May 01, 2003 by Luis Bush

Between July 2001 and March 2003 thousands of Christian leaders from more than six hundred cities heard stories from their colleagues of “God-at-work” in their cities and countries, then pondered in small groups the challenges, opportunities towards what they sensed God was calling them to in the twenty-first century.

One hundred twen­ty Christian leaders and scholars will gather in Seoul, Korea, May 7 to 9, 2003 as the World Inquiry International Coalition, to carry out a mid-course assessment of the preliminary findings and ongoing process of the World Inquiry.

How did the World Inquiry begin?

The World Inquiry, short for Evangelizing our World Inquiry, started out as an exercise to probe the minds and hearts of evangeli­cal leaders in the major cities of the world. The Inquiry began and has continued not as a rigorous, methodologically driven research project, but rather a “listening venture” that seeks to tune-in to God’s voice through his people, especially those voices and lead­ers who are now emerging onto their local, regional and national scenes in the Two-Thirds World.

In the last months of the AD2000 Movement (AD2000) an abiding question was: Where do we go from here in world evangelization? The encouragement of my fifteen-year accountability group led me to reflect on this question through a doctoral study at Fuller School of World Mission. While looking through the lenses of the Scriptures, theology, missiologists, church history, global mission conferences, Christian leader­ship, etc.—it soon became clear that the focus of the dissertation “Catalysts of World Evangelization” would more ap­propriately be on informing The Question, rather than seeking to provide answers.
In the process I observed that certain catalytic im­pulses of world evangelization are constant, including a God-given purpose, renewal as a means, conferences lead­ing to structures and human leaders as agents. The study of catalytic antecedents of today’s mission, plus review of AD2000 as an institutional and contextual frame­work of mission gave preparation for the final section, which anticipates future mission directions by means of an inquiry process.

The Evangelizing Our World Inquiry compresses the reflective process into a practical instru­ment. It seeks to become a tool for listening to voices that can help construct a missiology capable of empowering the global church for participation in God’s mission for the twenty-first century. As we listen to one another and seek God through his Word to hear “what the Spirit is saying to the church,” we can expect a fresh missiology to emerge that both deepens and extends our witness through the gospel.

From early on, the faculty of the School of World Mis­sion and Fuller President’s Cabinet have greatly served this World Inquiry, providing advice at various stages of the research, design and conduct of the inquiry process.  It is being conducted in collaboration with the Lausanne Com­mittee on World Evangelization, with a view to a presenta­tion of the Inquiry findings at the World Evangelization Issues Forum, sponsored by Lausanne in Thailand in 2004.