When Ruth Padilla DeBorst realized she would only have 15 minutes to address the topic of justice before a gathering of evangelicals from around the globe, her first step was to pray.
A Latin American theologian, missiologist, and educator, Padilla DeBorst was asked to present at the Fourth Lausanne Congress, which took place in Incheon, South Korea, just outside the nation’s capital of Seoul, between Sept. 22-28. The conference brought together more than 5,000 in-person attendees from more than 200 countries. Her presentation would be one of 11 evening plenary speakers across the week.
“I found out it was the only address in the entire congress, from the plenary stage, that was going to be head-on on justice,” Padilla DeBorst told Sojourners. “So, I felt quite a burden, given what else should be covered in 15 minutes, on such a complex, far-reaching, broad issue.”
As she began writing, she pieced together the narrative of justice from Genesis to the minor prophets and through the gospels. She wanted her audience to understand that “justice is at the very heart of God and should be at the heart of all God’s people are and do.”
Padilla DeBorst then began considering the injustices that she wanted to highlight: poverty, gender inequality, discrimination against disabled people, racism, ecological destruction, and war. She would name specific ills: the racial wealth gap in the U.S., sexual harassment and abuse of women, the Global North dumping waste in the Global South, and Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
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She knew some listeners might disagree on any number of these topics, including her decision to highlight the injustice of Israel’s actions before her widely evangelical audience. But as she told Sojourners after the address, she felt it was important to name the uncritical, unquestioning support that many evangelicals offer to the modern state of Israel, often conflating the nation with the biblical people of Israel.
“I believe that is a justice issue that evangelicals are particularly responsible for and need to reckon with,” she told Sojourners. “Because that allegiance, that commitment, is making people insensitive — to say the least — to the violence that has been perpetrated against Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in Gaza.”
So, in her 12-page speech, she dedicated two sentences to addressing the problem head-on. She criticized “superficial expressions of religious piety, ‘Christianese’ jargon, worship jingles, or colonialist theologies that justify and finance oppression under the guise of some dispensational eschatology.”
Dispensationalism is a movement that teaches biblical literalism, end-times prophecies, and draws direct parallels between Israel in scripture and the modern state of Israel. As the movement took shape in the 19th and 20th centuries alongside the founding of Israel in 1948, it emphasized that the rapture and Jesus’ “second coming” would not happen until Jewish people had returned to the Holy Land.
Later in the speech, she told her audience: “There is no room for indifference toward all who are suffering the scourge of war and violence the world round, the uprooted and beleaguered people of Gaza, the hostages held by both Israel and Hamas and their families, the threatened Palestinians in their own territories, all who are mourning the loss of loved ones.”
Less than 48 hours later, the director of the Fourth Lausanne Congress emailed all attendees, issuing a lengthy apology for Padilla DeBorst’s speech.
The apology
The Lausanne Movement is a global organization that puts on regional gatherings, global congresses, and other networking events. They describe themselves as connecting “influencers and ideas for global mission, with a vision of the gospel for every person, disciple-making churches for every people and place, Christ-like leaders for every church and sector, and kingdom impact in every sphere of society.”
David Bennett, Lausanne’s global associate director, served as director for the Fourth Congress. In his apology to Lausanne attendees, Bennett wrote that he and his team “failed to review the wording of the presentation carefully enough in advance.”
He also noted that plenary speakers didn’t represent an official position of the Lausanne Movement. Though he never named Padilla DeBorst, Bennett offered apologies for two specific portions of Padilla DeBorst’s speech.
“As Congress Director, I would like to offer an apology for a presentation this week which singled out ‘dispensational eschatology’ in a critical tone, implying that it contributed to violence and injustice, and which failed to note that many theologies have been misused and misapplied as justifications for violence,” he wrote. “That same presentation referred to the suffering of the Palestinian people, but did not express comparable empathy for the suffering of Israeli people, nor adequately express concern for many other peoples and nations of the world that are currently in the throes of violent conflict.”
Bennett, through Lausanne spokespeople, declined to interview for this story because of the busyness of the on-going Fourth Congress. He wrote to attendees that he apologized because of the “significant pain and offense experienced at this Congress from those in dispensational theological contexts, those who are Jews, and those engaged in ministries to Jews and/or in Israel.”
By the end of the conference, Lausanne also sent an email publishing Padilla DeBorst’s open-letter response to the apology.
Behind the scenes at Lausanne
Before the emailed apology, Bennett and Padilla DeBorst spoke twice: once briefly, and once alongside Dan Sered, chief operating officer for the organization Jews for Jesus. Jews for Jesus is a nonprofit organization with 280 staff members globally. The organization describes itself as “made up primarily of Jewish people [who] all believe Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah our prophets foretold.”
Bennett, Sered, and Padilla DeBorst spoke the day after her speech. Sered has been heavily involved with Lausanne. He was plenary speaker alongside Palestinian theologian Shadia Qubti at the Third Lausanne Congress in 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa; is president of the of the Lausanne consultation on Jewish evangelism; and is a Lausanne catalyst for Jewish evangelism.
Sered recalled that they opened and closed the 90-minute conversation with prayer. He told Sojourners that he highly respects Padilla DeBorst as a scholar and as a “sister in the Lord.” He emphasized that they agreed on many fronts in their conversation, including on justice's centrality to the gospel, and that there were some areas where the two “agreed to disagree.”
But Sered, who was raised in the U.S. and in Israel and lived in Israel from 2000-2020, said Padilla DeBorst’s speech did not offer balance and show “both sides” of Israel’s war with Hamas.
“What I found in Ruth’s talk was that she was just giving one extreme side of the story. Which doesn’t really reflect the whole truth and the whole story,” he told Sojourners. “It wasn’t done in the spirit of Lausanne.”
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In an interview with Sojourners, Sered echoed Bennett’s apology, claiming that Padilla DeBorst “just mentioned the Palestinians as if they’re the only ones and there needs to be more inclusiveness there.”
While she did not name other specific scenarios, in the sentence addressing Gaza, Padilla DeBorst did mention “all who are suffering the scourge of war and violence the world round.”
When asked what Padilla DeBorst should have said instead, Sered said that a plain reading of Padilla DeBorst’s speech would “assume that Israel are the perpetrators, and the Palestinians are the victims.”
“The reality is, Hamas are the ones who are the main perpetrators of all this conflict … But she doesn’t really mention Hamas there so much,” Sered told Sojourners.
According to recent reporting, since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Oct. 7, more than 1,100 Israelis have been killed and nearly 9,000 injured; in Gaza, the death toll has surpassed 41,000 people, including 16,000 children. Bennett’s apology said that Padilla DeBorst “did not express comparable empathy for the suffering of Israeli people.” When asked about whether the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis was comparable, Sered said he didn’t know.
“I don’t know what’s comparable. What I do know is that the gospel is the hope of justice for all people,” Sered said. “Is [Palestinian] level suffering 10 while Israel is 4? I don’t think God operates like that. I think God equally is crying and broken hearted over the suffering of all people. I think that it’s equal.”
Sered said he was thankful for Bennett’s apology and accepted it fully.
“I’m so proud to be part of a network — of the Lausanne movement — who doesn’t just talk about humility and reconciliation and repentance, but [whose] leadership will actually exhibit that.”
Jack Sara, a Palestinian minister and president of Bethlehem Bible College, had a different reaction. He told Sojourners that his “heart sunk” when he saw David Bennett’s apology email.
“David’s apology comes like a nail to a coffin that many evangelicals and [especially] Lausanne had buried the Palestinian Christian voice and plight for just peace in our area,” he told Sojourners via email. “They stabbed the Evangelical church in the back by not hearing them, avoiding them & silencing out voices.”
From his perspective, Padilla DeBorst received warm applause and many handshakes for her presentation. He felt that she was clear in her statements that she wanted to see “peace in the Holy Land … that the Israeli hostages will be back to their families and the innocent Palestinians who were detained by the Israeli army will be released.”
While he was dismayed by the apology and wrote that he didn’t “believe at all that Lausanne has any commitment to real justice globally as an organization,” he also encountered deep encouragement at the conference.
“[A]nywhere I went in the conference, the level of support, solidarity, holy anger was high, people assured us of prayers,” Sara wrote.
Comparing Padilla DeBorst’s words with criticism
Sered and Bennett both claimed that Padilla DeBorst’s comments singled out dispensationalist eschatology.
“We all disagree on eschatology, but again, what she does is she just picks one form of theology, she says, ‘Hey, that perpetrates violence,’ as if it’s the theology that causes the violence,” Sered said.
But Padilla DeBorst’s speech only criticized “colonialist theologies that justify and finance oppression under the guise of some dispensational eschatology.”
When asked about Padilla DeBorst’s specification of “under the guise” and the mismatch between that and Lausanne’s apology, Michael du Toit, director of communications and content for Lausanne Movement, told Sojourners that listeners in the plenary hall may not have had the time to key-in on the difference.
“People listening to a talk in a plenary hall remember things differently to reading a script afterwards,” he told Sojourners. “So, not every word is heard, not every word is remembered, not every single piece of information is absorbed in those moments.”
But du Toit also said that Bennett had time to review both Padilla DeBorst’s original manuscript submitted to Lausanne and the transcript of her speech. He also confirmed that Padilla DeBorst did not stray from her manuscript and that the two documents were “largely the same.”
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Lausanne is releasing the video and transcript of all plenary speakers after the conference and hasn’t delayed releasing Padilla DeBorst’s because of the controversy. Du Toit also said that, speaking from his perspective as communications director, the speed at which Lausanne moved to apologize was “perhaps something to consider.”
“I don’t think we’ve fully processed the learnings of the Congress yet. We continue to debrief, even in these days,” du Toit said. “We continue to want to not just speak about but also live out that humility, integrity, simplicity principles that we often refer back to. Where we do realize we could do better, we will commit to that and continue to learn.”
Du Toit also said that Padilla DeBorst’s comment on “the hostages held by both Israel and Hamas,” were a trigger point for many attendees offended by the idea that Israel is holding hostages. Hamas is still holding an estimated 100 people who they took hostage on Oct. 7. In Israel, hundreds of thousands — including former hostages — have criticized and protested the government’s inability to negotiate a cease-fire and hostage release. Israel also holds thousands of Palestinians in jail without charge or trial, according to the Human Rights Watch.
In her open letter, Padilla DeBorst wrote that she referenced hostages held by Israel in reference to “the fact that the entire territory of Gaza has been held hostage for years, with all its inhabitants suffering in an open air prison.”
The fallout
Intentionally or otherwise, Bennett’s apology brought ample attention to Padilla DeBorst’s speech and the conversation around Gaza and evangelical support for Israel. Dan Sered told Sojourners that he challenged Padilla DeBorst’s description of evangelical support for Israel. When asked if he thought evangelicals in the U.S. were uncritically supportive of Israel, he said his experience was “50/50,” but that he didn’t have data to point to.
Chosen People Ministries, an organization that sponsors Messianic Jewish congregations and supports evangelical outreach to Jews, sponsored a survey of Christian attitudes toward the war in Gaza in early 2024. The survey found that 47 percent of evangelicals in the U.S. said they supported Israel, while only 6 percent said they supported Palestine.
In her open letter to Lausanne, Padilla DeBorst expressed her frustration with the process and sought to reiterate the main points of her presentation.
“Perhaps, I should never have accepted the invitation!” she wrote. “There are so many expressions of injustice in our world, how could anyone thoroughly and responsibly tackle such a deep and broad ranging theme and the complicated scenarios related to it from a biblical and theological standpoint in only 15 minutes?”
She then sought to clarify her remarks about dispensationalist eschatology and about Israel, writing that her reference was “not in any way a blanket dismissal of dispensational theology.”
“For the pain my statement might have caused, I am sorry. What I am naming is the troubling theological rationale sustained by some people to perpetrate injustice against certain other people,” she wrote.
According to du Toit, many congress attendees had asked that Lausanne send out Padilla DeBorst’s open letter, and they sent it once she agreed.
Padilla DeBorst was cognizant of how this event reflects on her. After all, her speech came 50 years after René Padilla, her father, delivered a speech at the First Lausanne Congress. On the occasion of Padilla’s death in 2021, the Lausanne Movement republished his speech, calling it “the speech that shook the world.”
But Padilla DeBorst said she hoped the scenario would instead point toward “what this reveals about the power struggles [and] the interests behind how certain things are permissible or not in evangelical circles.”
“To me, the issue is far beyond me. It has to do with: What does it look like when we live together with difference? What is justice, what is a biblical perspective on justice? That’s first. Second, how do we engage with the realities of our world? Are we just going to spiritualize everything and talk about heaven and talk about our individual salvation, or are we engaging with the issues of the world that are messy? Even though they’re messy, we are called to engage with them as Christians. And third, what do we do with the issue of such blatant support, on the part of evangelicals, for the actions of the modern state of Israel?”
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