The Reformation – What You Need to Know and Why

Welcome to the web page for this book. Lausanne is a global movement, and here we bring perspectives from other continents on the Reformation in Europe.
As this 500th anniversary year unfolds, we will add more links and Further Reading.

Contents

The Protestant Reformation from the Perspective of the Korean Protestant Church

The Protestant Reformation from the Perspective of the Latin American Protestant Church

The Protestant Reformation from the Perspective of the African Protestant Church

Useful Links

 

The Protestant Reformation from the Perspective

of the Korean Protestant Church

Hyung-Keun Paul Choi

Currently South Korea is undergoing all sorts of hardships due to the Choi Soon-sil scandal in which President Park Geun-hye has been deeply involved. The late Choi Tae-min, Choi Soon-sil’s father and the leader of a religious cult, had mentored President Park before he passed away. Unfortunately, the Korean Protestant church cannot avoid its responsibility to some extent for this political scandal. In fact, historically many of the top church leaders have been entangled in it. The biggest mistake of the Korean church leaders is that they hardly realize the current crisis because they fall into a routine of maintaining its status quo, being captured by the values of the dominant culture. The real crisis of the church is that it constantly pursues its personal gains not the Kingdom of God. It is unable to be the church because it ignores the essence of the church that it is called and sent by the triune God to the world as the light and salt among nations. In this sense, if the church is diluted into mere human activities, it is not church anymore and cannot be the channel of God’s blessing for the nations.

Now with 130 years of history since the first missionaries introduced the gospel to Korea, many theologians and church growth researchers have examined the secrets of its remarkable growth. Since the mid-1990s, however, the Korean church has been stagnated in number and influence. Today the Korean churches are facing not only numerical decline, but are suffering from being criticized by the mass media and non-Christians due to various reasons such as competition with other local churches in over-enthusiasm for growth, a macho complex, seeking worldly fame via Christian mass media (TV preaching and evangelism), and financial and sexual misconduct among top church leaders. Interestingly, a vivid indicator of the crisis of the Korean Protestant church is the “Canaan believer”(estimated around one million) phenomenon. Canaan believers are Christians who are not just disconnected from the church, but intentionally leave the church for various reasons such as an atmosphere suffocated by unreasonable methods of ministry in sermon, leadership, and evangelism, hypocritical attitudes of church leaders and members, and unsolvable conflicts between pastor and church members and between church members. The crisis of the church is inevitably connected to that of overseas missions. Within the last ten years, some mission scholars and mission research institutes carefully have evaluated that the overall aspects of the mission movement in Korea do not show positive signs any more compared with those of the 1980s-1990s.

In the midst of this critical situation, Korean church leaders continue to prepare for the celebration of the 500th years of the Protestant Reformation. But some church leaders critically evaluate that the current situation of the Korean Protestant church looks like the eve of the Reformation. The Protestant Reformation broke out due to the fact that the Roman Catholic church compromised with the worldly desires as it tried to hold the distorted views on repentance, the pope’s authority, and the purgatory and indulgences so that it lost the essence of the gospel in relation to faith, grace and the scripture. When we carefully evaluate the current situation of the Korean church, Luther’s ninety-five theses teaches that the Korean Christians genuinely repent to God and live out the gospel. Articles 1-4 of the ninety-five theses indicate that authentic repentance must be done outwardly as well as inwardly in the lifelong process. Biblically justification and sanctification are an integral part of conversion and transformation that cannot be divided into two different categories. In this regard, a biblical view of conversion and transformation indicates a specific point and a process. Conversion to Christ and his kingdom is definitely transformational and revolutionary in its nature. To become missional people of God means to faithfully participate in the mission of God in the public sphere of the world. So it requires a long process as the church becomes transformational reality as the salt and light in the world.

The Korean church is entering into the critical stage or survivor mode. It is not easy to find any alternative way to overcome the crisis of the Korean church, when we carefully observe both inside and outside the church. In this critical time, if there is a way to find the exit, that should be done through genuine conversion and transformation. In fact, while the reductionism of the gospel is deeply embedded in the ministry, life and mission work of the Korean church, the effort to rediscover the essence and purpose of the church is extremely painful. That is because it requires us to look into our defects and shortcomings as well as weaknesses through a long process of conversion and transformation. The Cape Town Commitment urges us that in the age of secularization and disembodiment, the whole church as the body of Christ and the people of God should walk with Jesus Christ and reject the idolatry of disordered sexuality, worldly power, success, and greed. As disciples of Jesus we try to rediscover the real meaning of humility, integrity and simplicity as we do live out the gospel, the good news to the world.

Hyung-Keun Paul Choi (PhD, Asbury Theological Seminary, 2000) serves as Professor of Mission Studies and Dean of Strategic Affairs at Seoul Theological University. He is a contributor to the International Association of Mission Studies (IAMS). Paul Choi is General Secretary of the Korean Lausanne Committee.

 

 

The Protestant Reformation from the Perspective

of the Latin American Church

Samuel Escobar

Among the great joys of my life as a Latin American Evangelical is the privilege of having been a participant in the Evangelism congresses of Berlin 1966 and Lausanne 1974. I was moved by the Bible exposition in Berlin in which John Stott expounded the Great Commission passages in the Gospels. He emphasized that John´s version was the shortest but at the same time the most challenging, because Jesus not only gave a command but also a model for mission: his own way of going about it. Working with IFES among university students in Latin America in the 1960’s, right after the Cuban revolution, Pedro Arana, René Padilla and myself had to respond to questions about the social responsibility of believers in Christ in a continent that was in turmoil because of oppression and injustice. So we had started to develop a missionary model patterned by Christ´s ministry: incarnation, the cross, resurrection. Stott exposition in Berlin was for me the confirmation that we were on the right track. By the time that the First Latin American Congress of Evangelism took place in Bogotá, 1969, my paper summarized the reflection that had accompanied our evangelistic practice in Latin American campuses, and René and myself also contributed chapters to a book edited by Brian Griffiths.

Similar reflection had been going on among Evangelicals in Europe, Asia and Africa and the Congresses of Evangelism in Amsterdam, Singapore, Minneapolis and Bogotá were the forums where this ongoing reflection was articulated and shared. This process explains why Lausanne 1974 was not a missiological and theological monologue of European or North American Evangelicals, but a global dialogue, not an easy one, but dialogue anyway. In it theological work was done, searching for biblical answers to issues such as the need for a renewed awareness of the social dimensions of the Gospel, the development of contextual ways of expressing the faith in order to communicate it in different cultures, and the critical revision and evaluation of missionary methodologies that were in contradiction with the missionary style modeled by Jesus himself. The contributions of Latin Americans to the  Lausanne Covenant in 1974 came from theological convictions that had been developing since Berlin 1966.  They may be found, for instance, in paragraph 2 on the authority and power of the Bible, 5 on Christian social responsibility, 10 on evangelism and culture and 11 on education and leadership. There is evidence of the beginning of a global theological dialogue that followed after Lausanne in a book that was organized and edited by René Padilla, to which fifteen evangelists and theologians contributed chapters commenting the Lausanne Covenant.  Its title, The New Face of Evangelicalism, expresses well the reality that a renewing movement was afoot among Evangelicals.

In 1910 Latin American Protestants were not even invited to the famous Edinburgh missionary  conference. Gonzalo Báez- Camargo, a respected Mexican ecumenist ,  journalist and Bible scholar, interpreted this exclusion as a sign of the prevailing mindset among European Protestants in 1910, which was still shaped by Victorian-era complacency and paternalism.  They saw the human race as divided into a “Christian world” that included Europe and the Americas and a “non-Christian” world encompassing Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands.  “In other words, – says Báez-Camargo- there were grouped on one side and on the other a bloc of Christian civilized ‘sending’  countries, and a bloc of non-Christian uncivilized, ‘receiving’ mission fields.”i  He believed that this global classification was too  naive and had paved the way for blatant inconsistencies, such as placing Latin America in the first bloc and excluding from Edinburgh Protestant missionaries who had been working there for over a half century. In fact, as it is well known American Protestant missionary enthusiasts  corrected the refusal of Edinburgh 1910  to accept Latin American Protestantism by forming a Committee of Cooperation in Latin America and sponsoring the first continental gathering of Latin American Protestants known as the Panamá Congress on Christian Work, in 1916.

The 160,000 Protestants in 1916 have grown to around 60,000,000 in 2016.  A Catholic observer said in 1989 that  if current growth rates at that point would continue, Latin America would have an evangelical majority in the early 21st century.  Actually, in terms of church participation, “practicing” evangelicals may already outnumber “observant” Catholics. The continuous numerical growth of Protestants in the second half of the twentieth century led other Catholic observers to refer back not to the first century, but to the sixteenth.  Bishop Boaventura Kloppenburg, for example, has noted how in terms of changing religious affiliation, what is happening in Latin America surpasses what happened during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.  In the twentieth century the Catholic church lost more faithful who have become Protestants than it lost in the age of Luther and Calvin.

I have studied elsewhere the way in which during the second part of the twentieth century  some Roman Catholic missionaries and missiologists changed their perspective about Latin American Protestantism. While many of the bishops, even today, hold an attitude that I call  the “police approach” –  how can we stop the Protestants? –  these missiologists have a more “pastoral approach” – what can we learn from them? It  would be worth to pursue the missiological significance of what Jesuit historian Jeffrey Klaiber, an American missionary in Peru, wrote in 1970: “It may be one of the ironies of history that the final contribution of Latin American Protestantism will have been to awaken and revitalize a dormant  Catholic Church. If indeed it does awake and come to life, it will not be because the Church rose from slumber to fight a hostile force, as in the days of the Reformation, but because that new force taught the Church urgently needed lessons about what its own prime task in the future must be.

In the centennial celebration at Edinburgh 2010, of the three hundred participants that attended, sixteen Latin American men and women, all of them Protestants, had been invited, and eight of them were presenters in the seventy seven papers and presentations in the program. Some of them like Bertil Ekstrom  or Antonia Van der Meer from Brazil, are presently persons involved in the training and sending of Latin American Evangelical missionaries to Europe, Asia and Africa.

J. Samuel Escobar (PhD, Universidad Complutense of Madrid, 1989) is Peruvian by birth.  For 26 years he worked in Latin America and Canada with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) and then taught for 20 years at the Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, USA. Presently he lives in Valencia, Spain and teaches at the Facultad Protestante de Teología UEBE in Madrid. Among his books are The New Global Mission (IVP 2002) and Changing Tides: Mission in Latin America (Orbis, 2003).

 

The Protestant Reformation from the Perspective

of the African Protestant Church

Conrad Mbewe 

 

There has been significant growth of the Christian church in Africa in the last one hundred years. This has been especially true of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in their various colours and contours. Missiologists opine that it is in Africa that Christianity is currently growing the fastest. The number of professing Christians on the continent is currently about 542 million according to The Institute on Religion and Public Life based in the USA. When one imagines that almost all this growth has taken place roughly in the last 200 years, the rate of growth is certainly breathtaking. Much of this is a fruit of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century as I hope to show in this article. Due to space, I can only give a broad survey of the growth of Christianity on the African continent.

Christianity came to what is now Africa’s Arab North even before the close of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, but it was destroyed primarily through the battles with Islam in the 7th century. The second major attempt at missions work on the African continent was south of the Sahara desert in the 18th century, and this was by both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. These efforts were initially limited to the coastal regions while the inner parts of Africa were still largely unknown. Protestant missionaries like David Livingstone in the 19th century combined the role of explorer and missionary, and so opened up the interior of Africa to fresh missionary endeavours. Many well-known names of pioneer Protestant missionaries laboured on African soil; names such as Robert Moffat (South Africa), Mary Slessor (West Africa) and C T (Charles) Studd (Central Africa).

Reformation convictions

One of the benefits of the Reformation which caused the Christian faith to be catapulted across Africa, was its insistence on the Scriptures being made available to the people (the laity) in a language they could understand. It was John Wycliffe, one of the forerunners of the Reformation, who told a priest, ‘If God spare my life, ‘ere many years pass, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.’ Thus Protestant missionary work in Africa involved learning the tribal languages and dialects of the people where the missionaries served, developing their grammar, teaching the people how to read and write, and translating the Scriptures into those languages. This was painstaking, laborious work, and, without the Reformation convictions, it would have been abandoned along the way by many missionaries. Although there are still African languages that do not have the full Bible (Old and New Testaments), it can safely be said that almost all the major languages now have the New Testament, if not the entire Bible.

The statement made by John Wycliffe was achieved because the availability of the Scriptures was accompanied by belief in the great Protestant tenet of ‘the priesthood of all believers’. This tenet states that the ability to understand spiritual things, and thus relate directly with God, is not a preserve of a special class of believers (the clergy), but is true of all true believers. This is one of the distinguishing marks of the New Covenant. Hence, as various translations of the Bible became available in the languages of the people of Africa, especially through the work of Bible Societies, all Christians who were literate were reading the Scriptures. Over time this has caused African people across the continent to learn the Christian Faith from its primary source.

Another major benefit to Christian missions in Africa from the Protestant Reformation was the rediscovery of the gospel as defined by the five Solas —Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gracia, Solus Christus, and Soli Deo Gloria. This meant that despite the differences among Protestant missions on matters such as baptism and church government, wherever these Protestant missionaries went, their emphasis was on personal conversion to Christ through repentance and faith. Thus they were able to work together and even share out various tribes and regions – and resources – to make the work of pioneer missions easier and more efficient. This same gospel was passed on to the first indigenous evangelists who proclaimed it wherever they went—with great effect, leading to exponential church growth.

African leadership

Towards the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, the pioneer missionaries began to hand over denominational leadership to their converts who were now pastors and natural leaders of their church denominations. This was partly fueled by the Pan-African movement that was fighting for the removal of colonialism from the African continent. Many of the leaders of the Pan-African movement were educated in Roman Catholic and Protestant mission schools, and were taught that all human beings were equal because they are all made in the image of God.

The political history of Africa over the last 200 years cannot be written without factoring in this indirect foundational role of the church. As a rising cadre of young African leaders agitated for self-government of their countries, this spilt over into church denominations. Whereas many denominations saw the handover of top leadership to indigenous leaders as part of the agenda of missions itself, there was resistance in others (especially in handing over the control of assets), which led to very unhealthy confrontational situations. Thankfully, this phase is almost over and one can say today that Africans themselves are leading the church in Africa. Foreign missionaries still partner with them by drawing alongside indigenous leaders, with their own expertise in various fields.

With 542m professing Christians, Africa is now poised to be a major contributor of personnel to world missions. Some of the biggest churches in the Post-Christian West are African by congregants, leadership and worship styles. These thriving Protestant churches contrast with churches that are closing down or barely holding out in the midst of an aggressive Western atheistic climate.

 

Conrad Mbewe (PhD, University of Pretoria, 2014) trained and worked as a mining engineer in the Zambian copper mines before becoming pastor of the Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, where he has served for the last 30 years. He also currently serves as editor of Reformation Zambia magazine and as chancellor of the African Christian University. Among his books are Foundations for the Flock: Truths about the church for all the saints (Granted, 2008) and Pastoral Preaching: Building a people for God (Langham, 2017).

 

Useful Links

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/keller-piper-and-carson-on-why-reformation-matters-today

http://www.christian.org.uk/resources/series/the-english-reformation-and-the-puritans/