09 Dec Blue Dots, and the Missing Chinese

I was among the 4000 people who attended Cape Town 2010, the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, held in October in South Africa. It opened on Sunday, October 17, and closed a week later. This was my first trip to South Africa.

I’ve attended many missions gatherings. But I’ve never attended a missions conference where, as you walk through the convention center, the vast majority of people are not North American. Usually it’s predominantly a bunch of North Americans getting together to talk about missions, with a few internationals who are part of the discussions. But this time, 90 percent were from beyond North America. That was fascinating.

We all wore name tags, with our name and country. But a lot of people had a blue dot on their nametag, with only their first name and no country. The blue dot meant, “Don’t take a photo of this person.” These persons came from security-sensitive countries, and didn’t want their photo splashed on websites, because it could be harmful to them. There were a lot of blue dots.

We couldn’t avoid noticing the absence of 200 house church Chinese pastors. The Lausanne Congress had invited 200 Chinese people, but the Chinese government didn’t let them go. In fact, the government confiscated their passports and even put some under house arrest so that they couldn’t leave for the conference.

The Lausanne organizers explained some of this the first night of the conference, and we had a chance to pray for the “empty chairs.” All of the delegates were divided into groups of six persons; we had an empty chair at our table, which meant it was intended for someone from a house church in China.

That was disappointing. They could have benefits from the encouragement and insight of others from around the world.

In the end, the Lausanne Congress offered an apology to the Chinese government for not consulting with them first before offering the invitation to their people. The Chinese government basically said, “If you wanted to invite 200 of our people, you should have checked with our government first.” They said that’s the reason they weren’t allowed to go.