Seoul Controversy

It would not be a Lausanne Congress without some controversy or other. Back in the original gathering it was the young Latin Americans, Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar, who injected the need to address social action into the discussions. Not everyone agreed, but Stott was won over, so the new (or recovered?) emphasis was included in the Lausanne Covenant: 

"Although reconciliation with other people is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless we affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty."

Some participants refused to sign the Covenant because of this - I seem to remember that Ruth Graham, Billy's wife, was one of them. And in the subsequent years and especially in the discussions surrounding the Consultation on the Relationship of Evangelism and Social Responsibility in 1982, that issue was hammered out further.

It has never really gone away: irritations resurfaced at John Piper's exposition in Cape Town, in 2010.

And at Seoul the tension emerged again. Theologian Ruth Padilla DeBorst, Rene's daughter, spoke on the Monday evening on justice, and appeared to draw a moral equivalence between the "hostages held by both Israel and Hamas". It was not the only controversial thing to come from the platform that day but it was the most incendiary. And the next morning we received an email from the conference organisers apologising for the pain and offence that the presentation caused.

It would be a very difficult thing to make that judgment. David Bennett, the Congress Director, was doing a sterling job, so I for one would not want to criticise. Somehow, in such a gathering we need to be able to share our views without causing offence. Later in the week, the congress organisers also sent out an email from RPD, in which she sought to clarify her words. 

Another controversy also emerged during the week over the Seoul Statement. This document is meant, as its preamble clearly states, to build on the three previous core documents of the Lausanne Movement. So it was a little odd to me that it was immediately criticised for not adequately addressing this or that. It is a complex task to render such a statement into a form that is faithful, clear, and readily translatable. I will be looking to reread it over the coming weeks, as it deserves careful reflection.