Hot Button: Has ‘Evangelical’ Become a Dirty Word?
/We can’t really blame Donald Trump and Roy Moore for pushing Evangelical Christians off the cliff, or can we?The question is part of the discussion that’s trending (and I don’t mean in a Santa video kind of way) right now. In an opinion piece posted at The Washington Post last week, Eugene Scott wrote that after Roy Moore lost Alabama's special Senate election, “despite running a campaign on what he called Christian values, some evangelical voters seem to be considering that their label has been co-opted.”“There's a growing concern that aligning with people such as Moore and President Trump has hurt evangelicalism in the public eye. But others connected to the movement say evangelicals, particularly white evangelicals, had a perception problem long before Trump and Moore became the faces of the community’s politics,” Scott reports.The question has been so much in the forefront of the Christian community and even the community at large that The New Yorker gave Timothy Keller its platform yesterday to answer the question put this way: Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore?In typical brilliant Tim-speak, Keller writes:
In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Billy Graham and others promoted the word to describe themselves and the religious space they were seeking to create between the cultural withdrawal espoused by the fundamentalist movement, on the one hand, and mainline Protestantism’s departures from historic Christian doctrine, on the other. In each of these phases, the term has had a somewhat different meaning, and yet it keeps surfacing because it has described a set of basic historic beliefs and impulses.
He continues:
When I became a Christian in college, in the early nineteen-seventies, the word “evangelical” still meant an alternative to the fortress mentality of fundamentalism. Shortly thereafter, I went to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, to prepare for the Presbyterian ministry. It was one of the many institutions that Graham, Harold Ockenga, and J. Howard Pew, and other neo-evangelicals, as they were sometimes called, established. In those years, there was such great energy in the movement that, by the mid-nineteen-nineties, it had eclipsed mainline Protestantism as the dominant branch of the Christian church in the U.S. When I moved to Manhattan to start a new church, in 1989, most people I met found the church and its ministry to be a curiosity in secular New York but not a threat. And, if they heard the word “evangelical” around the congregation, a name we seldom used, they usually asked what it meant.Today, while the name is no longer unfamiliar in my city, its meaning has changed drastically. The conservative leaders who have come to be most identified with the movement have largely driven this redefinition. But political pollsters have also helped, as they have sought to highlight a crucial voting bloc. When they survey people, there is no discussion of any theological beliefs, or other criteria. The great majority of them simply ask people, “Would you describe yourself as a born-again or evangelical Christian?”
Keller concludes that evangelicalism as a movement may or may not abandon or demote the prominence of the name, “yet be more committed to its theology and historic impulses than ever.”
Should followers of Jesus simply trust Keller on his positive outlook on the Church’s direction?Perhaps it’s equally important to be aware that there is a fissure that appears to be widening.In the article, Young U.S. Christians Fear Trump Is Turning 'Evangelical' Into a Dirty Word - and Israel Is Paying the Price, published at Haaretz, the writer makes the claim that “a new generation has emerged that questions the literal beliefs of the Bible and rejects the politicization of their religion by some on the right.”Brandan Robertson, 25, who is the lead pastor of “a progressive Christian community” in San Diego, California, and has made a substantial impression in both the political and faith communities as a gay advocate, told Haaretz that he thinks “evangelicalism is in a real crisis right now.”Shachar Peled, reporter for the piece, writes: “Despite growing up learning about the Chosen People in what he calls ‘the hotbed of Christian Zionism,’ modern technology and globalization led Robertson and his peers to question those teachings.”“Because we live in such an interconnected globalized world, as students we were able to go on Facebook or to easily travel to a different part of the world and see that the things we were being told – based on, in my opinion, antiquated theology – didn’t live up and match up to the reality of what was happening to the world.”Before throwing out the “antiquated theology” with the baby and the bathwater, perhaps those who are so eager to oust “evangelical” from their vocabulary (or reasoning) should consider, as studies from Pew Research Center and others show and as Keller points out, “evangelical churches that resist dilution in their theological beliefs and practices are holding their own or growing.”Keller adds, “And if evangelicals—or whatever they will call themselves—continue to become more multiethnic in leadership and confound the left-right political categories, they may continue to do so.”Getting into solution is so much better than obsession with the blame game.READ: How American Evangelicals Are Taking the ‘Christ’ Out Of Christianity
By “Christian Values,” they mean “Conservative Republican Values,” not the values of Jesus as expressed in the Gospels or in the Sermon on the Mount. To hear Roy Moore’s version of “Christian Values” simply look at what he has said throughout this campaign and 
It is not an overstatement to call this a crisis. In 2015 alone, drug overdoses killed more people than the entire Vietnam War. Drugs are now the 
The greater the number of individuals changed, the greater the gospel movement. There is a great variety. Gospel movements can be in a single church or across a whole continent or continents. They can be very intense or rather mild; they can last months, years or one night. When an intimidated Billy Graham spoke to Cambridge University students in 1955, 400 students came to Christ in one night.So can we start gospel movements? Not really. They are too supernatural. But we can build or steward a gospel movement. A good metaphor is Elijah’s building of an altar in 1 Kings 18. We can build the altar, but God has to send the fire. And when the fire comes, we can throw wood on it, but we still don’t ignite it. Only God can ignite it.When Redeemer Presbyterian Church was only a couple of years old, people saw that it was growing, and they asked us, “What’s your model?” They thought it might be wearing suits, singing hymns, playing jazz in the evening services or quoting philosophers. That’s not a model. That was our contextualization of our ministry to the gifts and capacities of our people and community. For gospel movements, there is no single model. Gospel movements are built through the movement dynamics we have talked about—the application of the gospel to hearts, integrative ministry, extraordinary prayer. They both invite God to use us and build movements that he starts.CTC teaches these gospel movement dynamics. The gospel of Jesus Christ must transform our own lives—each leader’s life—and then it moves out through the city and transforms others. This is gospel renewal. Not a model. And it leads to a movement.CTC is not a franchise. We have no model to teach. We only have the gospel. But that’s the most powerful thing. We help national leaders build gospel movements. We are stewarding a movement in the great cities of the world.The above post originally appeared at 
What are your thoughts on the subject? Is it more important for you to be spiritual or religious? Or, be honest, are you struggling with where to start in your faith journey? Leave your comments below.
Call to Reformation
Lang, 30, is seeking revival in L.A.His vision includes leading a group called 
However, much of the rest of the nation returned children to families without the wrap-around support of the churches, which is so critical to the long-term success of an orphanage-free child welfare system. Our most recent Orphan Care PEACE trip saw this firsthand as they conducted trainings in Kimonyi, an example of an area where the orphanage recently closed but families had never received any information on how to address the trauma their children have experienced in the institution. When the government realized these families were struggling, they specifically asked for the Orphan Care Initiative to intervene with training and support.Getting a child out of an orphanage and into a family is only the start of the journey of helping that child and family succeed long term. In that way, future Orphan Care PEACE teams remain critical to delivering several important, world-view shifting messages:1) The value and need for adoption in a culture coming out of dependence on orphanages.2) Teaching churches how to deliver the evidence-based adoptive parent training that allows families to help heal hurts of children who have come from the orphanage and other hard places.3) The truth that EVERYONE in the church is called to care for the orphan, and the church can help members get on mission in this area in a variety of ways.The Rwanda Orphan Sponsorship is a piece of this support system designed to help children remain in, reunite with or regain family through adoption. Families brought into the sponsorship program receive support to help care for their child in the form of a monthly amount from their local church. As part of sponsorship, parents become part of a savings group to learn how to grow and manage their money, and they receive lay social work support from the church and agree to attend parenting training. In return, the families agree to use the funds to pay their child’s school fees, enroll them in medical insurance and tithe back to their local church. Because these funds go directly to the family from their local church, many families receiving sponsorship don’t know there is a Western donor on the other end, they just see it as their local church coming alongside to support them.This post was originally published on the 
Convoy of HopeAs a faith-based, nonprofit organization Convoy of Hope has helped more than 85 million people throughout the world by sharing food, water, emergency supplies, agricultural know-how, and opportunities that empower people to live independent lives, free from poverty, disease and hunger. Convoy of Hope does this through the following: mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers each year, partnering with churches, businesses, individuals and other humanitarian organizations who are intent on doing good work among the impoverished and suffering.In the past 20 years, Convoy of Hope has been active in 48 states and providing disaster response, conducting community outreach events, and directing nutritional programs and sustainability projects. Since Convoy of Hope was established it has brought help and hope to 114 countries and counting. This has been made possible, in part, thanks to Convoy of Hope Europe.Los Angeles contact: 562-412-8788 or convoyofhopela@gmail.com Website: 
Indeed, many in the church growth movement focus almost entirely on growing individual congregations bigger. Supporting and strengthening healthy smaller congregations has taken a distant second place – if it’s considered at all.But there have been many church movements throughout history – and many today – that foster smaller congregations, including house churches. They channel their growth with great skill and intentionality through the multiplication of more congregations, rather than bigger ones.There are some strong stats showing that 
“The kingdom is churches, God’s people coming together to advance and expand His kingdom — can’t do it separately, you need to do it together — and so Stadia is so committed to God’s kingdom, planting churches, people coming to Christ, being discipled…,” he said. “That’s who we are amongst the urban poor and under-resourced communities and so it’s a beautiful marriage.“When we think of LA together we also think of Stadia and World Impact together. We need to come together to move God’s kingdom forward.”
Note: This post was originally published at