My friend and mentor Mike Breen is an apostolic leader with keen global eyes. So when he recently issued his “State of the Evangelical Union,” it had my full attention. We’ll explore key themes from it in the next four columns.
John Chandler
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The first is, I admit, the most fantastic. Breen said his reverberating phrase about 2012 was, “All quiet on the Western front.” He muses that perhaps we are in 2013 on the dawn of a day when, after years of public infighting, apostolic leaders are moving past “loud, cantankerous, embarrassing, and exhausting” squabbles. Many combative evangelical people/organizations have become such buffoons that it is impossible to take them seriously. They still yell — but no one yells back. Westboro Baptist — for real?!
A pacific horizon is a sweeping generalization easily challenged by citing particular examples. But is it possible that the vast polarization and contentious rhetoric among evangelicals have left all but the zealots asking whether we have been completely co-opted by our polarized culture? Is it possible for evangelicals to live as a peaceable contrast society?
There is both historical precedent that suggests that harmony is possible, and current rumbling that indicates counter-witness could be more than wishful thinking. After the fractious Scopes trials, Depression-era evangelicalism was so divided that it was for over a decade in danger of being relegated to the dusty corners of American life. But, as George Marsden brilliantly explains in Reforming Fundamentalism, leaders such as Billy Graham and Charles Fuller were able to forge a broad coalition of “Positive Evangelicalism” that focused not on the minutia of doctrine but the broadly and passionately shared imperative for evangelizing our culture. The post-war result was the largest evangelistic and church planting boom since the Great Awakening.
A signal in the same spirit is the newly-formed Missio Alliance, spurred by my colleague Chris Backert and others in and beyond the Virginia Baptist tribe. This emerging network is gathering many and varied leaders in North American evangelicalism around serious theological questions of our day in conversations that view our culture “with affection rather than alarm.”
Bring it! I’ve had about enough of listening to Christians argue. I’d like to hear what we can agree on and see where that takes us.
John Chandler is leader of the Spence Network, www.spencenetwork.equip.htm.