What is the Cape Town Commitment?

The Cape Town Commitment (CTC) is a comprehensive document that reflects the proceedings of The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, where over 4,000 Christian leaders from 198 countries gathered in Cape Town, South Africa, to discuss critical issues of the time as they related to the church and evangelization. Written as a roadmap for the Lausanne Movement, the CTC presents a statement of shared Biblical convictions, and calls Christians all over the world to action.

The Cape Town Commitment 2010. Photo by The Lausanne Movement.

The CTC is rooted in the conviction that ‘we must respond in Christian mission to the realities of our own generation.’ It has 2 parts: a confession of faith and a call to action.

Under the point in the confession of faith that covers our love for God’s world, the CTC states that ‘We cannot claim to love God while abusing what belongs to Christ by right of creation, redemption and inheritance. We care for the earth and responsibly use its abundant resources, not according to the rationale of the secular world, but for the Lord’s sake. If Jesus is Lord of all the earth, we cannot separate our relationship to Christ from how we act in relation to the earth’, declaring that ‘creation care is thus a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ’.

Moreover, the Commitment calls for the logical outworking of this love for God’s creation. We ought to ‘repent of our part in the destruction, waste and pollution of the earth’s resources and our collusion in the toxic idolatry of consumerism’, and ‘commit ourselves to urgent and prophetic ecological responsibility’.

You may read a summary of the Cape Town Commitment here. Alternatively, the full document can be accessed here.