Defining Evangelicals

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, who just took the job as managing editor of the World Magazine blog (don’t’ know what that means for EO), is defining evangelical for us.

There was a very interesting 2004 conversation on this topic, conducted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Titled Understanding American Evangelicals: A Conversation with Mark Noll and Jay Tolson, it includes comments by the two principals and questions from selected journalists.

Mark Noll is particularly good and fascinating on the history of evangelicalism. He has a level head in fitting the modern church into the sweep of history.

Noll uses a David Bebbington recipe in identifying the following ingredients of evangelicalism:
(1) conversion, "the belief that lives need to be changed"; (2) the Bible, the "belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages"; (3) activism, the dedication of all believers, including laypeople, to lives of service for God, especially as manifest in evangelism (spreading the good news) and mission (taking the gospel to other societies); and (4) crucicentrism, the conviction that Christ’s death on the Cross (Latin crux) provided the means of reconciliation between a holy God and sinful human beings.

Noll said in the dialogue:

Since the mid-eighteenth century evangelicals have played a significant role in the history of Christianity, especially on the North American continent and wherever else the British or American empire has spread.3 For much of the nineteenth century, white evangelical Protestants constituted the largest and most influential body of religious adherents in the United States (as also in Britain and Canada). Today groups descended from those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements are more visible than they had been for several decades. A majority of those in full-time preparation for the ministry in the Church of Eng-land have, for some years, been trained in evangelical colleges. In Canada, a majority of the Protestants in church on any given Sunday are in evangelical congregations. And throughout the world, Pentecostal and charismatic movements, which trace their lineage to developments within Anglo-American evangelicalism early in the twentieth century, are far and away the fastest-growing segments of world-wide Christianity.

--James Jewell