty and opponents of the suffering caused by the structures of secular liberalism. The people who inhabited these positions often disagreed with each other, vehemently, but they operated in the shared field of meaning-making that was evangelicalism across borders. They understood suffering and sin in similar ways; they shared a language as well as general theological views on the Bible and salvation. This cohabitation was meaningful enough, and the lines of concern intersected frequently enough, that leaders from all sides left the 1974 Congress with some belief that there was a thing called global evangelicalism, and that the people at Lausanne were its exemplars – and its defenders. A newly energized and globalized evangelicalism did not begin at Lausanne in 1974, but the terms of the next forty years were set there, as evangelicals turned, heart and soul, toward the world.
