Lausanne 4: The most dangerous words for the world Church

By Melissa BarnhartEditor in Chief Monday, September 23, 2024

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

In his message to the 5,000 Christians from more than 200 countries gathered at the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization this week at the Songdo Convensia International Convention Center and to another 5,000 participants virtually Sunday night, Oh warned against mindsets and actions that hinder Christian witness and efforts to fulfill the Great Commission.

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

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“We repent of not saying those four dangerous words that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 12:21-27, but feeling them in our hearts or showing them by our actions: ‘I have no need of you.’ And we have said them to one another, and we have said them to God. But God reminds us that ‘without me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5),” Oh said, lamenting the “isolation” and “competition” among different ministry groups.

These four words, “I don’t need you,” Oh stressed, hinder the impact of the global church today.

The mentality of being “so self-centered, self-assured, self-reliant and maybe downright selfish,” he said, causes 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 emphasis on competition within the church instead of collaboration “has led to a struggle for financial resources and, ultimately, to ineffectiveness and ugliness in the Body of Christ,” he said.

“One of the main reasons for the ineffectiveness of the Body is the failure to integrate 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 fruits of these efforts, he said, was cultivated at the Lausanne 1 Conference, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, where great emphasis was placed on spreading the gospel to unreached people groups. This effort has led to the spread of the gospel to 9,000 unreached people groups in the last 50 years and the growth of churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Referring to Romans 10:14, Oh explained that it was through the missionaries who planted the first churches in the city of Incheon more than 100 years ago that his mother came to faith in Christ. And without the work of these men and women, “I might not be here today.”

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

“Stumbling over the messengers”

Although many new evangelistic tools have been developed over the decades, especially in the last 15 years, in “safe areas of the world” that have seen population growth, Oh said there has been a “slowdown” in the spread of 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 there were the year before,” he explained.

“Fifty years later, we are humbled because we recognize that our witness in the world and our mission to the world are still imperfect,” he said. “The task of sharing the Good News with the whole world is still difficult and incomplete.”

Oh also lamented the numerous scandals of “pride, power and impurity” among church leaders that have “shaken the church and compromised our witness.”

“The reputation of the bride of Christ in many parts of the world is not good,” Oh added. “Rather than stumbling over the gospel message, as we see in Romans 9, far too many people are stumbling over the messengers. Our failures today in a world of social media are more public and deeply felt and seen on a global scale than ever before. And so, 50 years later, we continue to be driven to penetration by our failures, or at least we must be.”

These two issues – the sharing of the Gospel in the world and the renown of the bride of Christ – are the reasons why the delegates selected to participate in Lausanne 4 must subscribe to the collaboration and the theme of this Congress: “May the Church proclaim and manifest Christ together”, he continued.

Despite human flaws, Oh encouraged the delegates not to live in fear but to live in faith and not to walk in arrogance but to be humble. Likewise, he reiterated the need not to compete but to collaborate in terms of mission and purpose.

“We need to speak out loud, biblically, clearly and plainly with the gospel message” in a way that is “personalized, contextualized, compassionate, with compelling words of life and love,” Oh added, citing 1 Corinthians 12:12, which says: “For as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.”