As the articles in this issue of Modern Reformation suggest, evangelicalism is experiencing a change in seasons: former evangelical statesmen are passing from the scene, new evangelicals don't seem to rally around the same issues and ideas as their forefathers, and it's increasingly difficult (if it was ever really possible) to identify clearly what an evangelical is. If you have any warm feelings at all about evangelicalism, you want some answers: Where is evangelicalism going? Who better to turn to for answers than the individuals whose lives and work helped create and shape evangelicalism. Modern Reformation is honored to include the reflections of these evangelical leaders, pastors, and scholars as we seek to understand our own time and the future of the evangelical expression of Christianity.
For cultural reasons and perhaps some providential ones, evangelicalism as a movement is in current eclipse. Numbers are down, certainly in the parishes I know, even the very large ones. I know this as fact, notwithstanding a few nice exceptions, because I spent the last three years criss-crossing the United States as dean/president of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, the evangelical seminary located in Pittsburgh. Sunday after Sunday, I visited churches that were one quarter to half full. Most unsettling were churches where committed evangelical rectors had raised large sums of money to build new sanctuaries or Christian education centers, which were under-populated on Sunday mornings. To be sure, the Episcopal Church has suffered from high-profile "culture wars." But my friends who are evangelicals in other denominations report that culture wars in their settings have brought decreasing attendance almost across the board. We are told that even "megachurches" are down about 15% in numbers, again with exceptions.
The reputation that evangelicals-and I count myself as one-have earned as being "intolerant" and "exclusive," and especially homophobic, seems to have stuck. Many people are convinced that we draw lines and build walls, where they are looking rather for open doors and open minds. The documentary on the homosexual culture wars within U.S. Christianity, entitled "The Bible Tells Me So," is achieving a wide hearing and when you see it, if you are a conservative in faith and morals, you have got to wince. I believe that evangelicals have lost the great culture war of the 1990s and early 2000s, and that we are in a shadowy time of defeat and regrouping.
For myself, regrouping means a period of trying to understand what went wrong. We inherited and then took on a "conflict structure" in Christian experience that was ill suited for times when religious conflict is the opposite of what most people want or say they want, especially seekers. Just at a time when the culture was looking for a word of peace and "a little tenderness"-just when just about everybody was asking, "What's so funny about a little peace, love, and understanding?"-we appeared to give them the opposite. We appeared to give them…we did give them! I gave them, if I may say it personally, the odium theologicum of the Thirty Years War. Our inner divisions, anchored in the passing and extremely contentious issues of the day, paraded to the world the antipode of "what the world needs now." Notice this use of pop-song "standards"-Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, with Otis Redding. The popular tunes of life call for the opposite of what the church has offered. I am myself convicted by the very songs I love.
I believe the answer to our problems is a return to the core of God's grace, the "Old, Old Story of Jesus and His Love," deepened by the Reformation insight of grace in relation to law- though I no longer want to use too much historical language. But Luther especially saw into Paul's teaching and Christ's living with diagnostic brilliant freshness. Luther was, to quote Kierkegaard, a "patient of great importance for Europe." In other words, Luther's grace/law receptor was finely and highly tuned. It gave him a diagnostic allergy to law in its many forms. I wish he were here today. We need people again who are allergic to law as the preached word and go, rather, to the enabling word of Christ's grace, and not just to outsiders but especially to the law-burdened Christian communities we have failed to strengthen and sustain. If I have a "recipe" for these times, it is the gospel of Christ's grace for Christians.
My own denomination, the Episcopal Church, has a pretty hardened relationship with evangelicals. There are few of us left here. And the many who fled the Episcopal Church have gone into vastly differing havens. Interestingly, many former evangelicals who were Episcopalians have become Roman Catholics. And the old stalwarts of English Anglican evangelicalism, whose names were world famous and who leavened the evangelical "lump" from Lahore to Vancouver to Mombasa, are undone by the collapse and multiple splitting of traditional Anglicanism. Anglicanism, as such, which was often a kind of "wax nose"-which is to say, it was whatever you projected upon it, whether "high" or "low," right or left-has little to gain now from evangelicalism, and vice versa, because the curtain has come down on both sides of the relationship. I mean that Anglicanism and evangelicalism are both in collapse.
The word "evangelical" is still a good one, if it means justification by grace through faith. It is still a good word if by it is meant the love of God for sinners, or what Jack Kerouac in a poetic vein called "consanguine partiality/ devoid of conditions, free." I still seek, still seek, to tell the Old, Old Story, which means in practice this: judgment kills, love makes alive. I realize that such a formula is quite "reduced" and could use a lot of enhancement; but we are going to have to begin again, our almost Sisyphean evangelical task now, by putting the core of Christ in simple, simple epigrams. Let's sponsor an evangelical Haiku contest! The prize?: A complete set of the Weimar Edition of the works of Luther.
