The evangelical subsets.

There used to be fewer labels to define the church. Really, how far in the past is it necessary to regress to find only Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox? Well, maybe a few hundred years. But there were not that many subsets until the early part of the last century. First came liberal, and then fundamentalist, followed not long after by the much misunderstood and even abused label of evangelicalism. During evangelicalism’s formative years the names of Harold Ockenga, Nelson Bell, Billy Graham, Carl Henry and Charles Fuller were seen and heard together in their cumulative efforts to encourage a movement that was biblically and academically sound and culturally acceptable.It worked for a few years.

Now getting past middle age, evangelicalism is thinning out  as it becomes drained by all of its divergent streams. Seeker, emerging, Emergent, reformed, charismatic, prosperity, monastic, traditional, contemporary, Third Wave, and more recently, the Third Way, all of them trying to maintain some semblance of connection with evangelicalism.

Perhaps the most revealing and bogus claim for evangelicalism came a few years ago from the soon-to-be-disgraced president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, who made the remarkable statement that evangelicalism embraced everyone from Benny Hinn to R. C. Sproul. In attempting to hold up these two men as representatives of diversity within evangelicalism Haggard, as the pastor of a megachurch, displayed his own theological shallowness, and the sad condition of a movement which apparently had no one better to wave its flag.

We need something better. We need something more akin to what Thomas Oden calls the “new ecumenism”, with unity built on truth rather than image. Maybe we do not need evangelicalism any longer, but we do need something better.