Lausanne and the Search for an Evangelical Social Doctrine

Catholic social teaching resembles a cathedral built across generations. Councils, popes, bishops, theologians, religious orders, universities, and lay movements have added to a recognizable structure.

Evangelical social thought resembles a dispersed library. It contains influential books, declarations, mission movements, networks, and institutions, but no single teaching office determines which volumes every evangelical congregation must read.

The Lausanne Movement is not an evangelical equivalent to Catholic social teaching. It is, however, the most significant global effort evangelicalism has made to develop a transnational framework connecting evangelism, mission, human dignity, justice, reconciliation, and social responsibility.

The difference is structural.

Evangelicalism includes Baptists, Pentecostals, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anabaptists, independent churches, mission agencies, seminaries, and parachurch organizations. Scripture supplies a shared authority, but competing interpretations remain possible without a common ecclesial body capable of settling disagreement or ensuring reception.

Evangelicals have consequently developed strong commitments concerning abolition, temperance, poverty, missions, racial reconciliation, abortion, peacemaking, religious liberty, refugees, trafficking, international development, family life, and creation care.

Those concerns have rarely been gathered into one enduring and widely taught doctrine of society.

Lausanne came closer than any other global evangelical movement.

In July 1974, more than two thousand evangelical leaders from approximately 150 nations gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the International Congress on World Evangelization. Billy Graham supplied much of the convening vision, and John Stott served as the principal architect of the resulting Lausanne Covenant.¹

The Covenant became one of the most influential documents in modern evangelical mission.

It affirmed biblical authority, the uniqueness of Christ, the necessity of evangelism, cooperation in mission, religious liberty, cultural sensitivity, and the importance of theological education.

Paragraph 5 addressed Christian social responsibility. It confessed evangelical neglect and affirmed that God’s concern for justice and reconciliation required Christians to oppose oppression and respect the dignity of every human being. Social action was grounded not in political fashion but in the doctrines of God, creation, judgment, human dignity, and neighbor-love.²

The Covenant nevertheless stated in paragraph 6 that “evangelism is primary” in the church’s mission.

That language protected a legitimate distinction. Social action is not identical to evangelism. Political liberation is not salvation. Reconciliation among human communities is not the same as reconciliation with God.

John Stott worked to preserve both the distinction and the connection. Evangelism and social responsibility were not interchangeable, but neither could be dismissed. Both arose from obedience to Jesus Christ and love for one’s neighbor.³

The wording nevertheless left important questions unresolved.

Was social responsibility a consequence of mission, a partner with mission, or an inseparable dimension of one integral mission?

Could one activity remain primary without the other becoming secondary in practice?

Who would determine whether churches had maintained the proper relationship?

These questions were especially urgent for leaders from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. They ministered in societies marked by colonial histories, poverty, dictatorship, corruption, conflict, racial and ethnic divisions, and economic dependency.

Separating evangelism from social conditions often seemed artificial because the people hearing the gospel lived inside those conditions.

René Padilla and Samuel Escobar........

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