What in the world is an evangelical?

It is a label that has been worn proudly by followers of Jesus Christ to describe their faith. It is also a label that has been used by others to pejoratively taunt Christians who do not measure up to their own religious standards -- whether those criticisms be of a liberal or fundamentalist bent. And finally it is a label whose meaning has shifted over the years to include a big tent of people who don’t necessarily agree with one another over many things secondary to the core of the gospel. And people thought being “Baptist” was hard to explain!

When I was a young man living in New Orleans Vieux Carre attending a Presbyterian church and studying at a Baptist seminary people would sometimes ask about my beliefs, since I didn’t seem to fit any commonly accepted stereotype. I would reply, “First, I am a Christian, second, I am an evangelical, and third, I am a Baptist.” That order still holds true for me today, more than a few years later.

An evangelical basically believes the good news of Jesus Christ and follows him.

The term has been around since at least the Protestant Reformation, when the church embraced the “gospel truth.” It took on a life of its own in the early 20th century, when it was used by Christians who wanted to separate themselves from the deadening liberal German theology that was causing American churches to die. Evangelicals in contrast had a core emphasis on four fundamentals of the faith: belief in the necessity of personal conversion, high regard for the truth of the Bible, and emphasis on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and evangelism, or sharing the good news with others.

Over the years evangelicalism has continually redefined itself, but has held on to the core beliefs. One of the first directions the movement took was to embrace engagement with the world or culture in which people live, rather than retreating to the isolation and separation of fundamentalists. Led by people such as Harold John Ockenga of Boston’s Park Street Church and Billy Graham, evangelicals were well on their way to becoming the thriving, positive faith that is best representative of the good news of Christ.

There have been detours along the way. Most recently, the identification of evangelical Christianity with the political Religious Right has sabotaged the message of the gospel, replacing it with the core belief in one or two hot button issues. That captivity is being corrected today, as young evangelicals in various emerging and postmodern movements abandon a narrow political agenda and return to the four vital cores of faith. In a way, that is keeping the vision of William Tyndale, who in 1531 published the first English use of the word by writing “He exhorteth them to proceed constantly in the evangelical truth.”

May we always follow that vision, proceeding constantly in calling people to a personal relationship with God, upholding the truth of scripture, being centered in Christ’s death and resurrection, and telling everybody we know the good news. Everything else comes in second place!

Jon Dale Hevelone