CAPE TOWN, South Africa – Mission-minded evangelicals from around the world were in high spirits Sunday as the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization got underway in Cape Town, South Africa.

More than 4,000 Christian leaders have convened at the Cape Town International Convention Centre to discuss the most pressing challenges facing the global church and world evangelization today.

Welcoming delegates to the Congress, Lausanne Chairman Doug Birdsall said he was looking forward to seeing what God would do in the coming days. more >>

Young evangelical leader Gabe Lyons believes that the death of Christian America is a good thing because it makes way for a new generation of believers, which he calls the Next Christians.

The Christian Post met up with Lyons, co-founder of the Catalyst conference and co-author of UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity and Why it Matters, at the recent Catalyst conference in Atlanta to discuss his new book, The Next Christians: The Good News About the End of Christian America.

The book, released Oct. 5, takes an optimistic look at the next generation of American Christians that seeks to engage the world and restore all parts of society as God intended when He created the universe. more >>

Philip Yancey grew up in a strict, fundamentalist church in the Deep South.

He spent most of his early life in a bubble, attending a Bible college that in hindsight seems like "an island fortress against the outside world, one with its own private culture." Even the Sixties' sexual revolution did not penetrate the college's sealed environment, he says.

The school's list of forbidden activities included dancing, playing cards, skating at public rinks and movies, among others. Students could only play music "consistent with a Christian testimony;" women's skirts were measured; and men could not grow a beard or moustache. more >>

The Lausanne Movement, which came out of one of the most important Christian conferences in modern history, is only as important as people think it is, said the movement’s executive chair.

“Lausanne as an organization is very, very small. We have no members, we have no permanent office anywhere,” explained the Rev. Doug Birdsall, executive chair of The Lausanne Movement, during a Lausanne/Cape Town 2010 global conference call Wednesday. “Lausanne really is only validated to the degree that people buy into the importance of the issues and add value to relationships they are able to make through Lausanne connections.”

For nearly four decades, the Lausanne organization has served to bring Christian leaders worldwide together to strategize on how to evangelize the world. Billy Graham convened the first Lausanne Congress in 1974 and drew some 2,700 participants from over 150 countries. From that conference came the Lausanne Covenant, an evangelical manifesto that called for active worldwide Christian evangelism. The covenant is one of the most influential documents in modern evangelical Christianity. more >>

Christian leaders from around the world who plan to convene in South Africa this October will adopt a new document that will follow in the footsteps of the historic Lausanne Covenant, an evangelical manifesto considered to be one of the most influential documents in Christendom.

The highly-anticipated document, referred to as the Cape Town Commitment, will be "rooted in the centrality of the uniqueness of Christ, and on the authority of the Scriptures," say leaders of the Lausanne Movement, which is spearheading the gathering in Cape Town in cooperation with the World Evangelical Alliance.

And it will reflect the discussions of some 4,000 Christian leaders from 200 nations who will be gathered to focus on the future of the Church and evangelization in the 21st century. more >>

When we think of God, we usually consider that fact that He is righteous, holy, loving, and good. But here is something else to consider about God: He is the God who has suffered.

We don't tend to think that a perfect Creator would experience such a human trait as human pain and suffering. After all, why would you suffer if you did not have to?

But God has suffered, and that more deeply than any of us could ever imagine. more >>