A Conversation with Young Evangelicals

“The Young Evangelicals” has been the newest phrase to emerge on the theological landscape this past year. Originally used in a book of the same title by Richard Quebedeaux [reviewed, Post American, June-July, 1974], the new designation has generated much discussion and controversy especially in relation to “establishment evangelicalism.” While much of the dialogue has been good and helpful, it has tended to focus on the “positions” of the young evangelicals rather than on the people themselves, who are the most significant part of the new evangelical consciousness.

Many of these “young evangelicals” attended the recent Thanksgiving Conference on Evangelical Social Action in Chicago. The Post American hosted a conversational interview between a number of the young evangelicals to try and get at the people behind the positions: who we are, what are our most basic commitments, what are our deepest struggles and questions, how we perceive ourselves, our lifestyle and our theology, how we look at the future.

Those involved in the discussion included men and women with a range of vocations, concerns and life-situations; most are members of communities, support groups, churches; some work and study in established institutions, and some have created their own. Most have some sort of evangelical background or tradition.

The group included: John and Judy Alexander, both writers who raise two children in Philadelphia while putting out The Other Side; Donald W. Dayton, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago and author of the current Post American series, “Recovering A Heritage;” Lucille Sider Dayton, on the staff of Chicago’s Urban Life Center and active in the feminist movement; Lane Dennis, a writer and publisher; Roger Dewey, the director of Evangelical Committee on Urban Ministries in Boston; Sharon Gallagher, editor of Right On in Berkeley and also an active feminist; Nancy Hardesty, graduate student and co-author of All We're Meant to Be; Karin Michaelson, a former missionary in Japan, now a theological student and part of the Church of the Savior; Wes Michaelson, aide to Senator Mark O. Hatfield and active member of Church of the Savior and executive director of the Coalition on Budget Priorities in Washington; Stephen Mott, professor of social ethics at Gordon-Conwell Divinity School; Wyn and Ron Potter, on staff at the Douglas-Tubman Center in Chicago and active in the black community; Richard Quebedeaux, author of The Young Evangelicals; Ron Sider, Dean of the Philadelphia Campus of Messiah College; Dick Taylor, author, activist, and member of the Philadelphia Life Center; Merold Westphal, professor of philosophy at the State University of New York; and Jim Wallis, editor of the Post American.

Jim Wallis: A charge often leveled against young evangelicals is that they are just another example of the church becoming further secularized. Is this merely new forms of political and social action that proceed from a spiritual base which is eroding all the time, or is there a real renewal of the church going on--a renewal of our own lives, of our own spiritual sensitivity, and of the church itself?

Is our problem just going to be choosing among all the projects that we need to be involved in, or is there a new engagement with the social order because of our biblical faith and a deepening of our own Christian lives? Are we finding a real deepening experience of Christ within us and among us, and a fresh outpouring of the Spirit?

Reuben McCornack: For me as a professional social activist, the hardest struggle I’ve ever faced is trying to discover that dimension of life in community which deepens myself spiritually. Over the last year I have been on a rather intense inner journey out of which hopefully will come a more loving and better-informed social action. Something that is missing in many communities is the effort to go inward to that quiet center of contemplation and prayer out of which comes the movement of the Spirit in the world.

Lucille Sider Dayton: The most important thing that I am struggling with is learning how to be silent and to pray. I grew up praying because I had to. Since it wasn’t very meaningful to me, I didn’t pray for quite a long time. Now I am discovering the need to pray, and I’m discovering the Spirit working within me in whole new ways that I never dreamed possible.

Richard Taylor: I come from a liberal Quaker background. In my evolution to an evangelical point of view, one of my concerns is a rediscovery of being guided by the Spirit in what we do. This was my first evangelical conference, and I sensed an intellectual approach to the issues that I am very familiar with in my liberal Quaker circles. As we develop a biblical social concern, I am wondering if there may not be some kind of valuable interchange with the charismatic movement and what they are learning about the work of the Spirit. In the process they might learn a lot from us too about biblical social concern.

Wes Michaelson: I am struck by what Lucille and Dick have just said. I sometimes wonder how much going on in an evangelical conference like this is really just out of the head, and how much is spiritual. Autobiographically, when I went to Princeton Seminary for a year, it was one of the greatest years for me academically, intellectually, theologically. But as I look back, it was really a void spiritually. Inwardly I had lost, in large measure, the sense of the presence of Christ. Let’s be blunt. I think that’s typical of many people who go on this journey from an evangelical or fundamentalistic background. The language, the terminology, so many things so totally turn one off. We still want to put our roots down there, but the things that turn us on are social action things. We identify ourselves with evangelicals. We don’t go to the extent of a lot of our other friends, and simply change molds completely and reject it all. But yet, there is still that inner spiritual void behind all of our investment in social action. For me, even my initial motivation that led into my work, I think, was partly fascination with the political to the neglect of the inward and the personal.

In my own experience this has really been changed, in large measure through the community I became involved with, the Church of the Savior. Now I think I am really at a totally different place. But I had to look to other places other than my evangelical tradition for making the inner life, the spiritual life, the presence of Christ, really vital. I found it primarily through a Catholic tradition, through that kind of development of spirituality in the monastic tradition, and through my own church.

My feeling is that we have to find ways of really revitalizing our own experience of Christ. For many of us that is very hard to do using the old baggage we grew up with. But the danger is in neglecting and turning from and going into all of our various causes and commitments without anything. If we are truly evangelical, what we do must come out of our own inner spiritual life, and we have to find whatever things help us most in our own situation to revitalize our own experience of Christ. In large part that’s going to come through the communities that we participate in, because it’s probably impossible to do without the discipline, support, and nurture of community.

Stephen Mott: Let me suggest that there are two different directions from which we are coming into our present beliefs. I come from a background similar to Wes. I was raised in fundamentalism and went through the evangelical educational institutions. The struggles that I went through have been very similar to those he has described. Those who are coming into this position from a more liberal position, or from a fresh conversion experience in the university, haven’t had to face that type of struggle in the way that we had. Those spiritual fires have probably been burning more steadily and they haven’t had to fan them or be concerned about them the same way.

Richard Quebedeaux: I was raised in fundamentalism, educated in liberalism, and found both unsatisfactory. The book I wrote is primarily a spiritual autobiography and represents the result of years of painful thinking and relating to find the gospel, essentially. I suppose that in finding the gospel I discovered the big cleavage in the church. We talk a lot today about the body of Christ and community, yet so often we are only talking about our own communities. We who call ourselves evangelicals, or who are evangelicals but don’t call ourselves such, are really people unto ourselves. Those who are, unfortunately for some of us, not evangelicals also have their own communities. My big passion and concern is to build bridges between those two larger theological communities.

Lane Dennis: My primary concern is the nature of our relationship with American culture, and particularly technological society. I am concerned with what form that relationship should take, and what criteria we should use for our relationship with technological society. It is quite apparent that technology can be both extremely dehumanizing and very liberating. I am concerned from a theological point of view just what human wholeness means, and how our biblical understanding of that relates to how we live in relation to technological society. On a practical level, I think that touches us every day. There is no way that we can escape being involved with both the dehumanizing and the liberating aspects of our society. Some of the things my wife and I have done over the past few years is to try to live as simply and as independently as possible from modern technology.

Sharon Gallagher: I come from a background where the “spiritual” was set up as a category separate from most of “real” life. Coming into an awareness of the cultural and political dimensions of the gospel made my spiritual life more meaningful and intense.

Things that were clichés have come to have real power, because now they’re related to life. I guess it’s the whole idea that “faith without works is dead.” But I also tend to be suspicious of an over-spiritualization of things. Too often people use their spirituality as a cop-out from any responsibility to act or even think and question things. In reacting to that I’m aware that I can become too action- or project-oriented.

Merold Westphal: I think what I have found is that the basic concepts of the Sunday School faith I was brought up with keep coming back to me newer and fresher and keep getting more and more indispensable: the meaning of sin, the meaning of forgiveness, the blessed hope, the need for prayer, the indispensability of the scriptures, not simply as a formal, mechanical guide to thinking, but as a living source of personal renewal.

Nancy Hardesty: In the same old clichés?

Merold Westphal: No. Sometimes the old clichés say it just right but I still can’t say them, because I learned to say them inauthentically. And so I stutter and stammer to find some way of my own which isn’t as good. But it is clear to me that what is happening to me is what I was taught in Sunday School.

Don Dayton: I’m not sure I share that same experience. I have quite the opposite reaction in that I find my present faith to be fundamentally different from my Sunday school faith, not as a repudiation of what I was taught, but as a discovery of Christian faith that was not made clear to me then. For instance, I have a fundamentally different concept of what sin is, but I have a profounder understanding of the depth of human sin and the appropriateness of that as a concept with which to think about human life. I have fundamentally different ways of thinking about Christ and his work and what we are to be about in the world in response to that. Now, I find my ways to be biblical ways which I was not able to come to before because they were obscured by different, sometimes wrong ways of stating those things. Now are we saying the same thing, or are we saying something quite different?

Merold Westphal: No, we’re quite clearly saying the same thing. Partly because of obscurity at some points and just immaturity at others, there was a lack of seeing things as I see them now. But at the same time I recognize that it’s the same faith. It was given to me incompletely, sometimes truncatedly, and sometimes obscurely, and sometimes over-dogmatically; yet the reality and basic structure of it seems to me to be the same.

Don Dayton: Was the immaturity you speak of because we were in seventh grade, or were there basic immaturities in the evangelical faith that we knew? That’s the kind of question that would interest me. Is there a growing maturity in the understanding of the faith in addition to a deeper apprehension of the personal experience? What is the significance of that deeper understanding of the Christian faith? And how does it effect which people we relate to and how?

Merold Westphal: Biographically, what it means for me is that it is very hard for my parents to believe that I am really a Christian. They do not see the identity between the faith that they gave me and the faith I now have, and that is very, very difficult
to live with.

Wyn Potter: I find it difficult to accept the view of the evangelical faith of our past as being simply immature, and even as being basically on the level of belief. I repudiate that past as being antithetical to what the scripture and the gospel is all about. I went through a period where I had to repudiate that faith in such a way that I thought that I as a person was going to go to hell, because I could not accept this gospel any longer. Christians were telling me that Christ was not concerned about the struggle of black people, and this was during the civil rights struggle of the ’60s. If that was Christ, I couldn’t accept him. I went through tortuous months before I came to realize what the gospel was all about.

Ron Potter: Evangelicalism to me is a combination of biblical orthodoxy and white American middle-class culture. Unlike most black Christians, I adopted white American evangelicalism hook, line, and sinker just a few months after my conversion. Ever since that time I have been trying to find the gospel. That is a struggle most black Christians do not have to deal with, because most have not gone through the filtering process of evangelical Christianity in the white sense of the word. The gut question that was raised for me was, what does your evangelical theology have to say to the “wretched of the earth,” specifically the “wretched of the earth” in America, more specifically, black folk. I have since thrown out that white evangelicalism. The question that I am presently grappling with as a black Christian is what to replace it with. How do you differentiate what it means to be biblical from what it means to be “evangelical”? Just where that difference lies is my struggle.

John Alexander: It is not at all clear to me that what my past represents is Christian. I don’t want to stand up and put my finger in the air and say all those people are going to hell, or something like that. I’m not prepared to make that kind of judgment. But it’s just not at all clear to me that a gospel that doesn’t have a basic and fundamental compassion and sensitivity to people is in fact the Christian gospel. And I believe in an awful lot of cases it just wasn’t there.

Jim Walls: It sounds like everyone agrees that what’s happening to us is a deepening of our biblical faith, rather than a moving away from that stance. Are there practical ways that each of us, being influenced by secular currents, movements and ties, have found that biblical world-life view seriously upsetting to us in our own assumptions and values as much as we use it to upset others who are more established in their views? That’s a very important question in dealing with the charge that we have taken a secular agenda to biblical faith. Does our biblical commitment boomerang around to us and in practical ways shake us up?

John Alexander: In the first place I don’t think we need to be too embarrassed about some of our agenda being set by the world. This is where we live. When problems arise in this society, there is nothing wrong in going to scripture with them. That’s the real meaning of “indigenous theology,” or "contextualization." The real question to me is whether we then take those questions to scripture and struggle with them. I certainly find the Bible to be a painful confrontation when it comes to dealing with those questions, because a lot of times it doesn’t tell me what I want it to say.

Reuben McCornack: The boomerang for me comes when I go out and relate to the world and realize how broken it is, and then try to put my own weight down, spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually, and realize only that I am just as broken. The journey that we are on is going two directions at once, inward and outward, and scripture has a lot to say about my brokenness, which is also a commentary on the brokenness of the world.

Ron Sider: We must not only take agenda items that come from the world, and then go to scripture in as uncompromising a way as we honestly can, but we must also be willing to hear scripture about questions that the world is not currently asking. The world is probably missing some fundamental questions at some points, and we need to have the scripture raise those questions.

Don Dayton: One thing that has to be realized in this discussion is that all theology is contextualized in a certain culture. We are really talking about a theology contextualized in the modern world versus one contextualized fifty to a hundred years ago. And that’s because evangelicalism in many ways is a cultural form frozen out of the 19th century. That’s where a lot of the struggle comes from.

Jim Wallis: Let me shift gears. What’s going to happen when the young evangelicals aren’t young anymore? Are most of our churches then going to have a social action program alongside of the evangelism program? Are the churches going to be very different? Is our lifestyle going to look different from the lifestyle of our parents?

Ron Sider: We may discover when we are twice as old that we have gained a little humility. We may discover that the new ideas we care so much about and think are biblical, our total theology, is probably no more faithful to all of scripture than our parents’ theology was. I just think we are arrogant if we really suppose that we’ve now finally arrived at the right statement of scriptural theology. I hope we will have gained some humility.

Don Dayton: I agree with that very much. We accept so many assumptions implicitly and culturally, more than we realize even if we are self-conscious of it happening.

Ron Sider: It doesn’t relativize what we now think, ultimately. It doesn’t undercut our action, but it adds a certain tone to it.

Wyn Potter: I just can hardly accept that you’re saying that 30 to 40 years from now you are going to believe that this new discovery of a holistic view of scripture and the gospel is as invalid as the kind of gospel that evangelicalism has produced over the last 50 years. I hope that’s not what’s being said, but I’m sitting here very much struggling with that.

Ron Sider: I didn’t mean that. I’m as sure as I can be that the holistic understanding of the biblical message is right. But I’m about equally sure that we’re missing fundamental parts of biblical truth. We’re probably putting emphases at some points in the wrong places, and I can’t tell you where they are because I don’t know. If I did, I’d change them.

John Alexander: I agree with that, but ... Maybe I don’t even need a “but.” I think there comes a fundamental change in a group that is struggling with scripture and with themselves when they become established. They lose their life and their vitality. It seem to me that in a real way the call for us is never to become young established evangelicals. We need somehow to keep the thing in ferment. I don’t know how you do that, because I’m sure that 20 years down the line we’re going to be basically established. And insofar as that’s true, we’re just wrong. We’ve got to keep it in ferment, and I think we can do it if we both keep listening to our culture and keep in scripture. With a lot of the evangelicalism that I have been associated with, it’s not so much that any of it is wrong as that it’s dead. It’s phony. It’s not true, just because the ferment is gone, just because they’ve got the answers.

Reuben McCornack: And the ferment is not a product of any particular age group. I am fortunate to be in a community where there are young and old, black and white, where women have very meaningful roles. In this community it’s not the young that are always generating the most ferment; it’s often the elderly. One of the tragedies, as I see it, of the young evangelical movement, is that it’s young, and that it’s culturally removed from so much of the rest of the life of the church. If we are really going to be about building the church, we’ve got to be reconciled and be interacting with many facets of the life of the body of Christ. If we achieve that, then there will never be an absence of ferment.

Richard Quebedeaux: I feel that the renewal of the church is in two dimensions: the first dimension is a radical kind of discipleship. The second dimension is unity. I think that all our attempts at social action and discipleship in our own little communities are going in fact to be useless until we start building bridges to those other Christians, those other members of the body of Christ, whom we don’t even know. This is what I am trying to do and about what I am excited. My big concern is that more young evangelicals will become aggressive in doing this, in a personal, substantial way in getting out of our own communities, at least for a while, to those other Christian communities and people whom we have not shared our lives with, and see what happens.

Jim Wallis: To me the critical question is, does our theology judge us and continue to call us to something that is more than we presently are now, or is it something that we begin to possess and dogmatically circumscribe, and then establish as a static world-life view. That is for me a very critical issue to be raised about and with young evangelicals, because to the extent that we institutionalize our present notions about things without realizing that basic biblical judgment and call to something more than we are presently, we run the danger of becoming a new establishment with new kinds of legalisms, a bit to the left perhaps of the old establishment.

Wyn Potter: How do you avoid that?

Merold Westphal: One of the ways in which the evangelicalism I was brought up in finally showed itself to me to be in many respects lifeless--not so much wrong as lifeless and dead--is that it had degenerated into a system of shibboleths. If one didn’t say the right shibboleths, one was an outsider. I think that the temptation will be almost unavoidable for us to create a new language, a new set of shibboleths, which in 10 or 20 years will be just that--shibboleths. And what we’ll be saying will no longer be the authentic expression of what’s happening to us, but simply linguistic habits that we have learned. I think it will be easy for us to keep our faith in judgment upon us in certain narrowly confined places, but it will be hard for us to really be open to all of the places where scripture wants to stand in judgment upon us. I think that the liberty we take in standing in judgment upon the heritage that we have come from puts us in a situation where we are going to have to accept the judgment of history upon our selves. We had better prepare for it.

Roger Dewey: I think the concept of progressive revelation can help us here. We can say at the same time what almost sounds like two contradictory things. We can say that 40 years from now there will be a substantive, basic difference between what we are saying, living and doing, and that which has gone before us. I think that the concepts of economics that we are talking about, the concepts of community, the concepts of personhood, are going to continue to show basic differences between what we believe and what has been the general expression of the last 50 years. On the other hand, I think that our own concept of humility must come in here and say that we ourselves will come under condemnation and judgment of people who see our errors, because we are not going to see our errors. It will take others to see them.

What we’ve got to learn is that the heresies of our parents don’t make everything they say invalid. I gained my faith from my parents and my church. I may see their faults when they’re not able to see them, but everything they said is not invalid. For five or ten years I couldn’t sing the song, “For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” or "Amazing Grace." Now when I sing them I start to cry, because the words have a meaning to them. Our problem is going to be the tendency to say that a real Christian must be thus and so. This is something that most of us have already recognized and will have to fight against.

Wyn Potter: The question I began to ask was, how can we avoid that? Maybe it’s impossible to avoid it. It’s living in the presence of the living God. I’d like to go back to the question of how scripture makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m dealing with the concept of black Christian separatism, and scripture shakes me up because I feel that scripture speaks of reconciliation. So as I live in tension with the presence of God and the meaning of scripture, I have to come to grips with the fact that someday I may have to be part of a white church or something. Though I hope not. (Laughter.)

Wes Michaelson: I have begun to feel some real question about my own political involvements. Part of these questions stem from theological and biblical issues. I am beginning to yearn for a deeper involvement in working with the issues that we are concerned about, not just in an intellectual or political level, but rather in a much more direct way. This yearning really reflects a deeper kind of question about whether one looks to the political structures as a primary vehicle for biblical social concern, or whether one looks to the building of Christian community as a primary vehicle for expressing Christian social concern. I don’t think it’s an either-or issue, but I do think it's a very real issue. I think you have to do both, but I think that there are a lot of mistaken notions among the evangelical community about reliance on the efficacy of political structures in promoting the things that we want to do. Evangelicals need to think, I feel, more biblically about that.

Lucille Sider Dayton: I am of course very involved in the feminist movement, but I am worried. I heard a black woman poet, Nickie Giovanni, recently say that she can’t go along with Gloria Steinem anymore because Gloria Steinem is just building a power base of women for herself which she feels will just duplicate the men’s power base. As a Christian, as a human being, that is just not something I want to do. I find it very easy to get into that, to build my own little group and in doing so to step on everyone else. So I am really struggling with trying not to do that. I don’t know how that is going to work out, but that is a real concern I have as a Christian feminist.

Judy Alexander: I think the Bible makes me feel uncomfortable about everything that I’m doing this weekend, about being here at all. Looking around, I’m the only woman here with small children to raise. That means that I have made a decision that the men seem to be comfortable with making, since there are several men with small children. The lack of women either means they simply weren’t invited, or that they didn’t make the decision that I made and which I am very uncomfortable with. My uncomfortability revolves around the question of what’s important and what kind of power a Christian should be seeking for. I struggle with this all the time and as a result I have a life which is kind of torn apart. On the one hand I feel very strongly with the women’s movement that I should be using all the gifts that God has given me. On the other hand, I feel very keenly Christ’s words when he took the children and said, “of such are the kingdom of God.”

In this gathering I feel that we have gotten a wrong focus on what God thinks is important. I think I made the choice to come partly for wrong reasons. We talked about the excitement of being with this kind of group. I feel very much that we think that we really are on the cutting edge of this new consciousness or movement, doing important things. I feel in my gut with the women’s movement that “we’ve really got to be in there in places of importance, on the board of directors; we’ve got to be on the cutting edge with people that make the decisions, the important people.” Yet that isn’t what I see the scriptures saying. I end up struggling with it. So at home one day I decide, “Well, to hell with the kids; I’m going to write.” And the next day I ask, “What does my writing mean?” I think we really have got to grapple with what Christ said about what’s important.

Roger Dewey: An image came into my mind while you were talking. I don’t think we have to choose which is most important. I think that the church is like one of those old fashioned pull lawn mowers. There are five or six different cutting edges that keep going round and round. They have importance because they all work together.

Don Dayton: I think Judy’s saying something fundamentally different. Are we grabbing for power, are we seeking the limelight, are we doing things of this sort which would seem to be directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus?

John Alexander: I think the question is deeper than that. Is the whole model that we are working on indeed wrong? The question is not whether we are simply grabbing power in this conference, but whether the whole idea of this kind of conference, growing out of a lot of individual heads, with no community base and very little commonality--whether it really means anything, whether it is a New Testament approach to dealing with problems.

Jim Wallis: This question of power deeply concerns and deeply confuses me at the same time. Because historically one thing that always happens is that when a group gains power, it becomes establishment. As John said before, that’s when we cease to have a cutting edge. I think much of the conversation this weekend has taken a too narrow view of the world and of where the action is--that the action is in heavy politics. Now I’m not saying none of the action is there, but too many of the action is there, but too many of us seem to think that most of the action is on those kinds of levels.

I have a real question about that starting point. When the civil rights laws came down, they didn’t originate in the congressional halls. They originated where people began to undermine a whole system of things by how they were living, by what they were doing. It was important that there were people in those halls who voted the right way. But more important to me in that struggle was the people who put themselves on the line and were living a wholly different kind of way than those people in power. I think that needs to be a continuing item on our agenda. What is important? What is power? Where is power? What is spiritual power?

Wyn Potter: I would just ask as you all continue that dialogue that you be in close contact with your black brothers and really hear us, and maybe we can hear you. Because I believe that white people have a luxury! It’s a luxury to deal with power, and to ask whether evangelicals should even consider dealing with the world’s agenda! You just talked about the world being able to tell us some things. I believe it’s very critical that the young evangelical movement reach some kind of balance in this perspective. This is one of the things I almost repudiate in your movement because I see a reaction against a liberal political philosophy. Maybe the liberal stance is wrong in a whole lot of ways, but I see almost a complete repudiation of that and a seeking to get away from it. You don’t understand that the powerless have a whole different approach to the concept of power than you have. In your dialogue consider the powerless and hear us, and understand why it is essential for us to deal with developing some kind of a power base! I think the issue is not so much power but one’s use of power.

Nancy Hardesty: It’s easy for people who have the possibility of power to talk about renunciation of power; it’s easy for people who have money to talk about renunciation of possessions; but it’s difficult for poor people, for oppressed people, to feel that luxury.

Judy Alexander: But that’s my struggle. I feel that if I adopt that model, then I’ve lost everything that I’ve learned from being an oppressed person.

John Alexander: For me this really gets back to the biblical question we were talking about before. I think I feel the way that you feel about power, but a couple of things have happened. As I studied the Bible, I just don’t see the New Testament using that kind of view of power that is embodied in the liberal structures. Now maybe I’m wrong in my understanding of scripture; maybe Jesus and Paul were talking about the kind of power you’re talking about. But assuming for the moment that they weren’t working that way, maybe they had a good reason, maybe they were saying that real change comes another way. Maybe the change doesn’t come by lobbying on Capitol Hill. Maybe it comes by putting your soul on the line, like Martin Luther King and various other people.

Wyn Potter: But he didn’t repudiate power as he put his life on the line.

Jim Wallis: Wyn, you have made a very important point. A lot of people are having critical questions about power, but if we proceed in that dialogue without powerless people, we are going to end up with distorted conclusions. I need to hear you in that dialogue, and you need to hear us. I would ask when you adopt the goal of gaining power, how can you keep from adopting the assumptions of the power you are trying to gain? History shows an awful lot of examples of radical initiative being lost when that happens. It doesn’t mean that I repudiate political lobbying across the board. I’m just asking, is all the action there? Where is the other action? Where is the starting point, what is our basis? As I said when I started, I am deeply confused about this, and I hear what you are saying. But the discussion needs to go on, because there are New Testament issues being raised for me and others, but another New Testament principle is that these questions are not decided without the powerless.

Wyn Potter: Right, that's all I'm saying.

Jim Wallis: Many people suggest that young evangelicals either don’t pray or have forgotten how to pray. I would just like to suggest that in terms of the issues we are talking about we had better learn how to pray. As we work through these issues, we better do an awful lot of seeking God’s mind, or else we are not going to come to very meaningful resolutions.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.