Evangelicals Unite

Roman Catholics look to the Vatican, Eastern Christians to their patriarchates, and liberal Protestants, to some extent, to the World Council of Churches. But the Evangelical Protestants of the world have no symbolic center. Their periphery, however, is vast and expanding.

Though the U.S. makes up the largest component of this empire, Evangelicalism is a worldwide movement that includes tens of millions of people of nearly every persuasion, from Anglicans to Fundamentalists. While the more liberal Protestants embrace many theologies, Evangelicals are united on a core of orthodox beliefs and take literally the biblical injunction to "proclaim the good news to the whole creation." They are now fielding more missionaries than ever before and have little trouble attracting hundreds of thousands of followers to their crusades.

Some effort toward forming an organization was made last summer when 2,400 leaders from 150 countries converged for an Evangelical congress in Lausanne (TIME, Aug. 5).* Last week in Mexico City, 41 members of the Continuation Committee that was authorized at Lausanne held their first meeting. To the world's pre-eminent Evangelical, Billy Graham, it came at a strategic time. Claiming that some liberals have, in effect, set up a new competing religion, he told the committee that "Evangelicalism has been raised up of God as a vigorous reaffirmation of historic first century Christianity."

Individualists all, Evangelicals are loath to construct a bureaucracy, and many of them think that church movements should adopt a low profile at a time when the secular world seems hypnotized by power. Nonetheless, after days of debate in Mexico City, the committee set up a loose minimal structure. More important, they decided to appoint a full-time executive secretary and offered the job to a Third World churchman, the Rev. Gottfried B. Osei-Mensah, 40, pastor of the Nairobi Baptist Church in Kenya. Once a sales engineer with Mobil Oil in Ghana, Osei-Mensah holds a bachelor of science degree from Birmingham University and worked for the Pan-African Fellowship of Evangelical Students for five years before taking the Nairobi congregation.

Tottering Orders. The appointment underscored the importance of Third World churches in the Lausanne movement. So did the address to the Continuation Committee by Billy Graham, who was named honorary chairman of the fellowship. Noting that more than 200 African, Asian and Latin American boards are now sending out missionaries of their own to spread the gospel, Graham said: "It is our opportunity to help these new societies to channel missionaries into countries where we as Westerners cannot now go." The exclusion of Westerners and the tottering of old political orders should be considered a challenge, said Graham. "We must capitalize on the spirit of unrest and change throughout the world." As for developing an Evangelicalism that is not controlled by the First World, Graham reminded his listeners that "Jesus Christ was not a Westerner."

* No Catholics are part of the Lausanne fellowship, although some people consider the burgeoning Pentecostal movement in the Roman Catholic Church and its small counterpart in Eastern Orthodoxy as Evangelical.

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