CAPE TOWN. Two outstanding U.S. pastor/authors spoke at Cape Town 2010 yesterday: John Piper in the morning and Tim Keller in the evening.

Piper is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Keller pastors the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York. Both are prolific authors who are significantly impacting today’s evangelical church. Both of them were used to convey vital messages to the evangelical gathering of believers from 198 countries.

During a rich Bible study on an even richer passage, Ephesians 3, Piper observed that there are two streams represented at the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. One stream is that when the Gospel takes root, it compels us to address human suffering. The other is that when the Gospel takes root, it awakens us to eternal suffering.

Piper asked, “Could Lausanne say … could the global church say that for Christ’s sake, we care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering?”

“I don’t want you to choose,” he added. “Christ is calling us to pull these together.”

Cities was, not surprisingly, the theme of Keller’s message. “If we want human life to be shaped by God, we have to go to the cities,” he said.

Stating that eight million people are moving to cities somewhere in the world every two months, he declared, “If you love what God loves, you must go to the city.” Cities are where the church will reach the younger generation, the unreached people groups, and the poor, Keller said.

Keller spoke of how God called Jonah to go the city of Nineveh and how Abraham pleaded with God on behalf of the city of Sodom (Genesis 18). He concluded his talk on reaching cities with “Let’s go!”