By Gretchen Keiser

Leaders from the charismatic and pentecostal movement in over 40 denominations and fellowships gathered in New Orleans in October to express a unified vision of massive world evangelization for Christ before the end of this century.

Father Tom Forrest, a Redemptorist priest who once headed the international Catholic charismatic renewal office in Rome, noted the celebrations last July 4 honoring the Statue of Liberty. “When that day came, the whole nation was focused on the birth of a statue,” he said. “We almost made it a goddess, referring to it as ‘her’ and Lady Liberty.”

“If we can do that for a 100-year-old statue, what can we do – what must we do, for the 2,000^th birthday of Jesus? We can make sure everyone on earth is thinking of Him. We can present Him a world where the majority of people are Christians,” Father Forrest said.

Some 7,500 leaders from throughout the United States and Canada heard the call from speakers of many denominations to ignite the spread of the Gospel in the last decade of this century. The Congress drew Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, United Methodists, Baptists, Mennonites, United Church of Christ members, Pentecostals, Wesleyan-Holiness representatives, and other denominations.

The Congress looks ahead to a General Congress on the Holy Spirit and World Evangelization to be held July 22-25 in New Orleans. It is expected to draw 70,000 to 90,000 people from the various denominations. Those denominations which normally hold annual charismatic conferences will instead meet in this one ecumenical session in 1987, listening to speakers from their own denominations and attending general interdenominational sessions.

Organizers hope that it will fill the Superdome to capacity. A parade through New Orleans is also planned with music, dancing, flags and banners.

The New Orleans 1987 Congress will be the successor to a similar meeting held in 1977 in Kansas City, Missouri, which attracted 52,000 people, but since then many more denominations have become involved, said Dr. Vinson Synan, who is serving as chairman of the group organizing the Congresses.

Dr. Synan, a national leader in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, said the Congress will be a gathering of “Christians who believe in the baptism in the Holy Spirit and gifts of the Holy Spirit.”

“All these movements share the same experience and yet they are seldom in contact with each other,” he said. The Congresses provide “a lot of cross-fertilization” as leaders come in contact with each other, he said. They also provide an expression of a “widespread longing in the hearts of many Christians” to show respect for the experience and traditions of fellow Christians.

If the 1987 Congress proves to be as large as planners anticipate, it may be the largest ecumenical gathering ever held, Dr. Synan said. This “grass-roots ecumenism” springing from shared Christian experience has been sustained over 15 years by an annual interdenominational retreat held by charismatic leaders since the early 1970s, Dr. Synan said. Although the topic of another interdenominational meeting like Kansas City has come up from time to time, it did not gain real support until now, he said.

Following the October Leaders’ Congress, held from Oct. 8-11 at the Superdome, Dr. Synan said organizers were “ecstatic” over the way in which the sessions unfolded and the spirit that prevailed.

“The incredible response” of people “exceeded everything we had dreamed” could take place, he said.

In July it appeared only about 3,000 would come, he said, but about 7,500 actually registered. A Saturday night rally open to New Orleans attracted over 10,000 people.

Major speakers included Father Forrest, Dr. Paul Yonggi Cho, a convert from Buddhism who is pastor of a Protestant church of 500,000 members in Seoul, Korea, Rev. Everett Fullam, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Darien, Conn., which is noted for its evangelizations, Oral Roberts and John Wimber, an evangelical minister who is teaching around the country on “signs and wonders” and the proclamation of the Gospel. There were also 15 workshops on evangelization with youth, the Third World, through the media, in marriage and on different approaches to healing.

The speakers galvanized participants with talks and prayer sessions that called people to a deep commitment to holiness in their lives, to a fidelity to prayer and action and to an openness to the work of the Holy spirit.

For example, speaking to this ecumenical gathering ranging up in bleachers in one quadrant of the Superdome, Father Forrest said his intention was to make people “uncomfortable” and to challenge them to move forward in holiness. “Any holiness not increasing is a holiness disappearing,” he said. He also said “this world needs saints” more than it needs anything else, including the solutions to gripping world problems and catastrophes. He emphasized a commitment to prayer, a commitment to Christian brothers and sisters which is deep and willing to accept suffering, and an avoidance of “junk” – that which is contrary to holiness.

At the end of his presentation, thousands of people stood and knelt in prayers of repentance and renewed commitment to the demands of Christian faith and love.

Dr. Cho, a diminutive man who pastors the largest Protestant church in the world, provoked emphatic laughter and amazement during his two talks as he spoke of his initial struggling attempts to establish a church in Seoul’s poor, overcrowded and desperate neighborhoods, and then to the extraordinary change that began to take place as he acted in faith and expected the Holy Spirit to work today the same miracles that Jesus worked. He told of his need to pray three to four hours a day in order to meet the difficult problems of this people with the power of the Holy Spirit, rather than with his own limited resources. In Seoul people arise at 4:30 a.m. to pray before beginning the day’s work, Dr. Cho said.

Following the 1987 General Congress, a World Congress is planned for 1990 in Seoul, a meeting that could draw several million together on the topic of evangelization, planners said.

In one of the sessions directed to Catholics, Father John Bertolucci emphasized that Christians are commissioned “to make disciples of all nations.”

“It’s up to us to go out and bring others into a loving relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“The disunity in the Catholic Church and the whole church is a scandal,” he said. “It impedes the work of God. We must be united to get on with the work of winning the world for Jesus.”

“Announcing the Good News of Christ is not only our duty,” he said. “It’s our salvation.”

(Leslie W. Bertucci of the Clarion Herald in New Orleans also contributed to this report.)