Evangelicalism and world mission

A new generation after fundamentalism

The fundamentalists of the 1920s had defended the great facts of the gospel and the authority of Scripture. After the controversies many left the mainline denominations, the universities and much of public life for colleges and missions of their own (see Liberalism and fundamentalism). By the 1940s some of their own children were asking: could one hold the whole gospel without retreating from the world?

The question was put most sharply by the theologian Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003). In a short book of 1947, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, he argued that in its reaction against the social gospel, fundamentalism had fallen silent before the great evils of the day, such as aggressive war, racial hatred and the exploitation of workers Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry did not want the gospel turned into a programme of reform. His point was the reverse: the message of new birth in Christ is the real answer to the world's ills, so those who believe it should bring it to bear on them.

Harold John Ockenga (1905–1985), minister of Park Street Church in Boston, was the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals, formed in 1942 across denominational lines. In 1947 he and the radio evangelist Charles E. Fuller founded Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, with Ockenga as its first president and Henry on its first faculty. Ockenga called the movement the ‘new evangelicalism’. In 1956 Billy Graham championed a new magazine, Christianity Today, with Henry as its first editor.

Billy Graham and the British voices

Billy Graham (1918–2018), a North Carolina farmer's son, came to faith at a travelling evangelist's meetings in 1934 and became a Southern Baptist minister. In the autumn of 1949 a tent campaign in Los Angeles, planned for three weeks, ran for eight; the newspapers took it up, and he became known across the country. For over fifty years he preached in stadiums around the world. His sermons were plain, on sin, the cross and the call to repent and believe, punctuated by his refrain ‘The Bible says’ and ending with an invitation to come forward for Christ. From the 1950s he refused to hold segregated meetings. In 1973 his crusade on Yeouido Plaza in Seoul drew, it is reported, more than a million people on its last day, with Billy Kim (Kim Jang-hwan) interpreting.

In Britain the Oxford literary scholar C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), an Anglican layman, explained the faith on BBC radio in wartime; his talks of 1941–1944 became Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis defended what Christians of nearly every time and place have believed in common, and argued that one option is closed: to admire Jesus as a great moral teacher while setting aside his claim to be God. A man who said what Jesus said, he reasoned, was either the Lord he claimed to be, or deranged, or something worse C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Lewis never called himself an evangelical, but generations of evangelicals have found in his books reasons for faith.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), a Welshman, left a brilliant career in medicine to preach, and for nearly thirty years at Westminster Chapel in London expounded Romans and Ephesians verse by verse. With the young Anglican J. I. Packer (1926–2020) he led a yearly conference that sent a generation back to the Puritans; Packer's Knowing God (1973) was read across the world. John Stott (1921–2011), rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, became through his preaching, his work among students and books such as The Cross of Christ (1986) a teacher of evangelicals far beyond Britain.

The convictions and the texts

Evangelicalism is not a church but a family of convictions shared across denominations, which the British historian David Bebbington has summed up in four marks: the Bible as the supreme authority; the cross of Christ at the centre of the gospel; conversion, the need to turn and be born again; and active effort to spread the gospel and serve. The first rested above all on Paul's words to Timothy:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

In the 1960s and 1970s evangelicals argued over how far that authority reaches: is Scripture without error only in what it teaches about faith and conduct, or in all that it affirms? In October 1978 several hundred scholars and pastors met in Chicago and issued the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. In nineteen articles of affirmation and denial it confessed that Scripture in its original manuscripts is without error in all it teaches, while allowing for the writers' styles, figures of speech and round numbers, and asking that every text be read according to its literary form. Henry and Packer were among its signers. The doctrine course's lesson The inspiration and authority of Scripture sets this view of inerrancy beside others.

The fourth mark, active mission, rested on the risen Lord's commission:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Matthew 28:18-20

Matthew Henry comments: "The salvation they were to preach, is a common salvation; whoever will, let him come, and take the benefit; all are welcome to Christ Jesus" Matthew Henry. The same text had launched the missionary societies of the nineteenth century (Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea), and in the twentieth it sent evangelicals to peoples who had never heard.

Lausanne, 1974

In July 1974, at Billy Graham's call, the International Congress on World Evangelization met at Lausanne in Switzerland: more than two thousand participants from some 150 countries, many from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Two worries met there. As ecumenical voices of the late 1960s described mission chiefly as the pursuit of justice and a more human society, many evangelicals feared that the call to repent and believe was being lost (The ecumenical movement and the Second Vatican Council). From the other side, Latin American evangelicals such as René Padilla and Samuel Escobar told the Congress that a gospel which saves souls while ignoring poverty and injustice is also a distorted gospel.

John Stott chaired the committee that drafted the Lausanne Covenant, and it held both concerns together The Lausanne Covenant. The Covenant holds that evangelism and social and political involvement both belong to Christian duty, and confesses that evangelicals had neglected the second and sometimes set the two against each other; yet of all the church's sacrificial service, it gives evangelism first place. It admits that missions have too often carried a foreign culture along with the gospel, and hopes for partnership among the churches of every nation.

The prophet Micah had summed up what God asks: "to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8). Matthew Henry guards the verse from misuse: "The good which God requires of us is, not the paying a price for the pardon of sin and acceptance with God, but love to himself" Matthew Henry. Justice and mercy are not the price of salvation; they are what love for God looks like among our neighbours.

The centre moves south

In 1900 the great majority of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. As the churches of the South grew and many in Europe drifted from the faith, many scholars judge that by the century's end there were more Christians in Africa, Latin America and Asia than in Europe and North America. Its new face included Africa's independent churches, Pentecostal churches multiplying across Latin America and Africa (The Pentecostal and charismatic movements), a church in China that grew through hardship, and the Korean church, which now sends missionaries all over the world (The Korean church in the twentieth century). The Lausanne movement followed the shift, meeting at Manila in 1989, Cape Town in 2010 and Incheon, South Korea, in 2024. See also Is Christianity a Western religion?

Weighing the movement

Its gifts are plain. The new evangelicals kept what the fundamentalists had rightly defended, the gospel's history and Scripture's authority, while recovering a mind for learning and a conscience for the neighbour. They preached Christ across denominational lines, made evangelism and compassion partners rather than rivals, and learned to listen to the churches of the South.

Questions came from several sides, and faithful evangelicals have answered them differently. Separatist fundamentalists believed Graham compromised when he accepted the sponsorship of church councils that included liberals, as in New York in 1957; his defenders replied that he preached the same gospel to all and endorsed no one's errors. In London in 1966 Lloyd-Jones urged evangelicals to leave doctrinally mixed denominations and stand together, and Stott, chairing the meeting, publicly disagreed, holding that evangelicals should stay and bear witness within them. Evangelicals still differ over the word ‘inerrancy’, and over how evangelism and social action belong together.

A map of today

The last thirty years can only be sketched. Among younger English-speaking evangelicals a Reformed resurgence has sent many back to the Puritans, Edwards and Spurgeon, asking how God's sovereign grace should shape preaching and church life. The New Perspective on Paul, which grew from E. P. Sanders's study of 1977, asks what first-century Judaism taught and how Paul's ‘works of the law’ and justification bear on the welcome of Gentiles into God's people. Postliberal theology, from Hans Frei and George Lindbeck at Yale, asks how the church can learn its language and life from the biblical story itself rather than from modern reason or experience. And the Pentecostal and charismatic churches of the South ask how the gifts and power of the Spirit are to be known in the church today.

What this story leaves us is simple to say and lifelong to practise: Scripture received as God's word, the gospel of the cross for every nation, and a love that does justice and shows mercy. The risen Lord's promise, "you will be My witnesses … to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8), is carried now by churches in Seoul, Lagos and São Paulo as much as in London or Chicago.

Practice