Dear en,
Ranald Macaulay makes some very valid points in his article ‘Lausanne and the polemical imperative’ (March en). It is sadly true that evangelicals in the past century, with some notable exceptions, have not adequately risen to the challenge of ‘truth decay’, as Douglas Groothuis called it, and it remains a major missiological need. I cannot speak for Lausanne 1974 (except to say that John Stott believed passionately in the crucial importance of the Christian mind), but Ranald is perhaps a little unfair on Cape Town 2010 – even if he is right that the programme did not make it ‘centre stage’. In the sheer scale of what was presented and discussed at Cape Town, arguably nothing was ‘centre stage’.
The first day of that global Congress concentrated on ‘Truth: bearing witness to the truth of Christ in a pluralistic globalised world’. The Cape Town Commitment necessarily had to be very condensed in its report on that whole topic, but Part IIA emphasises the importance of truth in relation to the person of Christ, the challenge of pluralism, the workplace, globalised media, the arts, science and emerging technologies, and public arenas, including the university.
