KGMLF 2017: Migration,Human Dislocation,and Accountability in Missions

Abstract

The fourth gathering of the Korean Global Mission Leadership Forum (KGMLF), held November 7–10, 2017, at the Kensington Stars Hotel, in Sokcho, South Korea, considered the theme “Migration, Human Dislocation, and Accountability in Missions.” The eighty-five registered participants included Andrew Walls, doyen of church and mission historians, riveting Bible study leader Christopher Wright, and mission scholars and practitioners from every continent. Somewhat more than half of those attending were Korean, and all had stories and insights regarding the movement of peoples, voluntary or otherwise, which is happening today on a scale unprecedented in modern history.

Organizing the conference was the Global Mission Leadership Forum (Jonathan Bonk, president, former executive director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center), with generous support from two Seoul churches: Yoido Full Gospel Church and Onnuri Community Church. Besides their major financial contributions, these churches supplied some sixty staff and volunteers, whose thoughtful hospitality was as appreciated as it was unforgettable. The fourteen plenary presentations and responses, the small-group discussions, the panels, and the ample opportunities for informal interaction provided a remarkable setting for grasping firsthand the personal pain of migrants and refugees, as well as the experience of Gospel hope in countless pastoral and mission efforts now underway around the world.

Memorable comments included: “Migration has been a more significant factor than the Reformation” (Andrew Walls); “Something goes wrong if we fail to be surprised by God’s love” (Chris Wright); “Diaspora is the biggest factor in this century for the church” (Sam George); “We are all refugees: either in the living God or in [any other place]” (Calvin Choi); “We feel cut off at our roots” (Wissam Kammou, himself an Iraqi refugee, quoting Iraqi refugees); “Hope is always connected with the life of the Resurrected One” (Dorottya Nagy); “Jesus Christ liberated people” (Peter Sensenig, responding to the question whether a priority exists between evangelism and works of compassion); “I’m no Moses, but I think I see the Promised Land” (Andrew Walls, at the final gathering, reflecting on the many stories shared of God at work among migrant peoples and the intense interest he noted in the many now studying and engaging with the current movement of peoples).

The proceedings of the three previous KGMLF meetings have been published in English and in Korean, with the English titles as follows:

2011: Accountability in Missions: Korean and Western Case Studies (Wipf & Stock, 2011).

2013: Family Accountability in Missions: Korean and Western Case Studies (OMSC Publications, 2013).

2015: Megachurch Accountability in Missions: Critical Assessment through Global Case Studies (William Carey Library, 2016).

The English and Korean books of the 2017 conference, to be published by Duranno Press, are scheduled to be presented on May 28, 2018, at Namseoul Church in Seoul. And planning is now underway for a fifth forum, to be held in 2019 with the theme “Missionaries, Mental Health, and Accountability in Church and Agency Support Systems.”

Author biography

Craig A. Noll is assistant editor of the IBMR and has been copyediting the journal since 1992.

Died. Billy Graham, 99, evangelist, author, and broadcaster, on February 21, 2018, at his home in Montreat, NC, USA. Throughout his life, Graham preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to some 215 million people in 400 evangelistic crusades, simulcasts, and rallies in more than 185 countries and territories. He preached to millions more through television, video, the Internet, and thirty-four books, including Peace with God (1953, 1984) and his autobiography, Just As I Am (1997). Graham’s primary focus was the advancement of the Gospel, and he took that simple message from his home in rural western North Carolina to church leaders, missionaries, evangelists, business executives, politicians, schoolchildren, and university students in cities from Anchorage (1984) to Lagos (1960) to Moscow (1982) to Pyongyang (1992).

Left: Billy Graham speaking at an evangelism crusade in Los Angeles in the fall of 1949 (photo Life magazine). Right: Graham speaking at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance in Washington, D.C., following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Photos courtesy of www.billygraham.org.

As he started preaching internationally, Graham developed a passion to unite Christians in the common task of world evangelization. As a result, in July 1974 he invited more than 2,400 people from 150 nations to Lausanne, Switzerland, for the First International Congress on World Evangelization. “We have one task—to proclaim the message of salvation in Jesus Christ. In rich countries and in poor, among the educated and uneducated, in freedom or oppression, we are determined to proclaim Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit that men may put their trust in him as Savior, follow him obediently, and serve him in the fellowship of the church of which he alone is king and head,” Graham told the global audience. This vision, which became the Lausanne Movement, articulated in the Lausanne Covenant, has since been advanced at international congresses in Manila (1989) and Cape Town (2010), and numerous forums (including the October 2017 “Finding Unity” conference that was initiated by the North Korea Committee of the Lausanne Movement and is the focus of this April 2018 issue of the IBMR).

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association held the International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in 1983, in 1986, and again in 2000. Christian workers from the Majority World, particularly those serving at the grassroots level (as opposed to ministry leaders), were invited to Amsterdam. Almost four thousand evangelists attended in 1983, more than eight thousand in 1986, and over ten thousand in 2000.

Early in his career, Graham denounced racism when desegregation was not popular. Preaching in Johannesburg in 1973, Graham said, “Christ belongs to all people. He belongs to the whole world. . . . Christianity is not a white man’s religion.” He also befriended Martin Luther King Jr. For more than half a century, Graham spoke to people of all ethnicities, creeds, and backgrounds. A 1977 trip to Communist Hungary opened doors for Graham to preach in virtually every country of the former Eastern Bloc, including the Soviet Union, as well as in China and North Korea.

In 1992 Graham became the first foreign religious leader to preach in Pyongyang since the Korean War. During that visit he gave a lecture at Kim Il Sung University and met with then-President Kim Il Sung. Graham visited there again in 1994 and told reporters that he was welcomed “very cordially” by the people and government leaders, which he termed “unquestionably, one of the most memorable events of my life.” Graham’s wife, Ruth, who died in 2007, returned to North Korea in 1997; she had attended high school in Pyongyang in the 1930s.

Since graduating in 1943 with an anthropology degree from Wheaton College in Illinois, which today includes the Billy Graham Center, a focus for training, networking, and “relevant, thoughtful evangelism and missions resources,” Graham also was a radio broadcaster on the Hour of Decision and in 1948 became president of a Bible college in Minnesota that has now become the University of Northwestern. A founder of Christianity Today magazine, he was the only minister to be recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1989) and with the Congressional Gold Medal (1996).

At his final evangelistic crusade, in June 2005, at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in New York, Graham said, “I have one message: that Jesus Christ came, he died on a cross, he rose again, and he asked us to repent of our sins and receive him by faith as Lord and Savior, and if we do, we have forgiveness of all of our sins.” Throughout his life, Graham was faithful to his calling as written in the inscription placed on his grave marker at the Billy Graham Library in his hometown of Charlotte, NC: “Preacher of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” As he once predicted, “Someday, you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.”

Died. Thomas Yung-hsien Wang, Chinese evangelist and international missions leader, January 4, 2018, in San Francisco. Wang, 92, was born in Beijing into a Christian family and in 1936 he converted to Christianity under the ministry of evangelist John Sung. Wang left China in 1949 and, became a pastor in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1953, and lived in Hong Kong and Europe, before moving to the United States in 1958. In 1961, he founded a literature ministry that became the Chinese Christian Mission, which he led for fifteen years before being asked to become the first director of the Chinese Coordination Center of World Evangelism, a network of Chinese churches in diaspora. Wang was then appointed vice chairman in 1985 and international director in 1987 of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. He served as congress director of Lausanne II, the International Congress on World Evangelization, held in Manila, in 1989. Later he was international chairman of the AD2000 and Beyond Movement, president emeritus of the Great Commission Center International, and the advisor for the America Return to God Prayer Movement.

The World Christianity and History of Religions program at Princeton Theological Seminary hosted “Currents, Perspectives, and Methodologies in World Christianity,” an international, interdisciplinary conference, January 18–20, 2018. Convened by Princeton professors Afe Adogame, Raimundo C. Barreto Jr., and Richard Fox Young, more than 130 participants from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Canada, and the United States attended. Keynote speakers Dale T. Irvin, president and professor of world Christianity at New York Theological Seminary; Jacob K. Olupona, professor of African religious traditions at Harvard Divinity School; and other presenters engaged topics that included anthropology, history, theology, and ethnomusicology. The conference sparked fruitful conversation about the trajectory of world Christianity as a field of study. To continue exploring the impact of ethnography and other fresh approaches to world Christianity, Princeton will host yearly conferences on theory and methodology, the next of which is scheduled tentatively for March 6–9, 2019. –Briana L. Wong

The presidents of the Evangelical University of the Americas, San José, Costa Rica; the Evangelical University of Paraguay, Asunción; the Evangelical Center of Andean and Amazonian Missiology, Lima, Peru; the South American Theological Faculty, Londrina, Brazil; the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Theological Institute, Buenos Aires; met August 15–16, 2017, in Londrina, Brazil, and agreed to create a network of doctoral programs to share academic, physical, and technological resources. PRODOLA: A Network of Evangelical Doctoral Programs, an expansion of the Programa Doctoral Latinoamericano initiative that started in 2004, will “provide broadened support for current students, offer opportunities to expand the faculty in order to serve a greater number of doctoral students, and will provide for a permanent contextualization of content and methodology in theological education in Latin America,” said Charles Van Engen, the network’s president emeritus, who is professor emeritus of biblical theology of mission, Fuller Theological Seminary; and founding president and CEO of Latin American Christian Ministries. A new cohort group is slated to commence in February 2019.

The eighth Lausanne International Researcher’s Conference will be held April 30–May 4, 2018, at the at the Dimesses Sisters House of Spirituality, Nairobi, Kenya, with “Research that Guides Kingdom Impact” as its theme. Participants will explore topics related to church research for global mission including learning about new research methods and ways to act strategically on research results. The conference, open to all who wish to attend (http://globalcmiw.org/lirn), is supported by the Lausanne Movement, the Movement of African National Initiatives, the World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission, the Community of Mission Information Workers, and One Challenge (OC) International.

“Christianity and the Public Sphere in Africa and Asia” is the theme for the international conference of the Andrew Walls Centre for the Study of African and Asian Christianity, which will be held July 1–3, 2018, at Liverpool Hope University, in England. The announcement from Daniel Jeyaraj (jeyarad@hope.ac.uk), center director and professor of World Christianity, said the conference will address such questions as “How did or does Christianity function as salt and light in African or Asian societies?” “What does it mean to be responsible Christians in Africa or Asia?” and “What are the examples of African or African theologies that engage with the public sphere of their peoples?” For conference details, contact Harvey C. Kwiyani (kwiyanh@hope.ac.uk), lecturer in African Christianity and theology at Liverpool Hope and general editor of Missio Africanus: The Journal of African Missiology.

Urbaniana University in Rome has decided to end publication of the annual Bibliographia Missionaria. Always under editorial care of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, it began in 1935 and was widely recognized as an essential bibliographical tool for mission research, especially for Catholic publications, while also being comprehensive and ecumenical. Recent editors were Willi Henkel, OMI, Marek Rostkowski, OMI, and Alphonse Rakotondravelo, OMI.

The Asian Society of Missiology will hold its fifth triennial academic forum July 9–12, 2018, in Bali, Indonesia, with the theme “Christian Mission a Religious Pluralistic Society.” Eiko Takamizawa (e.takami@ttgu.ac.kr), professor of mission and intercultural studies, Torch Trinity Graduate University, Seoul, South Korea, is the conference organizer and the ASM president. For details, go online to asianmissiology. com/event/asm-jakarta-conference-2018.

The General Board of Global Ministries, the United Methodist Church, in collaboration with Candler School of Theology of Emory University, Atlanta, will sponsor a conference entitled “Answering the Call: Hearing God’s Voice in Methodist Mission Past, Present, and Future.” It will be held in Atlanta, April 8–10, 2019. The conference (http://methodistmission200.org) will coincide with the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (a forerunner of the United Methodist Church) and will explore Methodism’s mission heritage and look to the future of mission in Methodism. Planners are seeking proposals for papers before September 1, 2018.