“We need some good Evangelical Christians at Princeton.” / “Is she an Evangelical Christian?” / “Yes, but is he Evangelical?”
Frankly, I’m sick of the word Evangelical. I want to run the opposite direction whenever I hear it. If I hear about one more “Evangelical” PC(USA) congregation…it’s all just the same labeling/in-out/us-them language. I know I’m not the first one to say this (I think I read this before on someone’s blog…), but I think we need to re-claim the word “evangelical.” As I searched on Google, I came up with this article on Beliefnet from Fuller President Richard Muow: “Reclaiming Evangelicalism.” I’m not sure I want to reclaim Evangelicalism, but I want to reclaim evangelical. Is there a difference?
At the FTE conference, our discussion group discussed this briefly. I think the conclusion we came to was that (Becca, you had good thoughts on this), at least in American Christianity, you have “big E” Evangelicals and “little e” evangelicals. We agreed that we’d all like to be (and, as Christians who care about the gospel) evangelicals…and that, for the most part, Evangelicals often irritate us.
Anyone else care to take a stab at what the difference is?
Of course, this doesn’t help when you’re talking to someone and they ask, “Well, are they Evangelical?” Most of the times I’ve run into this in the past few weeks, I am almost positive the person means a “big E” Evangelical – and I could reply that “Yes, the person is evangelical – but not Evangelical” – but that’s a little hard to get across when you’re simply talking with someone.
So, what do we do? I want to be known as a follower of Christ who does care about the gospel, who does care about preaching good news to the poor, proclaiming freedom for the prisoners, recovering the sight for the blind, to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And perhaps, that is what an evangelical Christian cares about. And perhaps that is also what an Evangelical Christian cares about…but there is too much bad press/publicity about Evangelicals, that if one more person asks me if someone is an Evangelical (or if I am), I’m just gonna say, “Nope.”