WHY EVANGELICALISM IS FAILING TO EVANGELISE

'I often wonder whether the younger "None" generation (meaning they mark "None" when asked on forms whether they belong to any religious denomination or group or espouse a particular creed), for whom the old wineskin of how church is done may no longer seem relevant, is now limited to experiencing God authentically primarily through culture and nature, two areas that evangelicalism in the United Sates has abandoned in order to "evangelize" the world.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, p.5

EVERYONE INTERPRETS

'Wrong interpretation is dangerous, and we must strive to avoid it. But lack of awareness that one is interpreting and that one interprets in community, within a tradition, is more dangerous. It is a danger to which evangelicals - with all their innovations and individualism - are particularly prone.'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination, p.255.

THE EVANGELICAL CRISIS OF CREDIBILITY

'If the Reformation was a crisis of authority - one that rightly gave the highest authority to the Bible rather than the priests - then this reckoning (or perhaps even a new reformation) is one of credibility: Do we who profess to believe in the authority of the Word present ourselves as credible witnesses of that Way, Truth, and that Life?'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination, p.231.

EVANGELICALISM & IMPERIALISM

'...the spread of the gospel during the missionary age is so intertwined with the West's expansion through imperialism that it is almost impossible to imagine an evangelical movement that is not an empire-building enterprise, not a movement rooted in political and cultural domination, and not propagated by the power of money, business, and capitalism rather than the power of the Holy Spirit. (It is almost, but not quite, impossible to imagine such a movement; it is possible because such a movement is there in Scripture in the early church.'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination, p.200.

THE POWER OF METAPHOR

'Metaphors are hard.

To discover similarities, to find connections once unseen, comprises some of the holiest work we can do as human beings, for it is a work of reconciliation. But this truth also entails the obverse: making wrong connections can be as dangerous as attaching the wrong cable clamp to the wrong battery terminal.'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, p.49. 

WHY I'M AN EVANGELICAL

'My sincerely held belief as an evangelical is that it is my very loyalty to Christ which requires me to hold evangelical views.'

John Stott, But I Say To You..., p.202.

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTIAN UNITY

'We frequently approach Christian unity as something that follows from what we are or what we do: we see Christian unity as constituted by doctrinal agreement or by moral alignment. We consider there to be no meaningful between someone who takes a different position on this or that doctrinal issue or this or that moral position. The way we approach evangelical ethics often reflects this. Even if we have a good emphasis on unity, it is often understood as an imperative modeled on Jesus' willingness to love the other, which still needs a move toward agreement by dialogue. But proper reflection on the sacraments confounds this: for Paul, our unity is a function of our union with Christ, which is a union with the one God, whose oneness becomes ours. Our attempts to draw a circle around those who think like us is fundamentally wrongheaded and, frankly, sinful. Now, this is not to say that it is wrong to pursue moral and theological agreement in the truth; it is important to do so, but we do it to bring the highest glory to God, not to define who is in and who is out. I am united to the believer whose doctrine is dreadful and to those whose life I find abhorrent; it is precisely because they share in Christ's body that I am compelled to speak to both problems, but to do so in brotherly love and affirmation. For Paul, the sine qua non of inclusion seems to be limited to the confession "Jesus is Lord," which can be made only by the acting presence of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor.12:3).'

Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ, p.70.

CHEAP WORDS?

'Although we throw the word "sin" around easily and often, especially within evangelicalism, we do not take seriously enough the extent to which it will afflict and subvert our piety - both our practice and our doctrine - if it is not always challenged by the gospel.'
Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ, p.7.

OUT OF TUNE EVANGELICALISM?

'For various historical reasons - good reasons, at that - evangelicals from diverse backgrounds have committed themselves collectively to defending certain truths in the face of their critics. But while we have maintained these notes carefully and sounded them loudly, gaining a sense along the way of what we hold in common that is distinctively "evangelical," we have allowed other truths to fall into silence. Our ability to sound those other notes where appropriate has been lost. At some point, we must ask ourselves whether we are still playing the original tune or are, perhaps without recognizing it, playing something else, something different. Have we sounded certain good notes so loudly and exclusively that they have come to constitute a different melody? Have we lost so much from our theological scales that what we proclaim is, in fact, a different gospel, much as Paul speaks of somethings as a "different gospel" in Gal.3:16?'

Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ: Paul's Gospel and Christian Moral Identity, p.5.

WHY PEOPLE WALK AWAY FROM CHURCH

'In the beautiful world, there is a point in which many realise that while their hip and fantastic church may offer them opportunities to engage in justice projects, a life group that meets for community and meal at the pub, and digestible life advice, they can leave the church and find similar opportunities. The kicker is that you can still enjoy all of this while ditching the biblical prohibitions on sex, or having to measure up to the limitations of biblical holiness, or the commitments of creedal Christian community. If you still want to keep your sneaker toe in the Christian camp, no problem. Just pick up a book or subscribe to that podcast by a "progressive" Christian author who will reassure you that you can still be a Christian while not getting too stressed about sex or Scripture or going to church.' 

Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church, p.99. 

THE IMPLICIT PROSPERITY GOSPEL

'If, in the explicit prosperity gospel, it is unthinkable that God would withold from His faithful followers cash, cars, and mansions, in the implicit prosperity gospel of many, shaped by a culture that must elevate sex beyond its station in God's created order, we cannot imagine that God would ask of some celibacy.'

Mark Sayers, Disappearning Church, p.82.  

FUNCTIONING AS AN EVANGELICAL

'For me, the only way to be a properly functioning evangelical is to keep arguing about what it means to be an evangelical.' 

Richard J Mouw, Restless Faith, p.174. 

DISMISSING EVANGELICALS

'"One of the Evangelical clergy, a disciple of Venn," says the critic from his bird's eye station. "Not a remarkable specimen; the anatomy and habits of his species have been determined long ago."

Yet, surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him - which gives us a fine ear for the heart-impulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstances and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms the human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings.' 

George Eliot, 'Janet's Repentance' in Scenes of Clerical Life, p.322. 

MAKE SURE YOU ARE LISTENING TO THE ORIGINAL TUNE

'Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.' 

George Eliot, 'Janet's Repentance' in Scenes of Clerical Life, p.319. 

EVANGELICALISM & CONSUMERISM

'The evangelical quest for a particular emotional experience in worship and the capitalistic quest for anonymous, cheap canned goods have something in common. Both are mostly concerned with what I can get for myself as as an individual consumer. 

But the economy of the Eucharist call me to a life of self-emptying worship.' 

Tish Harrison Warren, Life of the Ordinary, p.72. 

EVANGELICAL INDIVIDUALISM

'The beginning of the evangelical conversion story centers on the experience of a private and isolated decision to follow Christ. This focus on a privatized spirituality continues as the evangelical sub-culture stresses how our evangelical identity is found in "quiet times," or our commitment to private prayer and Bible reading. The isolated experience tends to be the high point for evangelical spirituality. In fact, evangelical theologians and pastors have encouraged, exhorted, and entreated Christians to depend on God alone as their helper, deliverer, burden bearer, refuge, strength, encourager, friend, and counselor. Scores of books have been written on the virtue and benefit of private, isolated, withdrawn, personal prayer. With an inordinate emphasis on the individual, it is rare to find an evangelical who values formation from paired friendship love and community.'  

Dan Brennan, Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, p.29. 

THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH

'Yes, we face difficult times, every generation of the church does. But we also face unprecedented opportunities, as cultural Christianity falls all around us. Many of our neighbors around us will burned over by the unkept, and unkeepable, promises of the sexual revolution and of Faustian individualism. Short term, these things will ravage communities and families and churches. But long-term, they will leave people wanting. And so we need to be ready for those who -like the woman at the well in Samaria - need to hear of living water that alone can satisfy. We must labor to preserve something ancient, something ever new, not just for us, and not just for our children, but for our future brothers and sisters in Christ, many of whom hate us right now. Many of them may one day lead us by the power of the Spirit that calls to life that which was dead. In that, we are no different from any other era.' 

Russell Moore, Onward, p.216. 

ETHICS TODAY

'One of the ironies in the story of Western theology during my lifetime has been the way in which the"liberal" tradition, which used to pride itself above all on clear, rational thinking, has quietly been taken over by emotivism, not least in the area of ethics. Meanwhile, the "conservative" tradition, which used to pride itself on carefully articulated ethical as well as doctrinal stances, has often been so worried about the danger of "work-righteousness" that it has turned a blind eye to the nature of moral understanding and effort upon which Paul is doing his best to insist, and has effectively ruled out virtue before it begins, lest people should suppose themselves to be contributing to their own salvation. No wonder that, when we try to debate key issues, we find ourselves in a dialogue of the deaf.' 

Tom Wright, Virtue Reborn, p.138.  

EVANGELICAL INDIVIDUALISM

'I noted earlier the evangelical declaration that "it is well with my soul," and insisted that this is an important and profoundly expression of Christian assurance. But it is not enough. It is a central confession, but it is a central confession; it is not a full expression of Christian assurance. The God who declares here and now that it is "well" with my soul is the same creating Lord who once looked at the whole world he had made and proclaimed, "This is good." This God wants once again to say that things are "well" with his entire creation - and he will someday do so when he announces: "Behold, I make all things new...It is done! I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end'" (Rev.21:5-6). "It is well with my soul" is only a first step, an initial fruit of God's redeeming activity. We must share in God's restless yearning for the renewal of the cosmos.' 

Richard J Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In, p.110. 

EVANGELICALISM

'For Evangelicalism to survive, it has to put people at risk to need one another, to make them vulnerable. That means they've got to risk their children. But to survive, we need to want to produce people that are as dysfunctional as the world in which we find ourselves. People have got to give their children to that process as well. They've got to be willing to let them engage in the kind of work that doesn't look as though it's going to be safe. This is just a kind of bottom line for reclaiming basic habits of vulnerability through which we discover our need for one another. Evangelicalism puts far too much emphasis upon belief rather than creating communities of vulnerability.'

Stanley Hauerwas in Luke Bretherton and Russell Rook, Living Out Loud: Conversations about virtue, ethics, and evangelicalism, p.8.