Vista 40: Hearing the 'muted voices' at Lausanne 2021
In November of 2021, the Lausanne Movement held their first major conference on European soil since the original 1974 Congress on World Evangelisation. The overall theme of the Lausanne Europe 20/21 Conversation and Gathering was “Dynamic Gospel New Europe” with its double focus on bringing to bear the power of the eternal Gospel in today’s changing Europe.
This edition of Vista is not an evaluation of the Lausanne 20/21 Conversation and Gathering. However, the Vista editors did want to specifically consider one theme of the conference which, in a small way, we had helped to develop: the theme of muted voices.
Three years ago, in January 2019, the organising committee of the Lausanne Europe 2020 Conversation and Gathering, held a one-day thinktank in Amsterdam. The eighty or so who took part were leaders of churches, denominations and church planting movements, youth and student ministry leaders, diaspora church leaders, and mission agency leaders from across the continent. They were challenged to discuss what benefit a Lausanne Europe gathering might bring, what objectives we should set for the gathering, but also to look around the room and ask the question: who is missing? Whose perspectives, input, and voice, is missing from our deliberations?
A few months later, the Vista editors decided to explore this issue more deeply. We surveyed a group of church, mission, and network leaders from across Europe and found that four voices were often muted in conversations about mission: the voice of women, the voice of the young, the voice of Central and Eastern Europe, and the voice of Majority World Christians (“Who speaks for Europe?” Vista 33, June 2019). In the next issue, we featured articles written by someone from each of those groups giving their perspective on what needed to change (“Reimagining Europe” Vista 34, Oct 2019).
So, did the Lausanne Europe 20/21 Conversation and Gathering serve to amplify the voices of women, the young, Central and Eastern European leaders, and the voices of diaspora Christians in Europe? The short answer is yes, but there is so much more that needs to be done, as the four articles in this issue of Vista will show, with reflections from Amanda Jackson, Director of the Women’s Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance; Henriette and Alexander Engberg Vinkel who are young leaders from Denmark; Slavko Hadžić and Peter Pristiak, church leaders from Bosnia and Slovakia respectively, and Vista co-editor Harvey Kwiyani who assesses LE20/21 from a diaspora perspective.
In my opinion, the muted voices of the church in Europe were heard more prominently in Lausanne Europe 20/21 than at any other European evangelical gathering in recent years. However, as this collection of articles shows, there is still much to be done. We trust that this edition of Vista will encourage a conversation with where all the voices of Europe can speak, and be heard.