Ecumenical Betrayal of Missions

Last month we reviewed the three Calvin Seminary lectures given by the professor of mission and ecumenical theology at Germany’s University of Tubingen. In them he highlighted the need to restore the Bible’s stress on repentance and faith in Christ to today’s churches and their missions. We also reviewed his books published in 1971 and 1972 which eloquently developed the same theme. His emphatic summons to restore the Lord‘s gospel call to conversion to the center of missions, provoked violent opposition on the part of the leadership of the World Council of Churches, who were determinedly promoting an exactly opposite course.

The next year Dr. Beyerhaus published another book, Bangkok ‘73: The Beginning or End of World Mission? Despite the orthodox sound of’ the theme chosen for the coming World Council conference, “Salvation Today,” it speedily became evident that there was no agreement about what the slogan was supposed to mean. While evangelicals sought a return to the Biblical gospel of salvation from sin through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, the council leadership was equally determined that “salvation” be given a radically different, “contemporary” definition of dealing with the problems of today’s society, so that now “The world determines the church’s agenda” (p. 26). Emilio Castro summarized the significance of the Bangkok conference on its last day, “We are at the end of a missionary era and at the very beginning of the world mission” (p. 33). The ecumenical council’s goal became more and more explicitly to seek “world liberation” by spreading Marxist revolution. In order to sell this radical revolution of missions the wee leader ship deliberately sought to prevent Biblical and doctrinal discussion of the subject of salvation and to make of the conference “an experiment in group dynamics” (p. 37), which it piously dubbed “the moving of God’s Spirit” (p. 38). As Beyerhaus describes the disappointing experience of this conference, he was especially impressed with the way the whole program was fabricated to sell by psychological manipulation (“sensitivity training” or “brainwashing”) the predetermined policy of the authoritarian, self-perpetuating leadership. Although they were not totally successful in suppressing all individual discussions of more religious issues, they saw to it that final reports and conclusions reflected only their own secular social and political policy. Not surprisingly, one conclusion promoted was a proposal that sending missionaries to the third world be stopped. The lengths to which this anti-Christian development went, Beyerhaus noted, came out in the liturgy when “for the first time in the history of Christianity an ecumenical conference has here joined in rejoicing over the fact that someone had become an atheist, and that even ‘by the grace of God’!” (p. 73), in the China evening a speaker called Mao “God’s Messiah for the Chinese” and a posted placard read “God save China from ‘conversion’!” (pp. 80, 81).

With such anti-Christian pressures coming from the wee it is little wonder that evangelicals saw the Council proposals to discontinue missions as “acts of sabotage against the advancement of God’s kingdom” (p. 109). They felt driven to renewed promotion of evangelism by means of their own separate Lausanne Conferences for World Evangelism.

Evangelical Revival of Missions: Lausanne

in the April 1987 Evangelical Review of Theology (pp.169–185), Dr. Beyerhaus further traces these important church and missionary developments from the early 70s up to the present. His 16-page survey is entitled “Evangelicals, Evangelism and Theology, A Missiological Assessment of the Lausanne Movement.” The July 1974 Lausanne gathering of 2700 spokesmen of evangelical churches from 150 countries to consider “World Evangelization” was a stirring event, hopefully more lastingly significant than many other meetings in our age of conferences. Beyerhaus characterized it as “a Decisive Breakthrough in the History of Evangelism.” Instead of the increasing perversion of churches and their Gospel missions into more and more plainly anti-Christian social, economic and political programs promoted by irresponsible wee bureaucrats, a multitude of Bible-believing Christians were unitedly trying to restore the Gospel to its central place in the churches and their mission to the world. Beyerhaus welcomed this movement as it (1) drew divided evangelicals together (2) focussed their attention on their common calling to bring the gospel to the world, (3) directed their attention to considering how it must be done, and ( 4) sought to base this effort on its necessary foundation in God’s Word and its doctrines. The writer saw its crucial affirmations about evangelism as:

(1) “Revelatory” – “The divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of the Bible as the only infallible rule of faith and practice in Christian mission work.”

(2) “Soteriologicaf” – “Salvation” as “the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ and the reception of the liberating gift of the Holy Spirit.” Although it envisioned social involvement in mission, it insisted that evangelism must always be given the “priority.”

(3) “Eschatological” – “This gospel of Jesus must be proclaimed in the whole world as a witness to all nations before the end would come with the glorious return of the Lord Jesus to set up his kingdom in power” (Matt. 24:14). This Biblical vision must replace the “evolutionary and revolutionary concepts of world history” which the misguided Council had been shoving in its place.

Caution and Counsel for the Future

Although thrilled by this development, Beyerhaus also warned “that the future of the evangelical movement will entirely depend on the vigilance of its leaders to defend this position against new temptations, from which evangelicals, too, will not be exempted.”

Tracing further developments since the conference, the writer observed that the leadership had resisted the temptation to build up a new centralized bureaucracy like that developed by the WCC. As Leighton Ford said, “Lausanne has become more than a place, an event, or a committee. It has become the symbol of a movement of like-minded believers who long to see the day when the Gospel will be preached to the whole world and the Lord will return.” Its mission strategy has been to organize converts into self-propagating, rapidly growing, indigenous churches. A prominent feature of the recent developments has been the vast increase of missionaries sent out by third world, formerly mission churches. Since 1974 this number has grown from about 1000 to an estimated 15,000! At the same time missionary problems continue. In bringing the gospel to people of other cultures, we always face the need to distinguish between what is characteristic of the Lord’s unchangeable gospel, and what is adaptable to various cultures! Unresolved differences between evangelicals in their views regarding the proper relation between the gospel and social action (which surfaced especially at a Grand Rapids conference!) were noted, with an observation that verbal agreements in conferences do not always show a real meeting of diverse minds. ‘Despite differences of emphasis, the primacy of evangelization was maintained. Beyerhaus noted with special appreciation the emphasis of a 1984 Korea conference on the fact that in the spiritual battle with the demonic powers of heathen darkness our prayers to God must be kept in the foreground. (Our Lord warned, “Without me, you can do nothing,” John 15:5.)

For the future, Dr. Beyerhaus stressed especially the need to be faithful to the “three basic theological affirmations . . . the normative authority of Scripture; the soteriofogical interpretation of salvation as reconciliation of sinful man with God; and the eschatological terminal of missions” (in the Lord’s return). He saw this faithfulness confronted by three threats. (1) The integrity of the gospel is threatened by a “contextuar” interpretation which perverts it to serve the needs and desires of a particular time or culture. (2) The effort to bring a “holistic” gospel of “word and deed” ministry is misleading if it makes these two equal, so that socio-political action overshadows the forgiveness of sins and we end up again with another “social gospel.” (3) A current trend of some to stress the gospel of the “Kingdom of God,” while appealing, is apt to overlook the fact that our Lord spoke of that kingdom not as attainable by our social and political efforts, but only to be realized at His return in triumph over the satanic opposition.

Beyerhaus saw in some studied efforts to present the gospel in ways understandable (and presumably therefore acceptable) to non-Christians, a lack of “realistic insight that non-Christian religions and ideologies are not only mistaken and illusionary products of human minds, or expressions of their thirst for salvation, but . . . incorporations of the spirits of God’s enemies which finally join forces in the universal reign of the Antichrist.” The optimistic vision of winning the world for Christ in our generation overlooks the fact that the Bible does not predict such a triumph of the missionary church in this present age. “Scripture promises us that this Gospel will be proclaimed among all nations until the Lord comes (Matthew 24:14), but it also shows that this witness will provoke resistance and hatred and persecution of the messengers and their converts as well.”

The writer expresses his sadness at the way the church of the free world largely publicly ignores the plight of the persecuted brothers and sisters (apparently under the mistaken impression that such silence might prevent more persecution). His appeal for them recalls the Biblical injunction to remember the persecuted (Heb. 13:3). He reminds us that we all need to be prepared for the time “when suffering for Christ’s sake will be the ultimate test of our faithfulness, carrying with it a decisive victory over the forces of the great adversary” as that is envisioned in Rev. 12:11, 12: “And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Rejoice then, O heaven and those that dwell therein! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”

A Word for Us

It is startling to find such a perceptive and resounding Christian testimony as this coming out of a school early associated with Liberalism and from someone long and intimately involved in the ecumenical movement. We are often assured by some among us who have long been urging us to join “the mainstream” that our critical holding aloof arises out of our naive (ethnic) ignorance. From Dr. Beyerhaus in the heart of that movement, we get one of the most profound and comprehensive critical analyses of the current WCC movement and its fatal policy for missions that has yet appeared. Although we may not share every nuance of his argument, we can only give an enthusiastic welcome to and learn from his stirring call for a renewed commitment to the gospel and its mission to the world.

One of the startling features of his case is that, although it was not at all directed toward our denominational circle, it, at many points contains the most impressive analysis and criticism we have yet seen of many of what we often consider our peculiar problems. One reason for that, of course, is that they are not peculiar to us at all, but re ally common problems of the churches in our time. Let’s note some of them.

1. Most important is the basic problem, of playing (“hermeneutical”) games with the Bible. Whenever anyone rejects or ignores its authority as God’s Word in this way, he quickly finds that the rest of the current problems (of the WCC or CRC) follow. Then one soon gets the decay of missions, as the only saving message of our Lord’s gospel is lost, to be replaced with the social and political Anti-Christian gospel of communism. As Beyerhaus shows, the gospel certainly has social and political consequences, but unless we keep the gospel of Christ and its call to conversion in the forefront, we lose it.

2. His warning against a coordinate “WORD AND DEED” ministry as a way to lose the WORD is particularly apropos, as we are still obviously trying to create that very thing in restructuring a mission-relief program.

3. The writer’s observations about how the WCC has developed an independent bureaucracy which is not accountable to churches it is supposed to represent, manipulates them by political and psychological trickery and pursues its own social agenda, suggests only too clearly the political manipulation and hierarchical restructuring “for efficiency” currently going on in our denomination. 4. We too need his warning to evangelicals not to be trapped into an appealing crusade for a “Kingdom of God,” that minimizes sin and the gospel of God’s grace, and tries to ignore the ongoing battle with the forces of Anti-Christ that will continue through Christian testimony and persecution until the Lord’s return.

The Lord’s Holy Catholic Church

It is thrilling to hear and see this refreshing testimony to the authentic gospel coming from such an unexpected quarter. How does one account for it? Beyerhaus at every key point shows that he is committed to the message he brings and the stance be has to take because it is neither more nor less than the Word of God. When many people and even leader s are saying that our faith and life is always conditioned by the changing and diverse culture in which we happen to be, they really show their blindness to the reality of the Christian gospel. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians (1 Th. 2:13) that he always thanked God that when they received the word of God from him, they received it “not as the word of men, but as it is in truth the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe.” How often one discovers, whether in roaming across the centuries of history or traveling the miles of the world’s geography, unexpected encounters with Christians whose faith and perspective is on fundamental matters, despite all trivial differences of history or geography, the same as our own! The blind try to equate that perspective with an “ecumenical” wiping out. Of all differences of faiths, only to discover, sooner or later, how lost they and their colleagues are. Those who, guided by God’s Word and Spirit, share one Lord and His calling, discover their real unity in the faith and life of the gospel as His Church.

Elect from every nation,

Yet one o’er all the earth,

Her charter of salvation,

One Lord, one faith, one birth;

One holy Name she blesses,

Partakes one holy food,

And to one hope she presses,

With every grace endued.

Few came to hear Dr. Beyerhaus’ remarkable plea (like that of a sometimes lonely Atbanasius or Luther) at Calvin Seminary. May more read in these pages his reformer—call to return from today’s anti-Christian perversions to the true mission of God’s Word.