McClungs Selected for Lausanne III Congress: Will Join 4,000 Participants from 200 Countries
Church of God missions veterans Grant and Janice McClung have been selected as participants for “Cape Town 2010,” the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, set for October 16-25 in Cape Town, South Africa. The international forum on world evangelization will involve 4,000 missions leaders from 200 countries and connect thousands more around the world through an internet “Global Link” and multiple on-site and cyber “Global Conversations” before, during, and after the international gathering. 
The Cape Town meeting, nicknamed “Lausanne III,” will be a highly interactive ten-day forum and the third in a series of major congresses dating to the initial conclave called together by Evangelist Billy Graham and world missions leaders in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The original Lausanne meeting in 1974 was a watershed congress that produced an internationally acclaimed theological/strategic evangelism document, “The Lausanne Covenant,” and set in motion a global collaboration in missions efforts called “The Lausanne Movement for World Evangelization” (see www.lausanne.org). A follow-up congress, “Lausanne II,” was convened in Manila, Philippines in 1989.
As a preparation for Lausanne III, the McClungs were invited to join some 300 men and women from 175 organizations – local churches, denominations, missions agencies, schools, businesses, and foundations – at the prestigious Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas on January 25-27. “The Dallas consultation was a foretaste of the fellowship, partnership, and international missions networking we can expect in Cape Town in October,” said McClung. At the Dallas meeting, he was named to the U.S. Lausanne Advisory Committee, a broadly representative group of some 40 American leaders who will be responsible to grapple with the evangelistic challenges in the United States and work with various interdenominational coalitions in casting the vision for engaging the various subcultures and unreached groups in the United States with the gospel over the coming decade.
“What was exciting about the process in Dallas,” McClung stated, “was that participants were being merged together for dynamic interaction from a wide variety of missions agencies, training systems, denominations, local churches (pastors and laity), and the marketplace (business professionals).” Many at the Dallas leadership conference commented on the diversity of the participants in age, gender, ethnicity, region, and denominational affiliation – a diversity that will also be reflected in Cape Town.
“The international participant selection process (now completed) has reflected the age, gender, ethnic, and denominational diversity with intentionality,” McClung noted, “and it is expected that at Cape Town some one-third of the participants from around the world will be women, and one-half will be younger leaders in their 20’s and 30’s. This will be the future of world evangelization as The Whole Church takes The Whole Gospel to The Whole World.”
Grant McClung is President of Missions Resource Group and a member of the World Missions Commission of the Pentecostal World Fellowship. He is an elected member of the International Executive Council for the Church of God (Cleveland, TN). Janice McClung, an accomplished composer of missions music, trains churches and leaders in praying for missionaries and nations. She has led a weekly world missions prayer ministry in her local church for more than twenty years. Together, the McClungs train, consult, and mentor the Great Commission community as missionary educators for Church of God World Missions.
