An intra-Christian gap has closed a little

FOUR decades ago, global Christian bodies were riven by rows over where their main duty lay—changing the world or saving souls. The Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC), dominated by liberal Protestants and Orthodox churches from communist lands, stressed “liberation” and social justice. That was one reason why America’s Billy Graham and other top evangelicals went to Lausanne in 1974 to set up a new body that would focus more on winning the 2.7 billion people who, by its calculation, had yet to hear the Christian message.

The so-called Lausanne movement remains ebullient. Its gathering of 4,000 evangelicals from 200 countries, which ended in Cape Town on October 25th, was billed as the biggest and broadest Christian meeting in history. But coming from a body that stresses the spiritual, parts of the meeting’s final statement were quite earthly. Humanity must “repent of our part in the destruction, waste and pollution of the Earth’s resources, and our collusion in the toxic idolatry of consumerism,” it said. Also, the WCC’s new head, Olav Fykse Tveit of Norway, was invited to Cape Town, despite his roots in liberal Nordic Lutheranism. …