Dr. Barry Corey, president of Biola University, is in Cape Town, South Africa, as one of just 400 American delegates at the Third Lausanne World Congress on Evangelism. This is the first in a series of dispatches Dr. Corey is sending about his experience at this historic event.

This has been another powerful morning here at Lausanne, Cape Town. The format in the convention center is setup around 800 tables of six. We are assigned tables for the morning sessions. More than four thousand fill the room with another 1,200 stewards and guests filling the seats and sitting and standing around the arena. It is perhaps the most representative gathering of the Christian church in history.

John Piper's talk on Ephesians 3 this morning drew our attention to the obvious tensions in gatherings like these of multinational, multicultural Christian leaders. How much do we give ourselves to the living out of the Gospel through eradicating human suffering, and how much do we give of ourselves to the awakening of the lost to the eternal suffering and the reality of hell?