Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – A Theology of Evangelism in the Global South

By Samuel Escobar
April 2008

The fruit of those labours was the development of vibrant evangelical churches in the Global South that had a great evangelistic dynamism. By the 1960s, a new generation of evangelical leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America started the quest for a theology of evangelism that would match their activism but also respond to the tremendous social tensions of that decade.

The 1966 Berlin World Congress on Evangelism that preceded Lausanne I became a catalyst for this ferment because it was followed up by a series of regional congresses on evangelism in which a questioning of the received Western evangelical theology took place.⁴ The urgency of communicating the gospel in a context of poverty, revolution, strife, oppression, and violence required a fresh understanding of the gospel and new models of missionary action.

Because of this preceding process, Lausanne was not the missiological and theological monologue of European or North American evangelicals, but became a brotherly global dialogue of a community that had grown beyond expectations, a dialogue in search for ways of obedience to the missionary imperatives of Jesus.

Evangelism in Jesus’ Way
As a Latin American, I consider John Stott´s series of four Bible studies about the Great Commission (Berlin 1966) a milestone. In his study of the Gospel of John, Stott argued that in this version of the Great Commission we not only have the imperative “I send you” but also the model of action “as my Father sent me.” In response to the social dilemmas of the 1960s in Latin America, we had developed an understanding of evangelism that was built over a Christological structure that shaped both message and method.

René Padilla developed it, and I also used it in my presentation about the social responsibility of the Church in the 1969 Latin American Congress at Bogotá.⁵ Since then, as good evangelicals, we have kept a central focus of our reflection on Jesus Christ; however, in the Global South we have tried to deepen our understanding of this basic Christology. There are recent expressions of this approach from Asia in Ajith Fernando´s study “Jesus: The Message and Model of Mission,”⁶ and from Africa in Tokumbo Adeyemo´s “Profiling a Globalized and Evangelical Missiology.”⁷

Padilla offers a fresh restatement of his position in a paper on the theological basis for holistic mission.⁸ Elsewhere, I offer an account of the development of this Christological search in Latin America.⁹

As we consider the missionary pattern modeled by Jesus, and the meaning of his death and resurrection, we face the uniqueness of his person and work. We must acknowledge that it is a scandalous truth, a puzzling reality. It was surprising for his own contemporaries, as we see in the Gospel stories, and it continues to be a challenge to human logic in these times of religious pluralism.

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Samuel Escobar was born in Peru and ministered in Latin America under the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He was chair of missiology at Palmer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, USA. He spoke at Lausanne 1974 and was a member of the committee that drafted the Lausanne Covenant. Presently he lives and teaches in Spain.