Evangelism and Evangelicalism

It was a sunny May morning at Palisades United Methodist Church in San Clemente. Light filtered through the tall stained-glass window of a Christ calming the storm. The ministers wore white albs with simple stoles—they were always dressed like the white marble of the altar with its seasonal paraments. I stood as tall as a young boy could on a footstool and leaned over the font, and I was baptized. I don’t remember much else about that day, except that I remember silence that lasted until I went home. People moved and talked but all was quiet.

Then it was a warm May afternoon in the garage of my youth pastor. Our high school men’s group met there on Wednesdays. I remember sitting as others left with a weight bearing down on my soul, burying my heart beneath confusing teen angst and a deeply troubled conscience. That pastor spoke to the voice of shame, calling me back to the simple truth of Christ-crucified once for all, and for the first time since that first time ten years prior, I knew that quiet again.

Ten more years and I was at St. Matthew’s, having just left from making a surprisingly painful confession. Opening to my penance, I read the first line of Psalm 32: “Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” Sitting with those words, along came that peaceful quiet again to sit beside me as a reminder that the voice of absolution was the voice of conversion was the voice of baptism. The elegance of that golden thread was and is the simple gospel.

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In the first post of this series we talked about how the term evangelism is a feature of every Christian life, because it is the orientation of all of life around the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. There is really no such thing as an unevangelistic Christian. 

Sadly and confusingly, though, it became a habit in the West during the Protestant Reformation to distinguish Protestantism from Catholicism by reference to the ‘gospel truth’ present in the former and supposedly lacking in the latter. Ironically, the ‘evangel,’ the good news that draws the Church together with one voice out of every tribe and tongue turned into a kind of shibboleth used to put distance between the brethren. Regardless of which side used it, the inference that the gospel was absent from the other became a wound of schism and estrangement that has plagued and shamed the Church ever since. Inadvertently, the hyper focus on who really has gospel truth has only diminished the evangelistic witness of those who fixate on it. Historically, this fixation developed into a theological tendency that emerged in many church traditions without being identifiable with any of them. The detachment of evangelism from the organic unity of the Church produced, in time, the phenomenon called evangelicalism.

Anglicans pioneered some of the earliest roots of evangelicalism as they sought to address creeping liturgical decadence combined with moral indolence and lax charity. The Evangelical Movement of the 18th Century in England centered on a revival of the importance of personal faith in the power of God as conveyed in the preaching of the Gospel. A mounting pressure to refine the Church’s sense of mission and focus had built up beneath the torpor of a latitudinarian institution, and when it was released it quickly blossomed into an emphatic and energetic movement. Sadly, as is often the case, this energy broke its bonds and spawned an independent movement of ‘evangelical’ churches detached from the historical traditions out of which they arose. As evangelical energy came to the United States, this tendency toward evangelistic emphasis continued to move in and out of established churches, at times attending them and then at times striking out to try to make it on their own.

The Anglican historian John Moorman notes that the evangelical emphasis has four focal points: 1) Conversion: that believers must be ‘born again’ as a response to a call for a complete change of life in light of the truth of what God has done for humanity; 2) Biblicism: evangelicals have an extremely high view of biblical authority and personal reading of the Bible; 3) Crucicentrism: a highly emphasized focus on salvation as coming through the death and resurrection of Jesus; 4) Activism: the call to have an active expression of faith and displayed through a sharing of the Gospel in word and action. Christian historian David Bebbington notes that an additional development of the Evangelical Movement was a renewed and augmented doctrine of assurance, by which believers believed almost to an extreme extent in the immutability of their salvation once gained in conversion, which perhaps allowed for the great sense of pathos generated by preachers within the movement. 

The great strength of evangelicalism is in its stress of personal relationship with Jesus over and against the passivity that can sometimes be engendered in liturgical settings. Even so, the Evangelical Movement created its own type of Christianity, which founded itself on several components to the neglect of the rest. This is true of any movement that seeks to emphasize certain aspects of the Faith. With the Evangelicals, energy was created and a passion for the saving work of Christ and the grandeur of God’s revelation and love, but this created a type of religious romanticism that lacked the structure provided by traditional modes of the faith. What results is a theological energy that tends to lack discipline and direction. Unless it is ensconced within a church whose polity can anchor it to sound Biblical teaching formed by centuries of costly and careful tradition, the evangelical energy will get co-opted by temporal and cultural concerns. 

One of the main reasons for this is because the tenets of evangelical theology that Moorman cites do not necessarily return a person to a sense of communion with the Body of Christ in place and through time. The emphases of the movement can be exercised individually and in isolation; the simple purity of that formulation of the gospel truth struggles to account for the practicalities of life together over generations. While the goal is an unadulterated relationship between the believer and Christ, what tends to be obscured or underdeveloped is the fact that Christ calls us into union with Him among a people. 

I’ll be the first to admit this isolation doesn’t always happen, for which I am thankful. Theological emphases tend to have their respective blind spots along with their strengths, these are often related, and this individualizing trend attends evangelicalism. But that’s not without a cost: the more the believer individuates, the less they sense the Body. The Church becomes an aggregate of individuals who join themselves together. One’s sense of participation in that Body becomes more internal, and confidence in it is measured in terms of intensity. This perspective shift has the effect of phasing an individual’s practice of one, catholic faith in community to a kind of ideology that the individual seeks with greater and greater purity in increasing isolation. Confidence in that ideology is a function of recruiting others to an identical formulation of beliefs. When the organic life of the Christian becomes a system of ideas, it begins to compete at the same level as other systems of ideas: the rhetorical and political. 

This, I would suggest, is what has happened in the United States. We have seen a co-opting of an ancient and powerful property of the Church for political and cultural purposes. At times, there has been some alignment between those concerns and the moral vision of the Church. At times, they have wildly diverged. What I would suggest matters more to someone seeking a coherent Christian life is not the ends for which the evangelistic charism of the Church has been borrowed but rather the grace problem of borrowing it in the first place. Evangelicalism, for us right now, is a tendency we see both in historical traditions and not. In our post-Christian era, we’ve now seen the evolution of it to the point where even atheist and anti-theist movements bear the imitative marks of evangelical influence. But it began with us. American Christians of all sorts saw and participated in the instrumentalizing of the Christian life to support a secular vision of political and interpersonal expedience. We attempted as American Christians to marshal the gospel as a support beam for a power grab from left and right alike. That was a poor choice and we will be feeling the impact of it for a long time.

While this has surely had effect in a number of causes, what has also happened is that to the extent we have treated the gospel as a pragmatic tool we have distanced ourselves from that very gospel. It is a natural danger of every theological movement or emphasis that becomes its own thing. Rarely does it possess the mechanism to say ‘no’ to itself. The evangel, the true gospel, is a fact and not a figment of Christian rhetoric. It will go on being what it really is and we will either meet it as such or become estranged from it. There is no coaxing it into our schemes. Nor will the God of the gospel reward attempts to do so—we can gain the whole world and even a host of great causes, and still forfeit our souls by unworthy means.

I want to be clear that I do not believe evangelicals are necessarily bad or in error. That is an insufficient and reductive way of looking at it. There is a real thing happening there. The Spirit is moving among our evangelical brethren. Personally, I owe my salvation and years of formation to the grace of God I experienced among the Methodists (the premier evangelicals) and the evangelical churches I attended in my youth. It is why I told the stories I did at the beginning of this piece—the evangel that remains present in evangelicalism remains present in me as an Anglican Catholic. The bust of John Wesley I received a gift from my father-in-law looks on and knows it to be the truth! 

I would note as well that this is not an attack on evangelical churches in particular, but about a theological tendency that is observably present in many traditions. Many evangelicals have adopted their theological movement for understandable and even worthy reasons. Many, I firmly believe, find through it that important gospel truth. But, as a theological emphasis, it has done its job when it returns its adherents to an ancient way of the Faith with a renewed energy to proclaim the gospel of Christ crucified in a way of life that can give that energy a home. Evangelism is the true breath of the Christian life. Evangelicalism, by contrast, is a construct the goodness of which can wildly fluctuate. We should always strive to be people of the ‘evangel.’ But it is time, I believe, for evangelicalism to be re-evangelized, to be redeemed from its bondage to unworthy causes.

In the next piece, we will talk about a life shaped by the gospel, and how the foundational paradox of Biblical evangelism cultivates within us and among us a gracious checks and balances influence that send us forth without self-aggrandizing, and turn us inward without neglecting those who need, as I also need, the saving love of Christ.