Lausanne World Pulse – Perspectives Articles – An Agenda for Change: Living Out the Social Gospel

By Joel Edwards

If you have ever stayed at the Holiday Inn Express hotel chain you will know they have a pretty well resourced department for consistency. I am currently in the middle of a United Kingdom tour promoting my new book, An Agenda for Change, and am fairly sure that one night my hotel room was in the city of Leicester and the following night in Norwich. But to all intents and purposes, they were the same room. Every detail was identical—the layout, the bedspread, the pictures. Even the coffee stains looked familiar. Watch the movie “Groundhog Day” and you may get some idea of my disorientation.

The irony of this is that the subject of my book is the future of evangelicalism, a “brand” that could barely be less homogenous. We come in all shapes and sizes and have spent years debating exactly who and what an evangelical is.

And while one group gets bogged down on definitions, another has embarked on an altogether more radical project. Their belief is that evangelical has such a bad public relations problem that they want to ditch the word altogether. Evangelical is seen as synonymous with a moral myopia which carps on about abortion and homosexuality, but never talks about poverty, climate change, or social exclusion.

Rehabilitating Evangelical: The Challenges
Should we ditch the word evangelical? No, I believe there is an alternative: rehabilitation. The book and the tour are the beginning of a conversation as to how we can make that happen. How do we get the word evangelical to become recognized once again as what it simply means: good news? We face three key challenges if we are to achieve this:

1. We need to humbly reassess some of our tribal theological rigidities. The theological left must accept it isn’t always right. This side often sees evangelical as an over-fifty club whose members forever discuss things nobody cares about. They are often embarrassed by the word, thinking it is linked with obsessions about personal morality rather than world hunger. Those from emerging church communities which often sit on the left can become fixated with cultural relevance and forget that history often gives us the best view of the future. No stigma-free faith wedded to its culture is likely to last the course. And whatever we feel about the sterile technicians of expository preaching, story-telling and funny jokes are no substitutes for an open Bible.

But if the left isn’t always right, the right is sometimes wrong. There is invariably a kind of intellectual arrogance which comes with the certainties of conservative evangelicals. There is a tendency to mask grace in the name of truth without realising that truth without grace feels like a lie. Evangelicalism owes a great deal to those on the right. But their certainties can lock us into certain inflexible ways of doing church, the old agendas of a Moral Majority mindset, or even an uncritical Zionism with no interest in the pain of Palestinian Christians.

Rev. Joel Edwards is general director of the Evangelical Alliance UK. He is committed to seeing long-term change for the world’s poor and chairs the Micah Challenge International Council. Edwards leaves the Evangelical Alliance in September 2008 and will bring his passion for justice for the poor to two new roles as he joins Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation and becomes the first international director of Micah Challenge.