Letter from America

In 1951 Bill Bright and his wife, Vonette, made a simple sort of 'contract' with Jesus. They pledged all their resources to the spread of the gospel. Then they sold their food business and later an Oklahoma oil drilling company. And they used the finances thereby gained to help found Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC). Today CCC is perhaps the largest Christian para-church organisation in the world. It works in 191 countries, has a full-time staff of 26,000 as well as more than 225,000 trained volunteers.

On July 19 Dr. Bill Bright died. He may not be the last famous post-war evangelical pioneer to die in the next year or so. While wishing to avoid all reference to Mark Twain's famous quip about his prematurely reported passing ('Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated'), both John Stott and Billy Graham are, after all, in their 80s.

What is an evangelical?

Other less concrete reasons too beckon the question of evangelicalism's future. Its very size gives rise to concerns about its breadth. Does the word 'evangelical' really mean much anymore? Are we not often forced to qualify the term, speaking of being a 'conservative evangelical' or a 'classic evangelical'? Some I have heard suggest jettisoning the term altogether. And then there are questions about evangelicalism's relation to the church. Obviously, in England this is dominated currently by the issue of evangelicals in the Church of England and the current Archbishop of Canterbury. But there is a more foundational question. Does evangelicalism need to have a better concept of church? Where is the sense of church discipline? Does not the gospel entail discipleship and committed involvement with a local church? Should not then evangelicalism insist upon moral discipline, and a pure equally-yoked connection with other evangelical believers? Surely it must; but then why so often has it not, and what then about the future?

Going south?

Interestingly enough, however, if author of The Next Christendom Philip Jenkins is to be believed, many of these torturous musings may soon become as introverted and sidelined as they sometimes appear. According to Jenkins, the worldwide statistics of church growth tell us that in the new millennium Christianity will literally 'go south'. The church, he tells us, is growing exponentially in the southern hemisphere. It is booming in South America. It is sky-rocketing in sub-Saharan Africa.

Even more fascinatingly, this growth is not growth of 'liberation theology' or any kind of liberal movement but a growth of old-fashioned, highly doctrinally and ethically conservative, evangelical Christianity. Jenkins rightly cautions against using such data in rhetorical wars in the West.

But the facts remain. The lesson for the future from these facts is not simply that God's movement from one region to another is a fatalistic inevitability. It is true, of course, that God is sovereign and he does go wherever he pleases. Nonetheless, as the prophets of the Old Testament remind us, God has a 'covenant' deal, now a new covenant through faith in Jesus, by which his blessing and favour is attained. He has promised that it would be so. Or as Christianity Today editor Philip Yancey has expressed it, the lesson perhaps is 'God goes where he's wanted'.

Never surrender!

As we survey the cultural wreckage of postmodernism in the West we are not to throw up our hands in despair and intone 'whatever God wills'.

We are instead to learn from our heroes. And as the book of Hebrews tells us in chapter 12.1-3 we are to learn from the roll call of biblical heroes that we can win because Jesus has won. We are to get rid of sin (verse 1). We are to fix our eyes on Jesus, doctrinally and practically - like him, we are to take one look at the cross and see through it to the joy of victory on the other side (verse 2). We are to be confident; we are to be fervent; we are not to 'lose heart' (verse 3). We are, as a Churchill might say in this context, never to surrender.
The storms may be gathering, but as Bill Bright and other of our evangelical pioneers have shown, the gospel of Jesus Christ is not running out of steam. It in fact belongs to the future and not just to the past. And that future is a bright one.

Evangelicalism: a bright future?

What is an evangelical?

Going south?

Never surrender!

Josh Moody, Connecticut

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