Lausanne

The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, occurring in Cape Town, South Africa next week, will be the most historic missions gathering in human history. Seriously, it's going to be huge. If you are a regular around here, you need to track some of this stuff closely.

The first world congress was held in 1974 with the likes of Billy Graham, John Stott and Francis Schaeffer - some of the most significant leaders in their time. Ralph Winter introduced the concept of unreached people groups there, the Lausanne Covenant was developed there [Ember affirms this by the way] and the working mantra became "The Whole Church taking the Whole Gospel to the Whole World." Since then, they hosted a few other gatherings, most notably the Younger Leaders Gathering . [You might remember my nominations.]

This year, there will be over 400 leaders from some 200 countries discussing the major mission issues of our time. In advance of the actual congress, Lausanne has put together a huge web platform for lots of conversations, networking and great content. They've got a series of advance papers that have been published prior to Cape Town, and they've actually set up some technology that does auto translate. There is also a set of global sites where you can participate from around the world. Cool huh?

I'll be doing a series of posts next week [I think starting on Tuesday] highlighting what I think are some important concepts that students interested in missions should be aware of. In the meantime, poke around the website, there is a ton of content out there.

Some great on the ground resources:
Justin Long
Andrew Jones
The Lausanne blog
Capetown on twitter