“Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes”

Abstract

October 2014 Samuel Escobar, a contributing editor, and his wife, Lilly, worked with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Latin America and Canada, 1959–85. Then he taught missions at Eastern Baptist (now Palmer) Theological Seminary, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, 1985–2005. He presently teaches at theFacultadProtestantedeTeologiaUEBEinMadrid. —jsescobar@yahoo.com A I sit down to prepare this response to a World Council of Churches (WCC) document on mission and evangelism, I cannot but reflect on the “landscape” from which I write. My most recent experience of missiological activity in Spainwas a fewweeks ago speaking in a gathering of LatinAmericanmissionaries in Europe. Over a hundred of them met at Torrox, near Malaga, representing fifteen countries. After that I crossed the peninsula to Seville in order to teach an intensive course about Christian mission organized by Irismenio Ribeiro, a Brazilian missionary who leads an extension theological center for the region. It was hosted by the Baptist church of Montequinto, where the pastor is Stella Maris Merlo, anArgentinian who has been serving as a missionary in Spain for thirty-three years. During the course we prayed for a team of Spanish missionaries that serve in Equatorial Guinea in western Africa under the European Baptist Mission. At the time for meals we were hosted by Gladys, a lady from El Salvador, a hard-working immigrant and one of the hundreds of Latin American volunteers who are active in Spanish churches these days. This is the reality of the global church in the twenty-first century, and as I experience it in Spain I cannot but praise the Lord as I trace back this reality to the two centuries of missionary work that have preceded us. Four years ago we were celebrating the centennial of Edinburgh 1910, and this year we are celebrating forty years of the Lausanne Covenant and the movement that followed it. In fact, the Busan document of the WCC has reminded me of what I consider providential convergences for Christian mission in the mid-1970s. First, in 1974 evangelicals gathered in Lausanne issued the Lausanne Covenant. This document reaffirmed commitment to mission and evangelism but also included critical reflection about the way in which mission efforts had taken place up to that moment, along with a surprising call to repentance and a commitment to explore realistically a more Christlike way of going about them. That same year a synod of bishops of the Roman Catholic Church asked Pope Paul VI to issue a renewed call to evangelism; in 1975 he promulgated the apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi, concerning the evangelization of the modern world. In the same year, the WCC had its Fifth Assembly, in Nairobi, where themes of mission and evangelismwere the object of renewed attention. Missiologist James A. Scherer commented that, in Nairobi, “Assembly statements about ‘confessing Christ’ had a stronglyChristocentric, Trinitarian, and churchly ring, echoing Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic influence but also responding to evangelical criticisms.”1Thefinal documentwas “Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes”