In a compelling conversation, Travis Michael Fleming and Christopher J.H. Wright explore the intersections of Wright's personal journey, his theological insights, and his influential role within the Lausanne movement. Wright, who grew up in Northern Ireland, shares how his upbringing in a missionary family profoundly shaped his understanding of faith and mission. The rich landscapes of his childhood provided a backdrop for his eventual academic pursuits, where he delved into the complexities of Old Testament ethics at Cambridge. This academic foundation laid the groundwork for his lifelong dedication to understanding the ethical implications of Scripture in contemporary contexts.

Wright's scholarship is portrayed as a vital resource for those engaged in ministry, emphasizing the importance of a theology that responds to real-world challenges. He speaks candidly about his experiences in India, where he navigated the dynamics of cross-cultural ministry, adapting biblical teachings to resonate within diverse cultural frameworks. This firsthand engagement with mission informs his argument for a holistic approach that integrates evangelism with social justice, a theme central to the Lausanne movement that he has been a part of since the 1974 Congress.

As the dialogue progresses, Wright reflects on his collaborations with prominent evangelical leaders, notably John Stott, and the theological developments that emerged from the Lausanne Congresses. His insights into the ongoing relevance of the Lausanne movement highlight the pressing need for the church to address complex social issues through a lens of faith. The episode serves as a clarion call for listeners to engage thoughtfully with their faith, urging them to consider the implications of mission in their own lives and communities.

Takeaways:

• Christopher J.H. Wright's extensive scholarship provides profound insights into God's mission in the world.
• The podcast delves into the significant influence of John Stott on Chris Wright's theological development and ministry.
• Listeners gain a unique perspective on the integration of Old Testament ethics and contemporary mission work.
• Chris Wright shares personal anecdotes illustrating his journey from Northern Ireland to global evangelical leadership.
• The conversation highlights the importance of holistic mission that encompasses both evangelism and social justice.
• Wright's experiences in India shaped his understanding of cross-cultural mission and the role of Scripture.

Thank you for becoming one of our Apollo swattered watering partners. This is a conversation with Christopher J.H. wright. This was behind the scenes before the conversation got featured today.

In it, we talk a little bit about who he is, his background, how he got into ministry, as well as some of the most prominent names within evangelicalism. One thing that you should take note of is really the depth of Chris Wright's scholarship.

Chris Wright is one of the world's leading experts in the understanding of what God's mission is and how it works out in the world. He's also interacted with some of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20th and 21st century.

One of the names that you may or may not be familiar with was none other than John Stott, a man that he had a close personal relationship with. In this, we learn a little bit about who Chris is behind the scenes. We also get to know a little bit more about his ministry. Happy listening.

Thank you, Travis. It's great to be with you. Thank you.

Okay, so the best thing about growing up in Northern Ireland was what?

Holidays by the sea. You're never far from the sea in Northern Ireland. You're never more than about 12, 15 miles from the sea, so it's always freezing cold.

But holidays at the sea, yeah.

Number two, how about this? What is the best Northern Irish dish that you encourage others to try when they travel there?

I would say Vida Bread. Vida Bread. It's a very rich malted loaf, very dark brown, very squidgy, and kind of slightly sweet. Good Vita bread. Yeah.

I've traveled to Northern Ireland and I never had that. So now when I go back, that's what I want to do.

Well, maybe it was part of my childhood, and it's maybe been discontinued. You never know. Maybe you don't get vita loaves anymore.

How about this one? Now, because you work in mission, it also means that you interact with people from all over the world.

So the funniest cross cultural experience you've ever had was what?

Oh, boy, that's quite a hard one.

I mean, I don't know whether it was cross culture or not, but I did once clash heads, literally, with an American, a very tall brother, possibly like yourself there, Travis. And we were playing football on the field in India. I was with the students, and it was an afternoon, and we both went up for a high ball.

This was soccer, you understand, not American football. Both went up for a high ball and our heads clashed.

And I landed on the floor, concussed with a broken nose, bleeding profusely, and had to be Taken to hospital to get that sorted out. So don't know whether it was funny, but it was certainly a cross cultural experience in more ways than one. And a painful one too.

Yeah, I'd say. So how about this one? The strangest food you've ever eaten as you've traveled around the world.

That was probably in Nigeria or.

Well, no, no, no, it was Uganda and they had this very special dish which was all chickens and things in a kind of big pot and they were searching around to find that bit of the chicken which in Northern Ireland, rather rudely was known as the Pope's nose. It's actually this kind of back end of the chicken where everything comes out.

And this apparently was the delicacy which they wanted to serve to me as their guest.

In the end they didn't find it and I was really quite relieved because I wasn't particularly looking forward to having to eat that bit of the chicken.

But yeah, and certainly the chickens there in that part of Uganda, I think they had had a long and stressful life because the meat was usually pretty tough. But I think that was in Uganda.

Got it. I like that. You never know what people are going to say when it comes to food. You just never know what you're going to have happen.

I've had some pretty funny answers as I've asked that question over the years, but that's one I haven't heard to have that part of the chicken. But let's get to the last question. You kind of allude to this in the book, that you've been a bit of an amateur photographer, if I get that right.

So if you could photograph one place in the world, where would that be and why?

Antarctica, which I've never been to. But I am fascinated by the place and I'd love to get there before it disappears sometime.

Yeah, I think that's because I refer to taking photographs of my boys when they were kids, when we actually had things called cameras, you know, with lenses and things that you stuck on. But I wouldn't describe myself as a photographer really. Now we just do what we do, don't we, with a phone.

Let the phone just do that for us. Well, let's jump right into a bit about who you are.

We know that you grew up in Northern Ireland, but what prompted you to study the Old Testament and then delve into mission? Those don't always seem to be things that go together.

That's absolutely right. And they didn't in my mind for quite a long time. In many ways, mission came first. Because I am the son of missionary parents, as you say.

I grew up in Northern Ireland. My parents, Joe Wright and Mamie Wright. Anybody listening who might know? My father, Joe Wright, obviously with the Lord and I for many years.

But before I was born, at the end of the Second World War, my parents had been missionaries in Brazil for about 20 years.

And so our home was full of all kinds of things that my dad had brought back, probably quite illegally now from Amazonia, because he was a missionary among the Amazonian tribes people.

And so my childhood was very much missionary focused in the sense that we would often go along to missionary meetings and conventions and I'd hear my dad talk about those things. So that was part of my childhood Christian upbringing. It was sort of.

You assumed that this was not exactly normal, not in the sense that everybody went out and did that, but it was part of Northern Ireland. Christianity was commitment to missionaries, missionary support, missionary prayer, missionary conventions and so on. So that was there.

That had been there for quite a long time.

The connection with the Old Testament was that after my first degree in Cambridge, I did classics and then I shifted over to theology and I ended up getting a degree from Cambridge in theology. And I went back home to Belfast. I must have been, what, about 22 or something? A youngster, really.

But I got asked by the principal of Belfast Bible College, a man called Vic Reid, if I would teach some evening classes. These were not main courses during the week, but evening classes for the general public, which I did.

And one of the ones he asked me to teach was Christian ethics.

And I hadn't actually studied that subject at my first degree, but I thought, yeah, I can mug it up, read a few books, start with the Old Testament, move on to the New, and then a few issues. And it's only about, you know, 10 lectures or something. I can do that, but I couldn't find any books on Old Testament ethics.

There were books on the Ten Commandments, there were books on the sermon in the mind and all that kind of thing. And at that stage, I was already contemplating going back to university to do a PhD. My wife and I were both schoolteachers.

I got married by then, so I was a high school teacher. But I had this sense that I was wanting to do more theological education.

So I wrote to my undergraduate supervisor in Cambridge to say that I'm thinking of doing a PhD if you have me. Would Old Testament ethics be a good subject to research?

And I remember getting quite, quite agitated after my first sort of six months of trying to wrestle, where is this thing? What, where are the books on it? How do I research it? What's it all about?

And in one of the tea times in Tyndale House in Cambridge where I was working, I shared my frustration with a German professor who was a visiting professor from Germany. And I said, you know, I'm really having a struggle to work out how I can do a PhD on Old Testament ethics.

And he replied, that is because the discipline does not exist. I thought, oh, thank you for your wonderful encouragement, brother. So then thankfully my supervisor, Dr.

Ronnie Clements, suggested that I look at the economic ethics of the Old Testament, that is specifically the laws about wealth and interest and debt and slavery and family, everything to do with the Old Testament economy. And that gave me a sense of focus.

And that's then where I concentrated for the following few years and produced Dissertation on Family, Land and Property in the Old Testament. And that then became the basis of teaching the Old Testament. After I moved on from my PhD, I got ordained in the Church of England, et cetera.

But my future teaching role was always because my PhD was an old Testament, that was what I taught.

The connection between Old Testament and mission, though, really only came after we lived in India for a while because, well, first of all, because I went for one year to teach at All Nations Christian College in England, which is a missionary training college.

And so I was having there to think, well, I'm going to be teaching Deuteronomy or Isaiah or whatever it is, but these are all men and women who are committed to cross cultural mission. They're going out to be missionaries. What do they need to know from this text?

I can't waste five lectures telling them all about J, E, D and P, you know, or something. They need to get into the text in relation to their calling and mission. So that stimulated me to be thinking about that connection.

And then while we were in India, the whole cross cultural dimension of the mission of the church in a land which is obviously not Christian in the broader sense of the word, meant that you were constantly having to think through biblical texts, Old Testament Texts from the perspective of men and women who are going to be bearing witness to Christ in a situation in a culture which was polytheistic, which was idolatrous, which was corrupt, and so on. And so those connections of what is the mission of the church in relation to the Scriptures began to come together really, while we lived in India.

Where were you in India?

In Pune, which is in western India, or if you think of the map of India, about 2/3 of the way up the left hand side. It's about 90 miles inland from what's now called Mumbai, or when we live there, Bombay. It's a large city.

I think it's about the seventh largest city in India. Quite an educational center. There are universities there.

And I was teaching my wife and I and our family, we were at the Union Biblical Seminary, UBS in Bibuadi, which was at that time right on the outskirts of Pune, but has now been engulfed in the expansion of the city.

Well, mission is so fascinating to see that transition for you. You even wrote a book, the Old Testament Ethics and the People of God, didn't you?

Yes, yes, indeed.

And that was a book seeking to help Christians understand how do I make sense of the Old Testament from an ethical or moral point of view? What is the kind of ethical teaching of the Old Testament? So that was Living as the People of God. The relevance of Old Testament Ethics.

So that's. Yeah, that was then known as Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, published by interparsity Press. Yeah.

And then what. What prompted you to get engaged with Lausanne? Tell about Lausanne first for those that don't know.

Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, Lausanne is what it says on the tin. It's a city in Switzerland, lausanne.

But because John Stott and Billy Graham were very close friends, John Stott was invited to participate in that congress. Theologically, he helped to prepare the statement in advance.

I mean, you know, in my mid-20s by then, John Stott was a famous evangelical leader in the UK and indeed globally. I'd listened to him teach, I'd heard him preach in London and in the university and so on.

The process by which the Lausanne movement, which had grown out of the congress, was seeking to work out theologically how to hold together evangelism, the preaching of the word, the gospel, and social engagement, social involvement in all the issues of poverty and oppression and injustice, et cetera, et cetera.

John Stott had managed to pull them together in Lausanne 74 and into the statement, partly by bringing to that congress and giving them a very strong voice some amazing church leaders from Latin America who he knew personally as very close friends, people like Samuel Escobar, Rene Padilla and a number of others. And so that remained an issue through those years, through that decade or more after Lausanne was how do we hold these things together?

A lot of theological work was done, a lot of good statements were written. Sadly, to this day, many people still keep asking the same question. To my great frustration, you know, what do you think's most important?

What should we do? You know, what is the priority? What is primacy? And so on.

And so the focus of evangelical churches through those years tended to be on reaching the unreached evangelism, church growth, reaching the world in our generation.

And it's kind of funny, I got quite disillusioned throughout that conference, during the course of it, because A, there was very little biblical or theological input which I thought was lacking, and I didn't think John Stott would be very pleased. And B, there were 31 different special interest groups of which one was holistic mission.

And I'm saying to myself, Anthony, look, holistic mission is not one interest group among others. Holistic mission is what it says it is. It's the whole thing.

You know, evangelism without engagement isn't holistic, but engagement with development issues and poverty and medical work and relief work develop without any kind of gospel centered evangelistic intention. That's not holistic either. So I was getting quite frustrated with the direction.

And then Doug Birdsall, who had invited me to come and who at that point had just taken over the leadership as the sort of executive chair of the Lausanne movement, asked me to come for tea the last day or two of the congress. Could, could we have tea together?

So I went thinking, he's probably going to tell me off because I'd been missing quite a lot of the sessions because I just got frustrated. I went back to my hotel room and got on with some work.

And, and so he sat down for tea and he said that he and his whole committee wanted me to take on the role of chairing the theological working group of Lausanne, the theological. Theological working group. And I, I was so taken aback that I, I actually excused myself from the table just a moment.

I need to go to the, the restroom, to the. Back, to the washroom. Because I was saying when I got there, I said, lord, what, you know, what, what you say?

Here am I thinking Lausanne hasn't got any theology anymore, you know, and here I'm now being asked to take on the theology working group. It's almost, you know, be careful what you ask for sort of thing.

And, and so I went back and I laid down a number of sort of conditions that this is a bit of a surprise. And I. Doug knew my theology. He knew the kind of thing I was writing.

I said I would want to do this in a way which tried to get back to something of the John Stott DNA of Lausanne.

I would also want to bring into this group, if we're going to meet regularly and have consultants, I would want to bring in people from the majority world, from Africa, Asia, Latin America people that I know are engaged in really holistic, integrated, evangelical gospel centered mission to let them do the theology and then see what comes. So it took. And then I said, I'll also have to ask my, my employers because I was working for the Langham Partnership. Well, I still am.

And so I needed to get their permission to take this on because I knew it would take a bit of time. And I said, I also need to ask John Stott.

The whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world. What does that mean?

I mean, I mean, I keep in touch, but I'm not really involved at the moment.

This concludes the bonus content of my conversation with Chris Wright. Thank you again for listening and becoming one of our watering partners.

And remember, your faith matters, your work is not in vain and the Lord is still with you every step of the way.