Each week someone in the news uses the words “evangelical” or “evangelicalism” as a description, epithet or lament. Often the most visible uses of the term occur when someone who is “in” wants out, as recently with young evangelical celebrities Rob Bell and Rachel Held Evans, or when in an election year some politician is said to be courting “evangelicals.”
As a Baptist with 25 years of experience in the “card-carrying” evangelical world, and as one asked to do a new book (with Isaac Sharp) for Westminster John Knox Press anthologizing the most important “evangelical” ethical voices of the last 70 years, I have both a scholarly and personal interest in clarifying understanding of this term…
Tomorrow I will attend my first board meeting for Sojourners. This new role reflects my own ongoing commitment to evangelical Christianity, 24 years after I joined the staff of Evangelicals for Social Action and first encountered the evangelical world outside of the Baptist South. Both ESA and Sojourners actually predated, and opposed, the Christian Right. Both have always offered a “peace-and-justice” type evangelicalism, and both were among the first evangelical organizations to embrace moral agendas such as peacemaking, urban poverty, gender equality, racial justice and creation care, rooted in a passionate love of Christ and love for those Christ loved. Both embody what I find a compelling Christian vision.