An international conference of Evangelical Christians has concluded a week-long meeting in the Netherlands with a statement calling for the Christian church as a whole to “affirm the urgency of Jewish evangelism and to take the whole Gospel to Jewish people everywhere.”
The group, which met Aug. 5 to 9 in the Dutch city of Utrecht, urged Jews to recognize “Yeshua of Nazareth” during the current period of messianic revival, and said, in a closing statement, “We lament the widespread reluctance to share the Gospel with Jewish people.”
The group, the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism, also issued a statement decrying anti-Semitism.
The Lausanne Consultation is composed of Hebrew Christian churches, including Jews for Jesus, Christian Evangelical churches that have a special mission to convert Jews, and Jews who have converted to Christianity.
About 150 members from five continents attended the conference, according to Susan Perlman, a member of the group’s international coordinating committee and information officer for Jews for Jesus, which is based in San Francisco.
The Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism meets every three years internationally, and regionally once a year, according to Perlman.
The danger of the group “is not in the conference, which is basically the same people getting together time after time, but in the globalization of these Hebrew Christian groups,” explained Rabbi A. James Rudin, national director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee in New York.
Some of those who participated in the meeting here were from Eastern Europe, where they often operate anonymously. At least one organization, called Christian Care East West, offers to help Eastern European Jews who want to leave for the West.
Signs of these groups’ future progress missionizing Jews is “somewhat ominous,” especially in Eastern Europe, with “its long and bitter history of anti-Semitism,” Rudin said.
Rabbi Leon Klenicki, director of interfaith affairs for the Anti-Defamation League in New York, said that in light of recent progress in Jewish-Christian dialogue, the group’s attitude toward Jews “goes back to the Middle Ages.”
(JTA staff writer Debra Nussbaum Cohen in New York contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
