What's an Evangelical? The growing questions

What does it mean to be an evangelical? That's a question that's been on people's minds for really a long time, and the definitions have changed and the borders have expanded and retracted several times (remember the Don Dayton--George Marsden debates a couple decades back). At times evangelical/Evangelical is a party affiliation at others it's a self-chosen descriptor. I've posted before that I have an evangelical pedigree of sorts -- being that I'm a graduate of Fuller Seminary --- but when you use the word evangelical and Fuller in the same breath, you still have to do some defining of terms. Fuller today is much different than it was in the 1950s, when it looked probably a lot more like Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, only more conservative. I'm not sure if Fuller wasn't more liberal in the 1980s when I went there than it is today (Jack Rogers was one of my favorite profs back then), but I can't be sure (politically the faculty remains socially progressive on most issues -- the exceptions being possibly abortion and gay rights but these aren't the sole issues for discussion). But Fuller is a long way from Al Mohler's Southern Baptist Seminary or Paige Patterson's Southwestern, which has become increasingly conservative and restrictive (especially on women).

An article in USA Today notes that evangelicals are struggling with the definition and whether it's a term worth saving. Lot's of people self-identify themselves as evangelicals but ---

Although 38% of Americans call themselves evangelical, only 9% actually agree with key evangelical beliefs, says research firm the Barna Group. In a surveys of 4,014 adults nationwide, conducted over four months in 2006, "one out of every four self-identified evangelicals has not even accepted Christ as their savior," says George Barna.


Scot McKnight, professor at North Park University and Jesus Creed blogger, comments on this dilemma noting his own struggles with the label. I thought these concluding paragraphs of his post interesting:

Today the word “evangelical” no longer means what it meant in the 50s and 60s. The question is whether or not the E-word is worth saving for many of us.

A story I was told: not long ago a major “evangelical” publisher had a meeting with some well-known “evangelical” authors and leaders, some of whom are professors at major “evangelical” institutions, and nearly to a person these leaders did not think it was worth the effort to save the E-word (they called themselves “evangelicals”) but had no term to label themselves in the Christian spectrum.

Should you care to know, one thing the word “emerging” seeks to capture is the older sense of evangelical for a new day.

I’m a follower of Jesus — orthodox, catholic, protestant and therefore sometimes (but clearly not always) “evangelical.” Five terms, in that order, so help me God.


Then there is this from Randy Balmer in Thy Kingdom Come:

Some of us have grown increasingly uneasy with the designation evangelical because we feel that it has been bastardized by the Religious Right, distorted so completely that it bears scant resemblance to the gospel -- the "good news" -- of Jesus Christ. (Thy Kingdom Come, p. xii).

Balmer's lament is rooted in his own understanding of evangelical being rooted in the meaning of evangel -- good news. The question I think being raised today is simple: is there any good news emerging from "evangelicalism"? A lot of people are saying no, and some like me have found themselves more at home in the Mainline community of Progressives. I still believe in the good news of Jesus, it's all the peripherals that's a problem!

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