|PIC1|When John Stott retired in 2001 after 30 years of leading Langham Partnership, he said he could not think of anyone better suited to lead the movement than the Belfast-born theologian Dr Chris Wright.

Such high praise from one of the most respected Christians in the world is testimony to Dr Wright's lifelong commitment to planting God's word firmly in the hearts and minds of people worldwide. Prior to joining Langham, he was an assistant pastor in Kent, a teacher at a leading seminary in India, before becoming academic dean at All Nations Christian College in leafy Hertfordshire.

Although he is a member of the ministry team at All Souls Church in central London, Dr Wright's work with the Langham Partnership takes him regularly to Majority World countries where the ministry works to equip churches for mission and spiritual maturity through the training of indigenous Christian pastors and leaders.

Dr Wright, who is also the Chair of the Lausanne Theological Working Group, spoke to Christian Today about the state of mission today, the challenges and opportunities facing Christians as they strive to carry out the Great Commandment of Jesus to make disciples of all nations.

CT: Langham Partnership raises local Christians to be teachers of the Gospel. Where do you see the greatest need in the worldwide church today?

CW: I think the greatest need is for the church to be what the church is supposed to be, which is to be a community of disciples who actually live like Jesus and follow what he taught and take seriously what he said. When the church lives like that it has a kind of attractiveness that people come to anyway. The message has to be communicated of course but the church has to live the Gospel as well as teach the Gospel.

The church in so many places isn't doing that, especially in those parts of the church that call themselves evangelical. They are often in great need of radical reformation over abuses and unchristlike behaviour and corruption, which is such a bad witness.

I think the parable of the sower is for our times in the sense that we know that there is a great deal of growth around the world. But as Jesus said, seed will grow very fast in shallow soil. The problem is that it doesn't bear any fruit and it just withers away. I think we are seeing great growth of Christianity in many parts of Africa and Latin America for which we can be very thankful to God, but if it is only growth in shallow soil without any real depth then in the long run it doesn't bear fruit and doesn't actually last. It just withers away as fast as it grows. And so you get this phenomenon of churches being planted and dying away, of people being swept into a kind of experience of Christianity and then abandoning it before very long.

Therefore we at Langham certainly see the greatest need to help the church to grow in depth as well as in numbers, to grow in maturity and discipleship. That's not something of course that you can manufacture. It's a long-term thing. But it is something you can help with resources. That is why we provide resources for better biblical preaching and better training of pastors, better resources of indigenous evangelical literature written by people who know their own culture. These are only small things but they are things we think will help the church to grow in maturity as well as numbers.

CT: So it's about quality not quantity?

CW: Yes, that's right.

CT: Some evangelical leaders feel the church in the West has lost its mission focus.

CW: I think the nature of the mission of the church in the West has changed. It traditionally saw itself as the missionary-sending part of the world. Everywhere else was a mission field except us. Thankfully we've grown out of that now and the mission field is everywhere. Mission is from everywhere to everywhere.

In some churches in Britain there is a very strong commitment to mission. It's not so much channelled into sending British missionaries but in supporting indigenous mission movements in India or Africa, in channelling support to ministries which are often fairly holistic in the way in which they seek to address human needs, whether medical, literacy, engineering, which is, in my part, all part of what Christians are meant to do. That's what I meant earlier by saying that we are called to live the gospel - becoming the whole of the answer that God has given to the whole of human need.

We can be involved in all kinds of ways in blessing the nations and blessing people around the world, including the sharing of the message of the gospel, also including doing good and being in places, being involved in issues of human rights and human welfare and human need. Those are areas that LP is not directly involved with as a programme but many of those whom we support are involved with such things. They are the ones to do it. They are the ones in their local context and far better at it than we could ever be.

CT: So the form of mission has changed?

CW: Yes, on the whole. But that's not to say that there isn't a proper place for cross-cultural church planting ministries or people who feel genuinely called by God to cross the boundaries, to go to other cultures, to be involved with first-level church planting and pioneering. That is always going to be the call of God on the church. If that had never happened in our history there wouldn't be Christians in Britain today, so we always have to recognise that that's there and that is important.

But in many parts of the majority world the church is already there, it has been there for generations, they are already involved in their own forms of cross-cultural evangelism. They are far better at it than we are so we don't have to go and teach them how to preach the Gospel.

CT: Christian leaders are trying to make sense of the shift to the Global South and many of these countries are sending their missionaries to the likes of the UK and US. Do you see that trend continuing?

CW: Yes. We are now into the era of reverse migration in the great scheme of our world history. In 500 years, the populations of Europe decided to go to other places, so we had mass emigration out of Europe to the world. We didn't ask permission. We just went and planted ourselves there and did stuff, whether they wanted it or not, sometimes disastrously.

Now that tide has turned and the world is coming to Europe, so we have huge populations of migrants. When you are into an era of reverse migration, it is not surprising that that includes Christians because many of these are coming from cultures where there is now a strong and vibrant Christian church, whether Hispanic cultures, or African, or from some parts of Asia. As people from those cultures come to the West they come as Christians and whether they are coming explicitly as missionaries or not, they come here and witness. So one is as likely to hear the Gospel from a black neighbour in Tottenham as from any white Anglo-Saxon. So be it, that's the way God has organised His history!

It is true that many of the churches in Africa and Asia see Europe as a missionary-needy continent - as we are, and so there are definitely mission movements seeking to bring evangelistic church planting movements back to Britain. My only thought on that is that we would hope that they would learn from some of the mistakes that Europeans and Americans made when we went out to other cultures in missionary work and we thought that our own culture was best and we simply did everything our own way. There are forms of missionary work from Africa and Asia, Latin America that are doing the same thing.

We need to all have a sense of humility, of cultural sensitivity, of trying to learn a new culture before you witness in it. We hope that the folks who do feel called by God will be willing to experience some degree of training and cross-cultural inculturation, as much as we need it when we go somewhere else.

CT: John Stott spoke in his final address at Keswick of incarnational evangelism. What does that mean in practical terms for the work that Langham is doing?

CW: John Stott's basic point was that the word became flesh. It didn't just come as a message from heaven, it became flesh and lived among us, so the church likewise has to incarnate the message it preaches by living among people, by witnessing, by serving them.

In the long-term it has to be a patient, relational kind of work. Langham Partnership isn't directly involved in evangelism but the work we do in preaching seminars is incarnational in the sense that we don't see our role as only going into countries and running seminars. Anyone can do that and come back out again.

What we see as our purpose is to try to root indigenous movements in biblical preaching which is locally owned and led and, we hope, eventually locally financed, in which people are almost generating their own self-help movement of preachers clubs and day conferences, helping one another in the whole task of biblical preaching. That will continue long after we have come away again. So we always work with a national organisation, whether it is a church or denomination. Langham Preaching will always be in partnership with an indigenous Christian group and we will as soon as we can have the whole thing run and led by indigenous leaders. And I think by God's grace we have seen the fruit of that.

The other side of the incarnational dimension of Langham's work is in our literature programmes. Originally John Stott founded the Evangelical Literary Trust as a way of getting books into the hands of pastors and using his own royalties. For a long time, that basically meant sending western books to other countries - evangelical books by evangelical authors in Britain and America. And they still do that because these are still valuable books.

But the other half of Langham Literature is Langham Literature Creative and it's growing very rapidly. Its purpose is to stimulate indigenous evangelical authors, writers, editors and publishers in their own languages so that people are getting quality evangelical writing which is much more incarnate, much closer to their own culture, their own language, and written in their own context, addressing the issues that they are facing.


CT: Christian communities are growing despite many difficulties. And in some countries they are perceived as helping Western powers.

CW: Yes, it is the case that Christianity is regarded as a foreign religion in many countries around the world, whether rightly or wrongly. It is a perception that is very convenient for the political leaders in countries that want to be hostile to Christianity, to persist in the myth that all Christians in our country, in India or some parts of the Middle East or Asia, for example, are only Christians because they are converts by westerners with western money, backed by foreign powers, and it is a very convenient myth to push out, but it is actually very far from the truth.

There have been Christians in India longer than there have been Christians in Britain, right back to the first century. There have been believers in the Middle East since the day of Pentecost. And after all, they were first called Christians in Syria. So there is an authentic voice of indigenous Christianity in these countries which needs to be heard as that - as the voice of indigenous Christianity even though they often do get portrayed as foreign religions.


CT: You are involved in the preparation work for Lausanne 2010.

CW: Yes, I'm the chairman of the Lauasanne Theology working group which is one of about six working groups in the Lausanne movement. There are plans for another Lausanne Congress in Cape Town in October 2010. The intention is to think again about what is meant by the Lausanne slogan which comes from the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 - the whole church taking the whole Gospel to the whole world.

The Lausanne movement will be quite important strategically. Many of us in the leadership of Lausanne feel it is an opportunity, particularly in the worldwide evangelical movement, for us to engage in some self-critical reflection and repentance and to say, well worldwide evangelicals are growing very fast but what kind of people are we and how did it come to be that the word evangelical is held in such contempt in many parts of the world because of the way in which evangelicals behave and the attitudes they display, their connections in some parts of the world with prosperity gospel and in other parts of the world with very wealthy, powerful leaders, and in North America connections with a particular form of political power.

There are aspects of world evangelicalism which are not very attractive at all. My personal hope is that Lausanne 2010 will be the launch pad of a kind of 21st century reformation within the evangelical movement, because there are many abuses and corruptions and all kinds of things that are really not of the true Gospel and certainly not either like Christ or glorifying Christ. I would love to see us having the courage to identify them, and where necessary to renounce them and certainly have the courage to repent of such things and come back to the foot of the cross and to say 'this is where we need to find our unity and our identity'. That is what I am hoping for from Lausanne 2010.

CT: There are many areas that are still unchurched and have still not heard the word of God. Where do we stand in terms of the gospel being planted around the world?

CW: Certainly there are those within Lausanne who are quite rightly drawing our attention to the fact that there are still millions of people in our world who have not heard of the word of Jesus and that is a scandal and we cannot but be ashamed of that and say 'what should we be doing to bring the good news of Jesus to those who have never had the opportunity to hear it?' That has to remain one of our key motivations in mission. We can't just say 'yup, that's it!'

The second thing I would say is that there are those who have a particular kind of interpretation of the great commission at the end of Matthew; that somehow all we need to do is to try to get every people group on the planet to have heard the Gospel in some way and then Jesus can come back. But I don't read the great commission that way at all.

It doesn't say evangelise the nations in the sense of simply make them hear the Gospel. Jesus quite specifically says, "Go and disciple the nations, baptising them and teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you."

So the task is not just one of evangelisation but it is one of discipling, and discipling is not a task that is ever finished. Britain is evangelised but it certainly isn't discipled. And every generation needs the fresh call to discipling and obedience and to live like Jesus lived. So I see the great commission not so much as a kind of ticking clock, that we can eventually say 'oh we are nearly there, the job's nearly finished, let's get the task finished'.

There are an awful lot of people who talk like that. 'What would it take to finish the job?' is some of the language we hear. Whoever said it was a job we were just going to get finished? It's not so much a ticking clock as a self-replicating mandate to go and make disciples and the making of disciples is like painting the Forth Bridge - it goes on and on and on because we are constantly needing to be disciplers and to be discipling.

A friend said at the Lausanne Theology working group, we need to remember that the New Testament was written by disciples for disciples about making disciples. And we have rather twisted it as if we only think in terms of how many people have had the opportunity to literally hear the name Jesus and respond in some sense to the Gospel.

So, I want to affirm the importance of the unreached need and that huge task. I don't want to in any sense minimise it or to say that we shouldn't be concerned about it because of course we should, but I don't want it to turn into the timetable for the second coming because I don't think that is the way it was intended to be in the New Testament. We are still called to live as Christians and to be faithful and to be disciples as well as making disciples.

Having said all that, there is no doubt that we live in a most remarkable age in the sense of the multinational nature of the people of God. There are more Christians now in the south, or the east, Africa, Asia, all over the West. These are wonderful days, the church is truly global and we should rejoice in God keeping His promise to Abraham because that is what He promised He was going to do, to bless all nations through his people and He is and He has and will continue to do so right up until people of every nation, and language, and tribe and tongue gather before the Lord.