"Making Christ Known" historic documents from The Lausanne
Movement, 1974-1989

Book Review by Rev. Tom Houston

John Stott and Paternoster Press and Eerdman’s in the USA have done
us all a great service in making these papers available in one well
produced volume.

I venture to say that if these papers had been read and followed by
the groups who went into Eastern Europe after the fall of communism,
some would not have made the mess they did. Equally if they had been
followed by those who started up new churches or Christian organizations
in the last 25 years and by the churches or organizations they left to
do so, we might well have had already, the revival that we have all been
praying for and less fragmentation.

It could even be true that if this book had been the text book of
more people, we might not have had "The Post Evangelical", for
here there is a sentence for nearly every kind of radical without the
need of feeling they are going beyond the pale.

Unfortunately, this gold mine of evangelical thinking has not had
wide currency because of the way in which it was originally published.
It came out in the Lausanne Occasional Papers which were all wire
stitched, with no spines and of little interest to booksellers and
Lausanne never had enough money to send them out free. What am I talking
about?

I am talking about The Lausanne Covenant and seven other papers that
were produced by the cooperative effort of a veritable Who’s Who of
international evangelical names. Tokunboh Adeyemo, Saphir Athyal, Kwame
Bediako, Peter Beyerhaus, David Bosch, Harvey Conn, Kenneth Cragg, Ed
Dayton, Samuel Escobar, Leighton Ford, Art Glasser, Paul Hiebert, Chuck
Kraft, Peter Kuzmic, Greg Livingstone, Howard Marshall, Donald McGavran,
Gottfried Osei Mensah, Stephen Neill, Bruce Nicholls, Jim Packer, Rene
Padilla, Bong Rin Ro, Vinay Samuel, Ron Sider, Tom Sine, Tite Tienou,
John Stott, Peter Wagner, Ralph Winter, Ted Yammomori and many more are
here.

I read each of these papers as they came out. I decided to read them
all again before I wrote this review. It was a very rewarding refresher
course of contemporary evangelical thought. The Lausanne Covenant with
its commentary by John Stott is a masterpiece of condensation covering
the whole gamut of the truths that underlie our evangelism. The balanced
eight pages on the Homogeneous Unit Principle takes the fire out of that
controversy.

The 33 pages on "Gospel and Culture" are an eloquent and
concise masterpiece of insights into a subject that only gets more
important as time goes on. Eight pages more on "An Evangelical
Commitment to a Simple Lifestyle" has an inescapable challenge and
yet is as balanced as one would wish. "Evangelism and Social
Responsibility" gets 40 pages and is as candid and open a paper as
you could desire, given the controversy that surrounded the subject.

All the Lausanne Occasional papers are not here but there is a
description of them all showing their place in the development of the
debate and indicating where they can be found. Lastly comes the Manila
Manifesto. When I reread it, in the same day that I finished the others,
I thought it was an excellent concise summary and extension of all that
had gone before and an agenda that any local church might follow with
profit.

Other features that shone out from the book were its modesty, its
realism, its fairness, its insistence on being international and its
conciliatory tone. It is a model of how Christians should explore the
areas where they disagree. It defines the evangelical identity and
articulates the dialogue we need to have among ourselves, with other
Christians and with the larger pluralist world we now live in.

For preachers or lecturers, many of the sections have study
questions added. There is a subject index that will enable themes to be
easily studied across all the papers. There is an extensive Scripture
index that could be used to take you from text to the relevance of many
passages.

In his introduction, John Stott gives the historical framework out
of which the papers emerged and he has a fine passage about the
"Lausanne Spirit". Its five ingredients are the resolve to
work for world evangelization, the humble penitence to confess our past
shortcomings, the courage to meet one another face to face in order to
debate the issues that divide us, the mutual respect to listen open
mindedly to one another’s viewpoints and the determination to submit to
Scripture as we conscientiously understand it, while not breaking
fellowship with those who interpret it differently.

Here is a book for every pastor, informed lay person and student who
wants to know their way around the issues that dog us in our day.

To order contact: Lausanne International Communications Center,
Bakkegaards v.9, Nesoddtangen, Norway Tel/Fax: +47 66912775 email: