Lausanne III, WEA and Geoff Tunnicliffe’s doctorate

“Friends, this is your day and this is your chance. This life is the one life you have. So which it is going to be? Are you going develop the heart for the world? Are you going to make a difference for Jesus Christ? If you are, then you’ve got to come close. You’ve got to connect with people with real needs.” – Dr Geoff Tunnicliffe, International Director of World Evangelical Alliance, upon receiving his honorary doctorate last week in San Francisco. Geoff is an outstanding Canadian who I have met a few times at mission conferences. Congratulations, Doctor Tunnicliffe!

Related: There was a Lausanne meeting last week in Hungary where they discussed, among other things, mission in “a post-Christian, post-modern, pluralistic world”. Lausanne had recently decided to partner with WEA towards Lausanne III, to be held in Cape Town, October 2010. If you are Baptist, you probably know that William Carey suggested an international missions roundtable in Cape Town for 1810 but it didnt happen. The 1910 International Missions Conference in Edinbugh happened a hundred years later and kicked off the modern ecumenical movement based around missions. It is not really known whether the organisers knew about Carey’s plans a hundred years earlier or not.

Gcrlogo50I have been thinking about Edinburgh 2010 for 6 years. In 2001, I gave an emerging church presentation at the Great Commission Roundtable in Malaysia where the two groups, Lausanne and WEA, came together with AD2000. We talked about the 2010 conference in Edinburgh as a hundred year celebration of mission partnership, at the suggestion of Jacques Matthey from WCC. I will probably still be living in Scotland in 2010 so I will no doubt be involved in some mission events in Edinburgh. Let me know if you are also planning something or have any strong ideas on what should happen. Be great to see the emerging church globally bring in some worthy contributions to the celebrations. It would be a great way to bring together the fruit of our many international roundtables. And yes, I am familiar with the Edinburgh Towards 2010 website and events and hope that we can compliment what is already going to take place.

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Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

4 Comments

  • andrew jones says:

    yeah – thats the one.

  • Gabi Nagy says:

    I picked up material about Edinburgh 2010 at the foyer of the conference hall here in Budapest. I haven’t given much thought to it, but there should be more connection since Lausanne is after all about the whole church reaching the whole world with the whole gospel and browsing through the E.2010 mission themes there are striking similarities… are there leaders of Lausanne reading these lines? among the intended outcomes are things such as: greater strategic collaboration and greater synergy in fulfilling the mission mandate, key conversation on mission will be initiated between a, mission leaders b, church leaders c, reps of diff christian traditions etc. and the affirmation of the biblical call to mission.
    I would love to see much more interchange and overlap since both initiatives feed from the past, look to the future with a desire to act in the present. As far as I’m concerned personally it would be great to be present both in Cape Town and Edinburgh as well. Have the top dogs been talking to each other???

  • andrew jones says:

    i am pretty sure they are connected. its a small world . . .
    and 2010 will be a dispersed thing with a number of events in different cities. might be a busy year for some people.

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