It has been debating for a long history of time that two circles of mission theology were involved: missionary circle of evangelicals and that of ecumenicals. Generally speaking, evangelicals stress texts, “the Bible,” and ecumenicals do contexts, “the Situation.”The Edinburgh World Missionary Conference(WEF) has been considered to be as the first modern ecumenical conference as well as evangelical one, and it was opened for the purpose of promoting word evangelization. It's propaganda was “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” and the optimistic opinions and hopes for the world evangelization had been prevailed as triumphant marching soldiers.
However, the world situations had been worsen after the conference: two times of world war, Russian and Chinese Communist Revolution, Korean war ets. Those world shocking events and ideologies had caused cold war and many other problems both imperial western countries and the third-world. Ecumenicals has been responded quickly from the issues of social, political, economical, developmental, and human problems through many ecumenical conferences throughout modern history of time, which means it has been oriented to outside issues of the church. The ‘Missio Dei’ theology of mission has been providing its theological foundation. This, therefore, has accelerated ecumenical mission theology as to be the one of the world socio-politico-economical orientation. That kind of context-oriented theology made a big gaps and differences between evangelical mission theology and ecumenical one, because evangelicals stress text-oriented theology. In that sense both theologies have their own axis of extremity.
The ecumenical mission theology has become to stress social responsibilities. When ecumenicals stress those world issues, evangelicals reacted agitatedly. However, since after the theology of Lausanne Conference of World Evangelization (LCWE), both the gospel and social responsibility in the mission were emphasized. The ecumenicals, at last, made a great influence to evangelicals. Nevertheless, since the ‘primacy of evangelism’ was also emphasized in Lausanne Covenant, the ecumenicals, on the contrary, has been recognized the importance of the gospel. Evangelicals, at last, made a big influence to ecumenicals as well.
The ‘Missio Dei’ theology has been the mission theology of ecumenicals, which has its goal to have ‘shalom’ both with God and with neighbors, and which also tresses God’s direct action to the world instead of His indirect action to the world through churches. This stressing point of ‘Missio Dei’ theology is far different from that of traditional evangelical theology which stresses God’s indirect action through His churches. Nevertheless, after Lausanne Conference, evangelicals seems to be recognized the importance of God’s general grace to the world, which was mainly stressed by ecumenicals as 'shalom.' This means these two theologies and circles of theologians has been interacted each other, and, at least, there has been the possibility of dialogues and interactions between two groups. According to Lausanne Conference, evangelicals also use 'Missio Dei' in their mission theology as the term of evangelical meaning of mission theology.