I have just read “AN EVANGELICAL MANIFESTO - A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment - May 7, 2008; Washington, D.C.” and I was impressed.
I love how this document does not compromise the Gospel of Jesus Christ while being forthright and frank about what true evangelicals really believe. It is a document that had to be written because of the damage and stereotypes created by the religious right in this nation where ‘evangelical’ was spelled ‘evangepolitical’ and the attempt to make The Great Commission into The Greater Constitution has backfired.
I love this quote that is near the beginning of the article:
Evangelicals have no supreme leader or official spokesperson, so no one speaks for all Evangelicals, least of all those who claim to. We speak for ourselves, but as a representative group of Evangelicals in America.
Thank you drafters of this document for finally telling us the truth. James Dobson, Beverly LaHaye, Tim LaHaye, the late Jerry Falwell, the late D. James Kennedy and others are not the ‘official spokesperson’ for us to give the world the ‘official opinion’ of what ‘real evangelical Christianity really is. Thetoo few for so long have tried to control the too many and turn authentic Christianity into ‘theopolitics’ where Government was the evangelism arm of the church instead of being what Webster’s dictionary defines as “the organization, machinery, or agency through which a political unit exercises authority and performs functions and which is usually classified according to the distribution of power within it ”
As followers of ―the narrow way, our concern is not for approval and popular esteem. Nor do we regard it as accurate or faithful to pose as victims, or to protest at discrimination. We certainly do not face persecution like our fellow-believers elsewhere in the world. Too many of the problems we face as Evangelicals in the United States are those of our own making. If we protest, our protest has to begin with ourselves.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we really do not know what true persecution is. True persecution is not the electing of a Democrat nor is it not getting a job and playing a ‘religion card’ like certain minority groups who play a ‘race card’ that the Christians call ‘a democrat concept’. True persecution is not the possession of ‘Catcher In The Rye’ in the school library.
True persecution is spending years in a dark tunnel hungry and beaten; not seeing sunlight because the gospel was preached, the Bible was read, or a hidden house church was in operation. True persecution is having a gun to your temple and being asked to proclaim some other god as ‘lord’ to renounce Jesus Christ and refusing to means death.
We ourselves are those who have come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is ―the way, the truth, and the life, and that the great change required of those who follow him entails a radically new view of human life and a decisively different way of living, thinking, and acting.”
I couldn’t have said it any better. Change is the key, a changed life that can be so distinguishable from the old life to the new creation that people can see, sense, and hear that a radical change has taken place.
Contrary to widespread misunderstanding today, we Evangelicals should be defined theologically, and not politically, socially, or culturally.
I’m tired of the ‘big homeschooled, republican, SUV driving, leave it to beaver’ stigma, stigmata, and mindset that the self-proclaimed leaders of the religious right have defined us as in the name of calling it ‘real christianity’ and ‘God’s blessed’ christianity and try to convince us if every ‘real christian’ would just be like the ‘big homeschooled, republican, SUV driving, leave it to beaver’ stigma, stigmata, and mindset, the gays will be eliminated, abortion would be outlawed, crime would be eliminated, and the skies will be bright sunny blue again.
Read the belief statements on pages 5 and 6 of the document available for download here and allow them to resonante within you.
That is just a part of this incredible document that needs to be read and enacted within our daily lives. The writers of this document really get it in reference to Christian service, humility, and lifestyle.
There is too much in this document to discuss. However, I need to leave you with one more amazing quote
We urge our fellow-citizens to assess the damaging consequences of the present culture wars, and to work with us in the urgent task of restoring liberty and civility in public life, and so ensure that freedom may last to future generations.
I agree completely with your assessment. Before I read it I thought it was probably going to be the usual emergent/seeker sensitive wishy-washy watered down statement. But it wasn’t and I too thought the writers did a fine job.
I’m tired of the ‘big homeschooled, republican, SUV driving, leave it to beaver’… mindset…
i.e. The 1950s as some sort of Godly Golden Age. I was a small kid in the Nifty Fifties and it was NOT some Godly Golden Age within a Perfect Christian Nation. The Fifties was a time of deliberate decompression and “don’t rock the boat” conformity after going through the hard times of the Great Depression and World War Two. A partial “vacation from history” aided by postwar prosperity; the US was the only first world country to come out of WW2 not only intact but stronger, and after the war rebuilding/bootstrapping Europe and the Pacific into their postwar recoveries. A time of prosperity you see maybe once in a century, with the wealth spread around a bit more this time.
…the gays will be eliminated, abortion would be outlawed, crime would be eliminated, and the skies will be bright sunny blue again.
You forgot the Thomas Kincade cottage by the stream and “Free Ice Cream for Everybody”.
I also forgot
The young girl in the white sundress plucking flowers and doing ‘Butterfly Kisses’
Thomas Jefferson, a significant USA founder and writer of the constitution, wrote a letter to Danbury Baptists in 1802 in order to explain the 1st amendment language (capital letters for emphasis):
………..Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” THUS BUILDING A WALL OF SEPARATE BETWEEN CHURCH & STATE. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.
Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.
Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal addressed this subject in this “Houses of Worship” commentary on their Taste page. The WSJ religion commentator found the statement too indirect to be described as a “Manifesto”. Manifestos are by definition direct and bold.