Abstract
This paper examines the contested legacy of the First Lausanne Congress in South Korean neo-evangelical communities. In response to growing political and social conflicts in the Global South during the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of evangelical leaders from more than 150 countries gathered at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974 to discuss the proper relationship between evangelism and social action. The meeting culminated with the proclamation of the Lausanne Covenant, which affirmed both evangelism and public involvement as essential elements of the Christian faith. However, the absence of practical guidelines in the Covenant opened the door for all sorts of evangelical social activism, whether from the Evangelical Right or the Evangelical Left, for years to come. In light of such diverse ramifications of the Congress at both the global and local level, this paper explores the various ways in which the idea of “Christian social responsibility” has been interpreted and implemented by two distinct generations of neo-evangelical social activists in contemporary South Korea in relation to their respective socio-historical experiences of the Cold War and the 1980s democratic movement.
Highlights
Since the early 2000s, among socially-concerned neo-evangelicals in South Korea, a debate has proliferated concerning Christian public engagement with reference to the Lausanne Congress resolution on “Christian social responsibility” [1,2]
In the mid-1980s, they were introduced to the Lausanne movement through some of the key founders of the Christian social responsibility (CSR), and yet, even though they identify themselves as “the Lausanne generation”, this group generally takes a liberal-left position on many socio-political issues [7]
Given that the Lausanne movement made such a great impact on evangelicals’ mode of public engagement around the world, when and how was it introduced into South Korea? In pursuing this question, special attention will be given to the ways in which the neo-evangelicals of the older and the younger generations differently encountered the discourse of “Christian social responsibility” and selectively digested its implications in relation to their specific experiences at a given period of time
Summary
Since the early 2000s, among socially-concerned neo-evangelicals in South Korea, a debate has proliferated concerning Christian public engagement with reference to the Lausanne Congress resolution on “Christian social responsibility” [1,2]. At every juncture of its journey, the transmission of this idea was often blocked, interrupted and delayed by those who were uncomfortable with its left-leaning implications Even after it became one of the key defining terminologies of the post-Lausanne global evangelicalism, the notion of “Christian social responsibility” has been variously re-interpreted and transformed according to given historical and socio-political circumstances. The data were primarily collected during fieldwork through a combination of semi-structured interviews and oral history, which intermittently took place in the Republic of Korea and the United States from 2010 to 2012 For this specific subject on the generational split of Korean evangelicalism, the author, from the perspective of an “outsider” to the evangelical tradition, interviewed a total of 22 evangelical pastors or lay leaders, who had been directly or indirectly involved in faith-based socio-political activism, as well as the controversy on the formation of the CSR in 2004 and 2005. The final part explores how a generational rift was created within Korean evangelicalism and how that affected the evangelical socio-political orientations of different generations
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