Take the 5-Point TIBM-Cape Town Challenge!

      Fresh back from my trip to the US-Lausanne pre-congress meeting, I had a chance to offer a report, words of encouragement, and set of challenges to the TIBM family this past Sunday night in our house church gathering.  I’ll admit that in my excitement, it was difficult to present things in an organized fashion, but I think that most people got the idea.  Well, I won’t rehash the whole report here, but I did want to outline the five-point “TIBM-Cape Town Challenge” that our team/church is taking on in 2010.  This is our way of preparing for the 3^rd Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization and engaging in a work that we feel may be the defining Kingdom-work of our generation.

     Wow, I’m really tempted to just go on and on here, but I’ll restrain myself.  Let me get right into the challenge and ask you to join us in this.

1.      Read, study, teach, and memorize the book of Ephesians

All 4,000 on-site participants are being challenged by the Lausanne leadership to soak in Ephesians in the months leading up to Cape Town.  We are also being asked to teach it and preach from it in our various mission contexts and even to memorize it.  The official Cape Town 2010 study guide for Ephesians is simple and helpful.  You can download a pdf for free here.  At Trinity, we just finished a multi-year study of spiritual warfare that had us focused a lot on Ephesians 6.  Nevertheless, we’ll take up this challenge and take a significant amount of time in the book this year.

2.      Prayer for and memorization of all nations

The 3^rd congress will be the most diverse gathering of Christians the world has ever seen.  Some 4,000 delegates from 200 nations will come together to pray, worship, commune, and discuss the most critical issues of our time.  The leadership of the US delegation has specifically asked us to pray for all these nations and to memorize their geographical locations on the earth.  This challenge was quickly amended in the recent Dallas meeting to, “Well, just do all the nations.”  So, I’ve begun to do so and invite you as well.  To pray, I am using a tried and true resource called Operation World that, fantastically, is available online for free.  Just go there and click on “pray today.”  Do it every day.  To memorize the locations of all the world’s nations, I’ve been using a geography quiz site that works well, is free, and is actually helping me.  You can check it out here.  Again, try doing one quiz every day.

3.      Study the Lausanne Covenant

The Lausanne Covenant is a document that resulted from the 1^st Lausanne congress in 1974 and has served as a “rallying point” for evangelical Christians the world over who are passionate about the “whole Church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.”  It is something of a statement of faith, but one that is fundamentally grounded in the missional calling and nature of God’s people.  One of the most influential documents in the history of evangelical Christianity, it is something that I want to lead my team in studying, understanding, and interacting with.  There are some terrific resources available for free on the covenant including the actual text itself as well as a study guide entitled For the Lord we Love by John Stott that can be helpful in an individual and group context.  I plan to do personal study as well as to lead TIBM in corporate study of the covenant.

4.      Fully engage the 6 crucial issues of the congress

The 3^rd Lausanne Congress is not being convened simply because we haven’t done it in a while, but in response to a global outcry from Christians who see that God’s Church is facing a number of extraordinarily difficult challenges.  AIDS, postmodernism, Islamic fundamentalism, the southern shift of the church, and other weighty issues are matters that simply cannot be ignored. The passion of Lausanne 3 is to gather the leaders of God’s worldwide church to earnestly seek the will of Christ through prayer, repentance, worship, communion, study, and conversation.  Our hope is to come away from the congress with an Acts 15 kind of declaration, “It seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit that the Church . . .”  In particular, through a multi-year process of prayerful and informed discernment, six crucial issues have been put before us.  These are:

·         How do we make a case for truth and the uniqueness of Christ in a postmodern, pluralistic world?

·         How do we articulate and demonstrate the power of the gospel in the midst of suffering and strife?

·         How do we respond redemptively to religious fundamentalism – Islam and Hinduism in particular?

·         What should be our priorities with respect to the unfinished task of world evangelization?

·         What are obstacles to world evangelization within the church and how can those be addressed?

·         How should the Church in the US partner with the Church in the rest of the world?

So then, the challenge is to prayerfully and studiously, thoughtfully and actively, locally and globally engage these six critical issues.  I believe that any local church or Christian organization in the world today that has a truly global vision will be able to find significant points of intersection between these issues and their local ministry.  So, I have decided to seek to make the work of Lausanne 3 the work of TIBM.  Here are a couple concrete ways we plan to engage these challenges.  First, I am calling upon the TIBM family to engage in the growing global conversation around these issues that is being hosted online by Lausanne and Christianity Today.  You can do that too by going directly to this site. I believe that God may have tremendous plans for this site.  Engage now.  Secondly, TIBM will be using a number of our Sunday night house church gatherings to focus on these issues.  We’ll take time to unpack each of the 6 issues and then prayerfully discuss them in our group.  In particular, we’ll frame our discussion with these questions:

 ·         How does this global issue impact and intersect with our local ministry?

·         How is God calling us to engage in this issue globally? How is God calling us to engage in partnerships around this issue?

·         What things make our involvement challenging?  Hopeful?

·         What resources do we have for the wider church and what resources do we need from the wider church concerning this issue?

·         What concerns should we bring before the Lord regarding this issue?

5.      Develop a Strategy for Mobilization and Prophetic Leadership

Cape Town 2010 is not an end in itself.  It is, Lord willing, the beginning of renewal, reformation, and recommitment for the global Church.  Those who engage in the work of Lausanne 3, have the responsibility to mobilize, equip, call, and lead the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.  As the Lord speaks to us in global community about these 6 critical issues, we then must speak to those in our spheres of influence.  We don’t know now what that will need to look like.  However, we know enough to pray and prepare ourselves for a work that will continue long after the Cape Town delegates have gone back home.  So, pray now.  And consider now how God may be calling you in leadership and in service around this work.  How should your gifts (teaching, giving, prayer, administration, service, mercy, etc.) be put to use to support the work of Lausanne right now?