Evangelical Ministers Research Articles

Religião e política: embate de sentidos sobre a fé evangélica em posts de pastores no Instagram

ABSTRACT This work aims to reflect on possible meanings for the evangelical faith based on utterances produced by three evangelical ministers in their social networks when they enunciate on themes that are linked, directly or indirectly, to political agendas. Based on the theoretical scope of studies in Applied Linguistics and on Bakhtinian conceptions of language, our analyzes point to three predominant meanings, which mean the evangelical faith as: i) reaffirmation of identity; ii) exercise of otherness and respect to the other; and iii) political practice. Such meanings demonstrate that there are contradictions within the religious discursivity, which allows the beating between hate speeches and respect and empathy ones within the realm of the evangelical faith. Thus, looking for cracks in religious discourse that oppose fundamentalist and authoritarian discourses is an ethical duty of a religious leader who recognizes his social and discursive role as influential in taking positions and, therefore, in the lives of the members of their congregation.

Ukrainian Evangelicals and the War

Abstract The resilience of evangelical communities in Ukraine became evident during the full-scale war started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as they actively engaged in networking and robust volunteer movements to provide aid and support to those affected by the warfare at the grassroots level. This article delves into the responses of evangelical ministers and believers to the traumatic circumstances arising from the war. The author emphasizes that the war experiences conveyed in the testimonies and narratives of evangelicals are deeply intertwined with their religious experiences and are framed to align with fundamental evangelical values. Confronting the challenges associated with life-threatening situations, irreparable losses, and bereavements, evangelicals interpret these experiences through the lens of their theologically grounded worldview.

Practical Christianity in Practice: Chinese Youth Culture and the Scouting Movement as Seen by British Missionaries at the Griffith John College, Hankou, 1915–1925

ABSTRACT This article, which highlights the religious origin of early Chinese scouting, scrutinises the connections between scouting, Christianity, and cultural exchange in early twentieth-century China. It provides insight into the history of Chinese youth by examining how British missionary scoutmasters, highly critical of Chinese parenting, introduced an alternate model of adolescence with a ‘civilising’ mission at Griffith John College – a mission school founded by the London Missionary Society in Hankou for Chinese male adolescents. This article contends that Chinese scouting was initially designed as an effective means to practice Christianity in evangelical ministries which equipped Chinese scouts with ‘fine virtues’ – elements that shaped them to become ‘good citizens’ and help them ‘overcome’ superstitious social customs. Apart from studying the role of scouting in China, this article also examines the effects of Christian missions on Chinese society in the cultural exchange influenced by the ‘civilising’ perspective that upheld by missionary scoutmasters. The cultural imperialism inherent in scout training hindered the development of a thorough Chinese citizenship at the national level. But the ways foreign evangelists educated their boy scouts did bring some positive impacts on Chinese youth culture, enlarging the scope of Christian missions to different possibilities and creative potential in cultural interaction between the colonisers and the colonised.

Privileged Agents vs Repressed "Spies"

The paper examines the problems faced by evangelical ministers condemned in the so-called Pastoral Trials (1948–1985) and their families. At the same time, the Bulgarian State Security managed to launch its own cadres to take the places of uncomfortable ones on the pulpits and push state policy following the KGB models. And they suc-ceeded in converting even some of the pastors who have been caught up in the judicial processes and declared unjustly. Attention is paid to the instigated opposition against highly educated and erudite clergymen enjoying authority in society, by officials obe-dient to the new authority, ready to sell their faith for some silver coin.

A Church for Scotland? The Free Church and Scottish Nationalism after the Disruption

The 1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland, which split the national church in two, was one of the most important events in Victorian Britain. The evangelical ministers who seceded from the Kirk to form the Free Church of Scotland did so in protest against the British state's intrusion in the church's affairs. The anti-English and patriotic rhetoric of the Disruption has led historians such as David Bebbington to argue that it represented something close to a nationalist movement. This paper questions this claim by assessing the nationalist characteristics of the Disruption and their role in shaping the political ‘unionist-nationalism’ of the mid-nineteenth century. It examines the kind of nationalist sentiment, if any, evident at the Disruption, the role of Free Church members in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, the short-lived proto-nationalist pressure group, and the nationalism of the Free Church minister James Begg, who called for Home Rule for Scotland in 1850. By assessing the influence of the Disruption's constructionist critique of the union on political nationalism, the paper argues that the religious nationalism evident in 1843 failed to translate to a political context in the mid-nineteenth century. The new religiously pluralist environment of the post-Disruption period saw the Free Church turn inwards and begin to focus upon its own denominational fortunes as a single Scottish national identity was replaced by a variety of competing confessional identities, each with their own claim to nationhood.

The Preacher and the Prelate: The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland by Patricia Byrne (review)

This reversion to a European norm of secularism is emphasised as the new reality of pluralism and multi-culturalism. I would not be quite as certain. Europe is the exception in the sweep of continents, as religious belief and religious passion, both as a spiritual and as a political identifying force, is very much alive elsewhere, and our own cosy corner may not be the standard henceforth. But this is the future, and this excellent book deals with the past and the present. It explains what it set out to do with clarity and with style. In doing so, it makes an invaluable contribution to Irish history and should be read by anyone interested in our story. Alan Titley is Emeritus Professor of Irish in University College, Cork, and writes a weekly column in Irish in The Irish Times. The Preacher and the Prelate: The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland, Patricia Byrne (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press, 2018), 244 pages. Achill Island, which lies off the coast of Co. Mayo on the Western seaboard of Ireland, is the setting for this book. The subject matter is a religious settlement established in 1834 by an evangelical minister, Edward Nangle of the Church of Ireland, and the bitterness it caused between members of the Protestant and Catholic religions. (The author points out that the text will generally use the term ‘Catholic’ to indicate the Christian persuasion of Roman Catholic and ‘Protestant’ to denote a Christian belonging to the Church of Ireland, which was the official established church until disestablished by the Irish Church Act 1869). Nangle believed that Achill was a place of ignorance, barbarism and intellectual and moral degradation.1 From the beginning the development was frequently referred to by both Catholics and Protestants as ‘the colony’, perhaps suggestive of a powerful body dominating a lesser one. The focus on such a small area as Achill enables the author to address in detail the sectarian problems common to Ireland for centuries together with the poverty of the native Irish people before, during and after the Great Famine of 1846–1848. The first section of the book deals with the background and health of Nangle, whose driving ambition was to evangelise the native population through education. He placed the emphasis on the superiority of the Studies • volume 109 • number 433 89 Spring 2020: Book Reviews Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 89 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 89 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 Reformed faith. He was the son of a staunch Catholic father and a Protestant mother. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin and his first ministry was in Co. Cavan, where he came under the influence of the local landlord, Lord Farnham. Farnham publicly proclaimed that the calamities that afflicted the Irish people could be solved by delivering them from their degrading bondage in the form of Roman Catholicism and converting them to the Reformed faith (p. 7).2 Nangle was also influenced by the writings of a Scottish Baptist minister, Christopher Anderson. He agreed with both men that evangelisation, meaning conversion to the tenets of Protestanism, could best be achieved through the medium of the Irish language, the language of the people. While ministering in Cavan, Nangle suffered a mental and physical breakdown. He recovered, but within weeks of arriving in Achill he succumbed to similar bad health, a pattern that was repeated throughout his life.At times he had periods of very high energy when he accomplished much and at other times was laid so low that he could barely function. The author suggests that he suffered from what we would now call bi-polar disease or manic depression. Protestant education in the scriptures and work on reclaiming land and planting crops had been under way for some years prior to Nangle’s arrival. Nangle quickly threw himself into developing his evangelisation programme and organising further building and farming projects. Prayers were said morning and evening in both the Irish and English languages and scriptural education was central and seen as necessary for combating popish error and for teaching the principles of Protestantism and civilised living to the Catholic population. Nangle stated...

White Women Who Lead: God, Girlfriends, and Diversity Projects in a National Evangelical Ministry

A robust body of literature has used feminist analysis to study white evangelical women in the United States, but few of these studies have addressed the reproduction of racial inequality. Beginning with the assumption that women-led evangelical ministries are racialized organizations, the authors examine the relationship between racial and gender ideologies and the messages of white evangelical women leaders at the IF:Gathering, a popular annual Christian women’s conference in the United States. On the surface, the women who lead IF embody a contradiction: they support the conservative gender ideology of evangelicalism while challenging this religious tradition by encouraging all Christian women, regardless of race, to act as leaders within their communities. However, the authors’ in-depth content analysis of live-streamed and video-recorded conference sessions reveals that the mostly white speakers at IF use race to credential their leadership. Speakers draw from a mixture of racial and gender ideologies to stress the importance of telling diverse “girlfriends” about Jesus and rescuing women of color “in the trenches” (those who are from the global South or living in U.S. cities) from poverty or sexual exploitation. The findings reveal how potentially progressive and empowering messages at a women-led evangelical organization limit the definition and scope of women’s leadership and reinforce the white patriarchal status quo.

Colour Symbolism in a Nigerian Church: The Case of Prophet/Evangelist Abiodun Oladele of the Overcomers‟ Evangelical Ministries International (Ori-Oke Asegun)

Colour Symbolism in a Nigerian Church: The Case of Prophet/Evangelist Abiodun Oladele of the Overcomers‟ Evangelical Ministries International (Ori-Oke Asegun)

Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era by Grant R. Brodrecht

Reviewed by: Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era by Grant R. Brodrecht Lucas Volkman Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era. Grant R. Brodrecht. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-82327-991-3. 278 pp., paper, $40.00. In recent years numerous works have appeared examining religion during the Civil War era. Grant R. Brodrecht gives us another fine addition in this field that helps better understand the role of evangelical religion in the North. He focuses on the concept of the Union, which for evangelical Protestants "connoted a country formed by the providential hand of God, in addition to the idea that it should remain whole and filled throughout with evangelical Protestantism" (15). This definition suits Brodrecht well in making his argument that evangelicals sought to use the Civil War and Reconstruction to preserve and strengthen their vision of the Union. While not disregarding the role of freedom in the Civil War and Reconstruction narrative, by emphasizing the Union, Brodrecht seeks to continue in the footsteps of those, like Gary Gallagher and Rogan Kersh, who argue for the Union's centrality in the minds of Civil War Americans. Brodrecht amplifies this unionism as he follows the lead of Mark Noll in viewing the nation as having a primarily evangelical ethos. Brodrecht examines evangelical views of the Union and concerns for its future during the war and Reconstruction. He organizes his work chronologically, beginning in the Civil War and taking things through Reconstruction in the 1870s. While it would have been interesting to see how this evangelical view of the Union played out during the sectional crisis, especially as Brodrecht argues in his introduction that this conception was in place prior to the war, this focus still serves his inquiry well. Critical to this work is the evangelical understanding of the Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant presidencies. Brodrecht argues that its relationship to the president played a role vital to forming this evangelical conception of the Union. While Brodrecht has successfully shown the importance of the presidency in the evangelical perception of the Union within his work, it does seem that the occupant of the White House is overemphasized at points, as the Union is more than the chief magistrate to these men and women. For most of the evangelicals in Our Country, the Union supersedes considerations of racial justice. Brodrecht consistently supports his argument in using examples of those [End Page 416] whose theology centered around the Union. For instance, toward the end of chapter 5, Brodrecht explains that evangelicals saw Ulysses S. Grant's election to the White House in 1868 as a saving event for the Union, especially after the disappointing Johnson presidency. But he includes the notion that many evangelicals decried the radicals who sought to implement an agenda that featured racial justice. He does, however, differentiate this viewpoint throughout his pages with some evangelicals who were radicals—primarily New York Congregationalist minister George Cheever. As Brodrecht's focus is national, his source base is made up of archival and published materials from throughout the North. Many parts of his book focus primarily on printed sermons, autobiographies, and evangelical periodicals, which is logical, given the book's emphasis on religious thought. At the same time, most of the sources cited within the text come from ministers and important laymen in these denominations. To that point, in his introduction Brodrecht explains that he began his project by looking at representative evangelical ministers such as George Peck, Henry Boardman, and George Cheever. While these men and the other evangelical leaders cited played a major role in the evangelical thought in this era, it would have been interesting to see what a few more of their followers thought of the Union. Additionally, throughout his book Brodrecht employs archival sources from the presidents and other governmental leaders as an additional lens. But, while it is always clear what evangelicals thought of their leaders, it is not always apparent what these leaders, especially the presidents, thought of their evangelical followers or how they were influenced by them. This issue is a problem, especially as Brodrecht asserts, in his...

@Preacher_Bot: an experiment in evangelical speech making

ABSTRACTThis article is an experiment in digital methodology. It applies tools associated with the digital humanities to the study of Protestant evangelicalism in order to ask what digital research methods can offer the study of religion. Beginning with the development of a social media computer program called a Twitter bot designed to mimic evangelical ministers on twitter, the article considers how digital scholarship allows the work scholars produce to mirror more closely the religious worlds they study. Next, the article analyzes the results of the program using text analysis software. In documenting trends in the bot's output, the article highlights how digital research methods can help answer long-standing questions in the field as well as potentially ask new ones. It concludes, The article, then, is both an exploration of contemporary religious cultures and a consideration of new media methods for analyzing them.

Inventing Revivalist Millennialism: Edwards and the Scottish Connection

Revivalism and millennialism are important concepts that influence contemporary evangelicalism. However it was in the Great Awakening that Jonathan Edwards and select Scottish ministers first connected revivalism and millennialism together in a new evangelical print culture. Evangelical ministers used publications and personal correspondence to hypothesise that the current Atlantic revivals were signs pointing towards Christ’s millennial kingdom. The 1740s stands as a unique decade where evangelical ministers created an influential synthesis of revivalism, social progress, and millennialism. The revivalist and millennial synthesis was a harbinger of the evangelical future for religious movements in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gypsy leadership, cohesion and social memory in the Evangelical Church of Philadelphia

Nowadays, although throughout Europe the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Protestant denominational identities remain among Roma, the conversion rate would suggest the number of Roma Pentecostal will have numerically overtaken all the others in just a few years’ time. The uniqueness of Spanish Gypsy Pentecostalism contradicts some of the stereotypes of global Pentecostalism and resides in its organisational complexity and hierarchical structure, its rapid institutionalisation as a sole church, the thorough theological training of its leaders, and its autonomy both from the State and from the European and Latin American Pentecostal Roma Movement. This article is structured around a life history and two concerns: (a) the role of the constant circulation of the gypsy evangelical ministers as regards charisma and leadership; (b) the growing transfer of prestige from the respected gypsy elders to the young evangelical pastors and their role in wide pacification processes involving ethnic cohesion and kinship.

Release by Patrick Ness

Reviewed by: Release by Patrick Ness Karen Coats Ness, Patrick Release. HarperTeen/HarperCollins, 2017 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-240319-3 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-240321-6 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 10-12 Adam Thorn suspects his parents know he’s gay, but his father is an evangelical minister, so Adam figures it’s better to keep up the heterosexual pretense than get sent to a pray-the-gay-away camp. Today he’s facing the going-away party for Enzo, the ex-boyfriend who broke his heart, and after having tender, erotically described sex with his new boyfriend, he is emboldened to be honest with his dad and he realizes he needs to let Enzo go. He has also, unbeknownst to him, roused a queenly spirit who has been taken over by the form of a recently murdered girl, and if she and the Queen cannot become disentangled by nightfall, the world may end. The thematic threads that connect these supposedly parallel plots are as wispy as cobwebs; the Queen is an ambiguous figure with no provenance, while Adam’s release from the things tying him in emotional knots, including the fear that he is unlovable, is at once more complicated and less dramatic. The urgency of doing it all in one day is thus built on an imposed and confusing contrivance; fortunately, the ghost plot can be safely ignored as tangential to Adam’s story, which has enough interest to stand on its own. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America by Elizabeth J. Clapp

Reviewed by: A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America by Elizabeth J. Clapp Susan Imbarrato (bio) A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America. By Elizabeth J. Clapp. ( Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp 280. $39.50 cloth; $39.50 ebook) Elizabeth J. Clapp’s A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America is a thoroughly researched, well-presented biography that chronicles the many unexpected turns in Royall’s life to construct a [End Page 430] comprehensive portrait of an adventurous, resilient, hardworking, and persistent woman. In doing so, the book also addresses Royall’s combative, controversial, and, at times, contradictory elements: she asserted her own freedom to travel yet supported the curtailment of rights for Native Americans and African Americans, and her own forthright assertions stood in contrast to her opposition to women’s rights efforts. More sympathetically, Royall petitioned relentlessly for pensions for widows of Revolutionary War veterans, supported efforts for female education, and sought to expose corruption in Washington. Clapp deftly weaves these various elements into a compelling narrative that brings this well-known public figure in her day to a new audience. In doing so, Clapp draws extensively on archival materials including Royall’s correspondence and travel writings, along with newspaper accounts and court records to construct a biography steeped in social context and historical background. Clapp charts Royall’s continuous ability to adapt to changing situations, from her childhood in frontier Pennsylvania through her witnessing of the French and Indian War, her family’s relocation to Virginia in 1787, and her marriage to Major William Royall in 1797. When her marriage ended with William’s death in 1812, Anne entered a protracted battle with his family over his will. Clapp’s detailed discussion about wills, probates, and executors provides helpful, relevant context for this section. With the proceedings ongoing, Anne “determined that she would no longer live in the isolation of William’s Sweet Springs plantation. She soon made preparations to move to Charleston in Kanawha County, western Virginia” (p. 35). She then settled in Alabama from 1817 to 1823. Eventually, the will was deemed invalid, and with her finances in turmoil, Anne began writing as a way to alleviate her situation. Royall’s first publication, Letters from Alabama (1826), followed by a novel, The Tennessean (1827), offered some relief. Here, Clapp carefully contextualizes Royall’s publication efforts with a discussion of the contemporary print culture. Royall then embarked on a series of book tours for her subsequent [End Page 431] volumes, ten in all, and developed clever, aggressive techniques for selling her books, by including caustic portraits of public figures, referred to as “pen portraits,” and elaborate descriptions of towns and scenery that, in turn, customized each volume. Clapp follows Royall’s travels from 1823 to 1830 along the “length and breadth of the settled United States and some parts not yet open to settlement,” including the “‘fashionable tour’” through New York and New England (p. 77, 82). Moreover, as Clapp elaborates: “As she traveled, Royall was constantly preoccupied with the need to earn a living—a concern she frequently voiced to those she met on her expeditions. Her journeys served the dual purpose of research for her new books and a search for patrons to buy those she had already written” (p. 82). Traveling amidst “dangerous and unpredictable” conditions of the day, Royall nevertheless “depicted herself as an indefatigable traveler” (p. 100). Royall also conveyed aspects of Jacksonian democracy, including a sense of patriotism in her travel books that mirrors notions of “Manifest Destiny,” while her public attacks on evangelical ministers for trying to enforce Sabbath laws aligned with Jacksonian policies that maintained the separation between church and state. In 1829, Royall’s troubles escalated when she was brought to trial as “a common scold.” Then living in Washington, Royall launched two newspapers intended to combat and expose corruption, the Paul Pry followed by The Huntress, and continued her attempts to secure pensions for widows of Revolutionary War veterans. In 1848, she herself was finally granted one, which provided some financial relief prior to her death in 1854 at the age of eighty-five. Presented in an engaging, accessible style, Elizabeth...

The intimate intensity of Evangelical fighting ministries

The author discusses what she learned from her participation in evangelical fighting ministries, paying special attention to how these communities sought to connect with God through interacting with each other. In training with and interviewing the members of these ministries in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the author found that as evangelical Christians, many struggled to establish and maintain the primacy of their personal relationships with God over their interpersonal interests. Yet they also believed their relationships with God were meant to be witnessed and experienced by others. During moments of worship they shared emotional intimacy, granting each other opportunities to make outwardly perceivable their internally felt relationships with God. During their Brazilian jiu-jitsu training, they were encouraged to feel God’s presence as they grappled with each other at very close contact. Using the concept of compartmentalisation, the author analyses how these evangelical fighting ministries demarcated their practices into emotional and physical forms of intimacy, thereby finding different ways to achieve what they perceived as personal contact with God in their intense interactions with each other.

‘Able and Evangelical Ministers’: The Beginnings of Ministerial Formation at Bristol Baptist College

This article re-tells the story of the origins of ministerial formation in Bristol Baptist College, and seeks to highlight what has become popularly known as the ‘Bristol tradition’. Special attention is given to some of the European Baptists who came to Bristol to study.

The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism by Matthew Bowman

Reviewed by: The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism by Matthew Bowman Devin C. Manzullo The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism. By Matthew Bowman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 308 pages, Cloth. The Urban Pulpit offers a convincing and much-needed revisionist history of Protestant religion in Progressive Era America. For too long, historians of American religion have understood late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Protestant Christians as divided into what scholar Martin E. Marty has famously called a "two-party system": modernists and fundamentalists, liberals and conservatives, Social Gospelers and born-again evangelicals. This division (the story goes) resulted from polarized reactions to tectonic shifts in American cultural, social, and political life near the turn of the century: challenges to the historical and scientific veracity of the Bible, waves of Catholic and non-religious immigrants, and the emergence of a leisure industry that provided a desirable alternative to Sunday morning worship. Since Protestants could not agree on how to respond, they fractured. Modernists embraced these developments, as well as other aspects of social pluralism, and sought to integrate them into their religious practice. Fundamentalists rejected these developments in favor of theological and ideological innovations, such as biblical inerrancy and dispensational premillennialism that buttressed the "old-time religion." [End Page 106] Historians and other scholars routinely describe this doctrinal cleavage as the "fundamentalist-modernist controversy." In The Urban Pulpit, Matthew Bowman nuances this story in two ways. First, he introduces into the scholarly discussion a Protestant style—"liberal evangelicalism"—that maintained ties to the old evangelical understanding of salvation and the Bible but did so using a framework that adapted these ideas to the social realities of turn-of-the-century urban America. Second, he depicts the rupture of Protestantism not as a theological debate over religious dogma but as both a pragmatic response to the crisis of the city and as a "product of pastoral experimentation" (13) to uncover the most effective way to preach the Word in a modernizing world. Bowman charts the emergence and decline of liberal evangelicalism and its responses to the urban crisis in eight brief chapters. The first four explain the development of the liberal evangelical style; the final four describe the tensions from the left and right that emerged in opposition to it. According to Bowman, those who would become liberal evangelicals emerged sometime between the 1880s and 1915, departing from the religious consensus of those in the conservative Protestant "mainstream" by self-consciously identifying as "liberal evangelicals." During these decades, virtually all evangelicals lost confidence in their ability to reach postbellum American cities by conventional means. At an earlier time, there had existed an intimate "connection between the city's cultural and physical landscapes and evangelical piety" (13). But now that connection had shattered, and the verbal and written Word of God seemed less powerful in a city teeming with immigrants and saturated with entertainment and recreational opportunities. This crisis necessitated new methods for converting others to Christianity. Liberal evangelicals realized that redemption would not come just by hearing the Word preached: It also had to be embodied and lived out. Bowman explains how this reconceptualization of the Bible occurred, primarily in academic circles, and then further details how liberal evangelical ministers and social activists put it to work. He successfully shows that as social reform movements flourished in New York City in the early twentieth century, liberal evangelicals began to see their activism as a form of religious liturgy, as "rituals of conversion that would draw both the reformer and the reformed into the orbit of the Word enacted, and bring conversion to their souls no less than preaching might" (112). [End Page 107] After describing the development of the liberal evangelical style, Bowman also analyzes the challenges faced by this nascent movement from both religious conservatives and religious liberals. While liberal evangelicals sought to embody the Word rather than merely preach it, the emergent fundamentalists took the opposite tack. In seeking to "assert faith in the unaltered Word," they delivered "strident and aggressive" verbal proclamations (165), a feature that would become a primary identifier of fundamentalism in subsequent...

Evangelicals and Contextual Theology: Lessons from Missiology for Theological Reflection

In this paper, we argue that evangelical missiological reflection on contextual theology will help develop models and methods for doing contextual theology that western evangelical theologians and ministers may be more comfortable with than some of the dominant models available in the western theological training. In the process, we also hope to show that evangelical resistance to contextual theology and theological reflection as exhibited in its dominant forms in western theological discourse is not a rejection of it per se. Using five of Bevan's six models for contextual theology, we argue for a range of models for contextualization and theological reflection for the tasks that Christian presence, witness, and discipleship require in our multicultural world, to help us in our desire to grow in faithfulness to the Scriptures and to the nature of God's revelation in Christ and therefore in fruitfulness in our Christian witness in the contemporary world.

Philosophy, Grace, and Reconciliation: Reflections of a Catholic Revert

Philosophy, Grace, and ReconciliationReflections of a Catholic Revert* Francis J. Beckwith (bio) On April 28, 2007, I was received back into the Catholic Church. My reversion caused quite a stir,1 since it occurred while I was serving as president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), an academic association of Protestant biblical scholars, theologians, philosophers, historians, and ministers that in 2007 had a membership over 4,300. On that evening I wrote the other members of the ETS executive committee, telling them of my reversion. Although I assured them that I could remain as ETS president since there was nothing in the society’s doctrinal basis with which a Catholic could not agree,2 it was naïve for me to believe that this was possible. Within a week I resigned, realizing that I could not remain as ETS president without causing a scandal. Several days later I resigned my membership as well. Although I have published a memoir,3 as well as contributed to the book Journeys of Faith,4 in this article I want to offer some additional reflections on what I have learned and continue to learn about my journey. My focus will be on the role that philosophy played in helping me to be more receptive to the Church’s understanding of grace, and how that understanding has been instrumental in deepening my spiritual life. [End Page 66] I I had left the Catholic Church in the early 1970s as a young teenager, having been drawn to Evangelicalism as a consequence of a variety of factors. As a young Catholic who had a penchant for theological inquiry and a desire to follow Jesus, the Evangelicals that I had encountered, both in person and in print, seemed to be far more serious and authentic in their faith than what I had known as a Catholic. Like most Catholics of my generation, I was poorly catechized, despite the fact that I attended parochial schools from first to twelfth grade. After my high school years, in which I became less interested in my faith, though I still attended Catholic Mass with my parents, I found myself again gravitating back to Evangelical ministries that I had first begun exploring a few years earlier. As my college days commenced, I no longer considered myself Catholic. I became involved with several college ministries including Campus Crusade for Christ and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. It was in those groups that I became acquainted with many Evangelical authors who shaped the trajectory of my spiritual and intellectual development. These authors included popular speakers and writers such as Walter R. Martin, J. Vernon McGee, and Charles Swindoll to more academically oriented authors such as Norman Geisler, Ronald H. Nash, Clark Pinnock, Alvin Plantinga, R. C. Sproul, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Warwick Montgomery. I was also influenced by some thinkers outside the Evangelical orbit, including Peter Kreeft and Mortimer Adler. In college I switched my major to philosophy, largely because of my growing interest in Christian apologetics. I had been advised by several people that it was the major that would best prepare me for advanced work in apologetics if I chose to pursue it. Interestingly enough, the two Evangelical philosophers who had the biggest influence on me were Norm Geisler and Ron Nash, an Aristotelian Thomist and a Platonic Augustinian, respectively. I had no idea at the time that these were not widely held schools of thought in [End Page 67] the Evangelical world. Both thinkers saw nothing untoward in the positive use of philosophy in the formation of doctrine including philosophical theology and the nature of the human person. This too was highly unusual in the Evangelical world, but I did not realize it at the time. It was only years later that I came in contact with the writings of Evangelical theologians who didn’t have many nice things to say about the role of philosophy in theological development. Colin Brown, for example, offers an analysis typically held by his Evangelical peers: “The first [side effect of Aquinas’s thought] is that, where a theology is based partly upon Christian revelation and partly upon alien philosophical ideas, the result is often a misguided...

Asian American Evangelicals in Multiracial Church Ministry

Since the 1990s, evangelical efforts to create multiracial churches (MRCs) have grown exponentially. This article analyzes the experiences of Asian American evangelical ministers leading MRCs. Through interviews we explore how Asian American evangelicals came to be involved in MRC-ministry and how they approach issues of racial diversity in this context. We compare the racial attitudes of Asian American evangelical ministers leading MRCs with those of White and Black evangelicals delineated in Emerson and Smith’s Divide by Faith. Rather than conform to the colorblind approach of many White evangelicals, the majority of our respondents utilize structural explanations for social inequality and promote a colorconscious approach to diversity. We conclude that Asian American evangelicals utilize a unique framework for MRC-ministry, what we call a ‘racialized multiculturalism,’ that has much to offer American evangelicalism.