The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization begins this Sunday in Cape Town, South Africa. John Piper will be one of the plenary session speakers (see the schedule [PDF]).
Here's a brief description from their website of what this congress is about:
Cape Town 2010, held in collaboration with the World Evangelical Alliance, will bring together 4,000 leaders from more than 200 countries to confront the critical issues of our time—other world faiths, poverty, HIV/AIDS, persecution, among others—as they relate to the future of the Church and world evangelization.
The Lausanne Movement officially began in 1974 when its first congress convened in Lausanne, Switzerland. Billy Graham, Ralph Winter, Francis Schaeffer, and John Stott were among the main speakers.
One of the big accomplishments of this first congress was the establishment of The Lausanne Covenant. This was a big accomplishment because 2,300 believers from 150-plus nations and multiple branches of the evangelical church were able to sign on to a common expression of faith and mission.
The Lausanne Covenant is arguably the most significant document from the past 200 years related to the cause of world missions, second perhaps only to Willaim Carey's Enquiry. Here is its Introduction:
We, members of the Church of Jesus Christ, from more than 150 nations, participants in the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne, praise God for his great salvation and rejoice in the fellowship he has given us with himself and with each other. We are deeply stirred by what God is doing in our day, moved to penitence by our failures and challenged by the unfinished task of evangelization. We believe the Gospel is God's good news for the whole world, and we are determined by his grace to obey Christ's commission to proclaim it to all mankind and to make disciples of every nation. We desire, therefore, to affirm our faith and our resolve, and to make public our covenant.
In this video, Christopher J. H. Wright, chair of the Lausanne Committee's Theological Education Commission, outlines the Covenant and gives commentary on its different parts:
