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Partnership Roundup: November 2008

Posted by Justin Long ⋅ November 18, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ View comments

Lausanne is deep in preparations for its huge Cape Town 2010 Congress to be held in collaboration with the World Evangelical Alliance. They are expecting some 4,000 people from over 200 countries (now that’s an event to be part of, if only for the social networking). They also expect “thousands” of virtual participants, and they’re exploring online meeting spaces, chat rooms, streaming audio/video, etc. (although no word about twittering or wikis or other collaborative software). Invitations to participants will be done through some kind of national and/or regional recommendation system, probably similar to the one they used for the 2004 conference in Pattaya. There will be six major themes to the conference, most of which seem to me to be pretty similar to themes of the past (e.g. supremacy of Christ, etc). This is only the third Congress in Lausanne’s history, following up from the Lausanne congress in the 70s and the Manila congress in the 80s. Due to the economic downturn in the US, Lausanne is among many groups experiencing a financial challenge and is looking for donors.

The World Evangelical Alliance just finished one of its General Assemblies, at which about 500 people attended (representatives of the 128 or so national alliances that make up the WEA). They came away with a number of resolutions as well as the launch of a leadership training institute to train evangelicals in countries for service.

The Ethne unreached peoples movement is hammering its website into good shape (sorry I couldn’t be of more help, guys!). A recent report for the WEA Mission Commission meeting outlines the progress being made in the network as a whole. They are preparing for the second Ethne convention, Ethne’09, to be held in Bogota, Colombia.

The International Orality Network has blogged about an interesting situation in Juiz de Fora, where thousands of poor people spend each day pushing carts through the city streets looking for garbage they can sell to recycling stations. Stephen Young wants to start a church “on the street” among them and is looking for anyone else who’s had experience doing something similar.

The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP) held its annual event this month. The prayer requests page of their website has a great quick overview of the persecution situation in most of the restricted nations on Earth.

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