The Way to the Global Christian Forum

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One of the realities many ecumenists encounter, locally through to international, is the separation of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches from the mainstream ecumenical movement.  This has been addressed internationally through the Global Christian Forum in recent years. 

I've found a blog post, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Global Christian Forum, which summarises the origins of this split and the story of how the Global Christian Forum was founded.

Here's a an excerpt from the account of how the split was formed:

One con­cern Evan­gel­i­cals and Pen­te­costals have often had is the loss of the mis­sion­ary spirit among ecumenically-minded Christians—a ter­ri­ble irony, con­sid­er­ing that ecu­menism was born at the Edin­burgh Mis­sion­ary Con­fer­ence in 1910. The Inter­na­tional Mis­sion­ary Coun­cil that was formed as a result of the Edin­burgh con­fer­ence even­tu­ally joined the World Coun­cil of Churches in 1961; many Evan­gel­i­cals left in protest. 1974 saw the for­ma­tion of the Lau­sanne Com­mit­tee for World Evan­ge­liza­tion, fol­low­ing a Con­gress in the same place and year, at the ini­tia­tive of the Amer­i­can evan­ge­list Billy Gra­ham. There 2500 Evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers from 150 coun­tries recom­mit­ted them­selves to world evan­ge­liza­tion in sign­ing the Lau­sanne Covenant. Clearly enough, they weren’t impressed by the WCC’s abil­ity to keep up the mis­sion­ary task of the church.

The post goes on to describe how the Global Christian Forum was founded and designed to compensate 'for their “under­rep­re­sen­ta­tion” else­where, as well as to demon­strate the will­ing­ness of “ecu­meni­cal vet­er­ans” to be in the minority'.

Related articles

• Global Christian Forum (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Faith and Order Centenary (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Evangelical Congress takes Reconciliation as Key to its Mission (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)