says Christopher Wright is idolatry. Here is a portion of what he had to say at the recent 3rd Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization:
God’s people today, like in the Old Testament, have fallen to worshiping the false gods and idols of the world, said the international director of U.K.-based Langham Partnerships as he spoke before the thousands attending the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization.
“Idolatry … is the biggest single obstacle to world mission,” said Wright, who will be the main drafter of the much-anticipated Cape Town Commitment that will come out of the weeklong gathering of mission-minded Christian leaders.
According to Wright, the three idols are: power and pride, popularity and success, and wealth and greed.
Many evangelical leaders, he said, have become obsessed about their status and power in the Christian church and have become disobedient to Christ in the process. They worship popularity and therefore exaggerate or report dishonest statistics to make themselves look more successful than they are Similar to the false prophets of old, these leaders claim to speak the word of God but really act in their own self-interest.
“The Church was dazzled by these super apostles who boasted about their credentials and their impressive speaking and great popularity,” said the theologian, whose ministry was once led by John Stott, the evangelical leader who was the main drafter of the first two Lausanne covenants.
But the Kingdom of God cannot be built on the foundations of dishonesty and lies, such as questionable statistics of success, he said. It also cannot be built based on the false teaching of prosperity gospel, which distorts what it means to be blessed by God and does not properly teach about suffering and the cross, Wright added.
“We are a scandal and a stumbling block to the mission of God,” Wright stated.
Ouch! But I think Wright is dead on. There is a serious problem in the church when there is, for example, in the case of one congregation I know of, a 25-30 year gap between the time one congregation sends out one or more long term career missionaries, and when they send the next one out, if at all. Maybe this indicates a shift in thinking about missions, but still, it is not a good sign.
I happen to know a few long term missionaries who are nearing retirement and they are all wondering where the new missionaries are going to come from, especially when missions conventions are either altogether non-existent or done in haphazard fashion where the missionaries are only allowed a few minutes to share their visions, aren’t given much time to interact with congregations and so on.
Why? One possibility is as Wright is suggesting – congregations have lost the vision to engage in cross-cultural mission due to various idolatrous practices and attitudes. I am concerned too this can happen as well when we sing the song “everybody is a missionary” because, as one Stephen Neill once said, “When everything is missions, nothing is missions” and when everything becomes missions then, I think, urgency to proclaim the gospel can be lost because areas of the world where it needs to be more strongly supported or emphasized end up loosing out, and then, unreached peoples continue to go on unreached while we stay safe in our nice big mega-church buildings patting ourselves on the back for being such good and faithful Christians, when more likely we’re just participating in a closed system of self congratulation and idolatry – which is what Christ Wright is getting at.
Time is short people, we can’t waste time on ourselves and our echo chamber conversations – the work of the gospel must go on and carried out with urgency and diligence.
Blessings
