I suspect that of all church congresses, evangelical or not, at any time in history, it most closely approximates the demographic reality of Christian populations around the world. In that sense, at least, Cape Town 2010 is historic.

When executive chair Doug Birdsall invited Malaysian Methodist bishop Hwa Yung to work with him in planning Cape Town 2010, Hwa Yung had one question. “Which kind of conference do you want to have? A normal kind of congress dominated by old western leaders? Or one that represents what the church is today?”

Cape Town 2010 was designed to represent the global evangelical church, but the devil is in the details. I spent some of the conference’s third day finding out those details.

How did 4,000 church leaders get invited? Who chose them? Who decided how many to invite from the US, or from Burundi, or from China? And how? Here’s the short version of what I learned.

The process started with a selection committee, chosen from the Lausanne network including one representative from each of 12 regions globally. That committee chose a selection director for each of 200 countries…

How many? That depended on the number of evangelical Christians that resided in each country, based mainly on statistics from Operation World. The number of delegates was proportional to that population, though additional delegates could be added if the country had a vigorous foreign mission profile and/or a vital and fast-growing church.

Read More: http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2010/10/representing_th.html