From 17-21 June 1997, 52 evangelical missiologists, theologians, and mission practitioners from 20 countries met in Haslev, Denmark, to consider the issue ‘Gospel Contextualisation Revisited’. This meeting was sponsored by the Theology and Strategy Working Group of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation and the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity.We began by looking back to the 1978 Lausanne Consultation on Gospel and Culture, held in Willowbank. The resulting Lausanne Occasional Paper, ‘The Willowbank Report on Gospel and Culture‘, brought the challenge to accept contextualisation and to become more adept in the use of its principles. We are grateful for this pioneering work and hope that our work adds value to this prior work.The purpose of our meeting was to review 19 years experience of thought and practise and to identify issues that have emerged during this time.
The interaction of people from different churches and cultures produced a new creativity and confidence about how the gospel might be more adequately expressed today. We offer the following as a result of our reflections.
Read the full Consultation Statement.
The following articles related to Haslev 1997 were printed in the Sept/Oct 1997 issue of Lausanne’s World Evangelization magazine.
- Editorial on Haslev 1997 by Fergus Macdonald
- Issues in Contextualisation by Patrick Sookhdeo
- The Old Testament Contextualisations by Saphir Athyal
- Contextualisation Theory in Euro-American Missiology by Charles H Kraft
- Ethnicity and Race in Contextualisation by Morris Stuart
- Methods of Communication and Contextualisation by Graham Cray
- The Contextualised Witness of the Apostles by Ernst Baasland
- The Ethics of Contextualisation by Bishop Josiah Fearon
- An Observation from Haslev by Tom Houston, Minister-at-large