Friday, October 05, 2007

The Blogging Parson: The collapse of the evangelical consensus?

Interesting questions here: The Blogging Parson: The collapse of the evangelical consensus?

Is evangelicalism as a "movement" collapsing, at least in the UK? How is that related to what is happening in the USA?

What happens with evangelicalism will be important for world missions because almost all the missionaries out there trying to convert non-Christians are evangelicals. A handful are non-evangelical Protestant, and a couple here or there are Catholic. I have heard that there are Orthodox working in this area of converting the unbaptized, but I have never met one or known one personally.

For better or for worse, evanglicalism with all its warts and blemishes is carrying the torch of the church's mission to the nations.

The article at Blogging Parson is short, but here's the heart of it:

The common diagnosis of the problem is that, in the 60s, there were three or four leaders of the evangelical movement around whom we all (or our spiritual parents) gathered - Stott, Lloyd-Jones, perhaps Packer. Since then diversity and infighting has been the rule - disputes over charismatic gifts, women in ministry, the new perspective, social action and so on have meant that the movement has no clear common ground anymore. There seems to me to be a significant erosion of what evangelicals used to hold as points of unity: the atonement, the bible, the priority of evangelism/conversion, justification by faith, the work of the Spirit in sanctification of the believer, and so on. Reasserting these, and shouting them more loudly has been the strategy of some, but it isn't working to unify [evangelicals today].

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