Efforts to establish a code of conduct to govern Christian churches’ missionary and evangelism efforts — especially those aimed at other Christians — took a major step forward when the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) said it would support such a pact.
“We see this as a major step forward on the way to getting the code agreed on among organizations representing a huge body of Christians,” said Juan Michel, a spokesman for the World Council of Churches (WCC), which is heading up the project with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
The code, expected to be finalized in 2010, would be directed at both inter-Christian evangelism and Christian missions to those outside the faith.
The decision of the WEA, which has 233 evangelical churches in more than 120 countries, was announced at an Aug. 8–12 consultation in Toulouse, France, attended by a broad spectrum of Christians, including Pentecostals and evangelicals, as well as WCC churches and Roman Catholic representatives.
Efforts to create a code of conduct on conversion come at a critical moment. In Afghanistan, the Muslim-rooted Taliban holds 19 Korean Christian aid workers as hostages, and in Latin America, Catholic leaders have voiced increasingly sharp criticism of evangelicals and Pentecostals for seeking to convert Catholics. In Russia, Orthodox leaders accuse Catholics of trying to reclaim churches and parishioners after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Thomas Schirrmacher, a German theologian who heads the WEA’s International Institute for Religious Freedom, said the code would seek to “establish the borderline between acceptable forms of mission protected by religious freedom and undue forms of trying to convert people.”
“‘Evangelical’ and ‘ecumenical’ Christians have never been as close in this regard as they are today,” he said. (RNS)
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