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.
Evangelicalism: Just what is that? Because it is a complex reality that different people conceive in different ways and because the area round its edges, so to speak, in which details determine whether a person calls a view evangelical or not is so broad, I need to state my own definition before starting my discussion. So here goes.
Evangelicalism is a form of historic Christianity, embracing both belief (faith) and behavior (life), which has three controlling features. First, it is Bible-based, in the sense that Holy Scripture, received as revelation from God, shapes and resources it. Second, it is mainstream, in the sense of being trinitarian, incarnational, redemptive, and Christ-centered throughout, according to the historic creeds and Reformational confessions. Third, it is doxological, in the sense of valuing and requiring orthodoxy of faith, holiness of life, church health through ongoing repentance, reformation and renewal, evangelism and church planting by all possible means, and energetic worship, individual and corporate, all for the glory of God.
Thus defined, evangelicalism appears as an ideal of which many professed evangelicals fall short, and one to which Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant liberals do not fully assent, since they all believe that evangelicalism's biblical methodology is significantly flawed.
Within the evangelical ranks there is variety, substantive as well as stylistic. Confessional Calvinists and Lutherans, Arminian Methodists, charismatics and Pentecostals (excluding the anti-trinitarian United Pentecostals), Baptists and Salvationists, are all evangelicals of sorts.
Statistics do not show everything, but they tell us something. Here, they tell us that evangelicalism worldwide expanded enormously during the twentieth century. Very roughly: of the world's two-billion-plus professing Christians today, one-billion-plus are Roman Catholics, over a quarter of a billion are Eastern Orthodox, and getting on for half a billion are some kind of evangelicals, most of this growth (from under twenty million when the twentieth century opened) being Pentecostal in character. In the Old West, as we may call it (North America, Britain, Australasia), the overall numbers of professing Christians have shrunk, but evangelical numbers have grown, steadily if not spectacularly. Evangelical scholars, publishing houses, literature, both popular and academic, learned societies, seminaries, and educational institutes abound today, and evangelical schools are full while liberal schools stand half empty. And though evangelical evangelism goes slowly in the Old West, there are parts of Africa and Asia where it races ahead like wildfire.
Against these upbeat facts must however be set a debit balance.
It has often been said that Christianity in North America is 3,000 miles wide and half an inch deep. Something similar is true, by all accounts, in Africa and Asia, and (I can testify to this) in Britain also. Worshippers in evangelical churches, from the very young to the very old, and particularly the youth and the twenty- and thirty-somethings, know far less about the Bible and the faith than one would hope and than they themselves need to know for holy living. This is because the teaching mode of Christian communication is out of fashion, and all the emphasis in sermons and small groups is laid on experience in its various aspects. The result is a pietist form of piety, ardent and emotional, in which realizing the reality of fellowship with the Father and the Son is central while living one's life with Spirit-given wisdom and discernment is neglected both as a topic and as a task. In the Western world in particular, where Christianity is marginalized and secular culture dismisses it as an ideological has-been, where daily we rub shoulders with persons of other faiths and of no faith, and where within the older Protestant churches tolerating the intolerable is advocated as a requirement of justice, versions of Christianity that care more for experiences of life than for principles of truth will neither strengthen churches nor glorify God.
The well-being of Christianity worldwide for this twenty-first century directly depends, I am convinced, on the recovery of what has historically been called catechesis-that is, the ministry of systematically teaching people in and coming into our churches the sinew-truths that Christians live by, and the faithful, practical, consistent way for Christians to live by them. During the past three centuries, catechesis as defined has shrunk, even in evangelical churches, from an all-age project to instruction for children and in some cases has vanished altogether. As one who for half a century has been attempting an essentially catechetical ministry by voice and pen, I long for the day when in all our churches systematic catechesis will come back into its own.
As an Anglican minister, I glow as I recall the time-honored Anglican dictum: "There are three priorities in pastoral ministry: the first is, teach; the second is, teach; and the third is, teach." And I long that out of Anglicanism's current inner upheaval may come the needed squeezing out of liberal leadership in the Old West and a wholesale realignment in the evangelical mainstream path that the Anglican Reformers long ago defined for us. It is idle at the time of writing to speculate; one can only pray and hope. But I cannot get it out of my mind that if Anglicanism-which has in its heritage such catechetical pioneers as Alexander Nowell, the pioneer Puritans and the Carolines, John Wesley, Hannah More, Henry Martyn, J. C. Ryle, and catechetical Bible expositor John Stott-can recover its sense of direction, it might under God become, catechetically speaking, the leader of the pack. Well, we shall have to wait and see.
