With origins in Latin American, integral mission has influenced a significant number of Protestants around the world through the Lausanne Movement.
[2] The process of defining integral mission and the journey of its acceptance by significant numbers of Protestants has taken place over a period of just over 40 years.
The Wheaton Declaration confessed that "we [Evangelicals] are guilty of an unscriptural isolation from the world that too often keeps us from honestly facing and coping with its concerns" and the "failure [of the church] to apply scriptural principles to such problems as racism, war, population explosion, poverty, family disintegration, social revolution, and communism.
"[8] By contrast, that same year the World Congress on Evangelization in Berlin continued to emphasise a traditionally Evangelical conception of mission, as articulated by Billy Graham: “if the church went back to its main task of proclaiming the gospel and people converted to Christ, it would have a far greater impact on the social, moral and psychological needs of men than it could achieve through anything else it could possibly do.
A number of declarations which emerged from international evangelical conferences in the ensuing years (some of them organized by the Lausanne Movement and chaired by John Stott) revealed similar concerns for a holistic understanding of mission.
Of critical importance for the development of the theology of integral mission were the various Latin American Congresses on Evangelism (CLADE, their Spanish acronym—Congreso Latinoamericano de Evangelización).