Topic: Lausanne 4: Michael Oh reveals 4 most-dangerous words affecting the global Church– Christian News23 SEPTEMEBER 2024 – Faithwheel.com

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Lausanne 4: Michael Oh reveals 4 most-dangerous words affecting the global Church

By Melissa Barnhart, Managing Editor Monday, September 23, 2024

INCHEON, South Korea — Reflecting on the wisdom found in the scriptures, Michael Oh, global executive director of the Lausanne Movement, called on believers to humble themselves and work together to spread the Gospel worldwide effectively.

In his message to the 5,000 Christians gathered from over 200 countries at the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization this week at Songdo Convensia international convention center and the 5,000 others participating virtually Sunday night, Oh admonished the mentalities and actions hindering the Christian witness and efforts to fulfill the Great Commission.

Oh, who, along with his wife and children, previously served as missionaries in Japan, called on Christians to repent of four things: their pride, parochialism, isolation and arrogance.

“We repent of not so much saying with our words but feeling in our heart or showing through our actions those four dangerous words that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 12:21-27: ‘I don’t need you.’ And we have said those to each other, and we have said those to God. But God reminds us, ‘apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5),” Oh said, lamenting the “isolation” and “competition” among various ministry groups.

Those four words, “I don’t need you,” Oh stressed, are hampering the impact of the global Church today.

The mentality of being “so self-focused, self-confident, self-sustained and perhaps flat out selfish,” he said, is causing believers to miss out on the “competitive advantage of working with others — other ministries, other businesses, other schools, other denominations or other parts of the Body.”

The focus on competition within the Church instead of collaboration “has led to a fight over financial resources and, ultimately, the ineffectiveness and ugliness of the Body of Christ,” he said.

“One of the greatest reasons for the ineffectiveness of the Body is the failure to incorporate the whole Body into God’s mission,” he added, reminding those gathered that through collaboration, it only takes a few people to “change the world.”

An example of the fruit of such efforts, he said, was cultivated at Lausanne 1 held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, where great emphasis was placed on sharing the Gospel with unreached people groups. That effort has led to the sharing of the Gospel with 9,000 unreached people groups over the last 50 years and the growth of churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Pointing to Romans 10:14, Oh shared that because missionaries planted the first churches in the city of Incheon over 100 years ago, his mother came to faith in Christ. And without the work of those men and women, “I might not be here today.”

South Korea has since become the second-largest missionary-sending nation in the world. Hundreds of churches throughout the country have been working alongside Lausanne to host the event, and 4,000 Korean Christians have committed to praying for the event’s success.

‘Stumbling over the messengers’

Although many new evangelistic tools have been developed over the decades, particularly in the last 15 years, in “safe areas of the world” that have seen population growth, Oh said there has been a “deceleration” in sharing the Gospel. This is compounded by the fact that “year after year, there are more people in the world who have never heard the Gospel than a year before,” he explained.

“Fifty years later, we are humbled as we recognize that we still have a flawed witness in the world and a flawed mission to the world,” he said. “The task of sharing the Good News to all the world is still challenging and incomplete.”

A separate issue Oh lamented is the numerous scandals of “pride, power and impurity” among church leaders that have “rocked the Church and compromised our witness.”

“The reputation of the bride of Christ in many places around the world is not good,” Oh added. “Rather than people stumbling over the message of the Gospel, as we see in Romans 9, too many are stumbling over the messengers. Our failures today in a world of social media are more public and profoundly felt and seen globally than ever before. And so, we continue, 50 years later, to be moved to penetrance by our failures, or at least we need to be.”

These two issues — sharing the Gospel throughout the world and the reputation of the bride of Christ — are the reasons why the delegates selected to attend Lausanne 4 must embrace collaboration and the theme of this Congress: “Let the Church declare and display Christ together,” he continued. 

Despite one’s human flaws, Oh encouraged delegates not to live in fear but to live in faith and to not walk in arrogance but to exhibit humility. Likewise, he reiterated the need not to be in competition but to collaborate in terms of mission and purpose.

“We must be vocal, beautifully vocal, biblically vocal, clearly vocal with the message of the Gospel” in a way that is “personalized, contextualized, compassionate, compelling words of life and love,” Oh added, citing 1 Corinthians 12:12, which says: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

Others who spoke at the opening ceremony included Incheon Mayor Yoo Jeong-bok, who recognized the Lausanne Movement’s “50-year legacy of world evangelization.” The opening ceremony closed with performances by Keith and Kristyn Getty and their band.

Also addressing delegates was the Rev. Jaehoon Lee, senior pastor of Onnuri Church and chair of the Lausanne Movement’s Asia Co-Host Committee that helped to organize the event.

He said that in an increasingly polarized world, the Lausanne Congress offered an important moment to think critically about some of the changes affecting the Church, like technology, the shift in the center of Christianity to the Global South and East, and the challenges of raising up a new generation of young leaders.

“The world seems like it is getting more torn apart than ever before. … Can it be that God can deliver peace and healing through our prayers? Could it be that God can bring about hope and transformation through our partnerships?” he said.

As part of the seven-day event, numerous speakers will address various topics within the global Church, including Patrick Fung, global ambassador of OMF International, Pastor Rick Warren, Billy Wilson, president of Oral Roberts University, and Egyptian professor Anne Zaki.

Two significant documents were also released during Lausanne 4: The Seoul Statement and The State of the Great Commission report.

The Seoul Statement is the work of the Lausanne Theological Working Group and draws on feedback from regional gatherings over the last 18 months.

Co-author David Bennett said the document is an “exciting milestone” that will build on previous Lausanne statements, notably the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, the 1989 Manila Manifesto and the 2010 Cape Town Commitment.

The Church has ‘failed to nurture new believers’

The Seoul Statement identifies seven key areas that the global Church must collaborate on in order to fulfill the Great Commission: the Gospel, the Bible, the Church, the human person, discipleship, technology, and the ‘family of nations,’ which focuses on people living in areas of conflict.

The statement expresses “regret” that “during the last 50 years of evangelistic harvest, the global church has not adequately provided the teaching necessary to help new believers develop a truly biblical worldview.”

“The church has often failed to nurture new believers to obey Christ’s call to radical discipleship at home, at school, in the church, in our neighborhoods, and in the marketplace,” it reads.

“It has also struggled to equip its leaders to respond to trending social values and to distortions of the gospel, which have threatened to erode the sincere faith of Christians and to destroy the unity and fellowship of the church of the Lord Jesus.”

The statement expresses alarm at the “rise of false teachings and pseudo-Christian lifestyles,” both of which it says are “leading numerous believers away from the essential values of the gospel.”

The statement calls on Christians to renew their commitment to the centrality of the Gospel and the faithful reading of Scripture.Play Video

“Only in this way can we meet the specific challenges that now face the global church as we seek to bear faithful witness to our crucified and risen Lord — from everywhere, to everywhere, for the sake of generations to come,” it says.

The ‘mission is now from every continent to every continent’

The State of the Great Commission report considers 10 key questions the global Church must consider as it looks ahead to the year 2050.

These include questions surrounding the impact of artificial intelligence, changing societal attitudes toward gender and sexuality, the world’s aging population, radical politics, Islam and secularism, and the growth of Christianity across the Majority World.

“Christianity will increasingly be a religion of the aged in Europe and North America,” it reads, adding that “mission is now from every continent to every continent.”

“With the exception of Europe, every region in the world both sends and receives more missionaries than fifty years ago. Mission is increasingly decoupled from its Western colonial legacy, with more missionaries coming from countries that lack Christian majorities.”

The report further notes that “with the exception of Africa, all regions will witness an increase in the proportion of the population that is unevangelized in the coming decades.”

“This is a stark reversal of a century of growing gospel access around the world,” it states.

During Lausanne 4, group sessions will be held to discuss 25 of the most pressing issues raised by the report.

Xia-Maria Mackay contributed to this report 

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