Evangelicals are trying to broaden their influence beyond the normal politically conservative venues. The New York Times reported the following:
The National Association of Evangelicals, with 30 million members in 45,000 churches, opened a debate on Thursday on a document intended to expand the political platform of evangelicals beyond the fight against abortion and same-sex marriage.
The authors of the paper, "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," said they reached a consensus between liberals and conservatives by adopting public policy goals, but not prescribing strategies to achieve them. At a luncheon held by the association on Thursday on Capitol Hill, however, some evangelical leaders voiced concern that the new platform could dilute the focus of the evangelical movement by taking on too many issues.
The document urges evangelicals to address issues like racial injustice, religious freedom, poverty in the United States and abroad, human rights, environmentalism and advancing peace through nonviolent conflict resolution.
So, what are evangelicals trying to accomplish? A both/and approach to evangelism and the Gospel. The extremes on both the left and the right have not always served evangelicals well. The following op-ed by David Waters sums up this thinking:
Will the pendulum ever stop in the middle? Some evangelicals are beginning to question the faithfulness of one-sided evangelism, left or right.
"The Moral Majority lacked a servant heart of Christ born out of humility and compassion for a fallen humanity," Robert Wenz, vice president of national ministries for the NAE, said at the conference.
"Instead, it was all about making America a nice place for Christians to live. This is not the kind of social involvement that we need or that evangelicals espouse."
Other evangelical leaders have been critical of the social gospel's lack of emphasis on personal sin and salvation.
"We need a full-blown biblical theology that affirms both personal and social sin, both personal conversion and structural change, both evangelism and social action, both personal and social salvation, both Jesus as moral example and Jesus as vicarious substitute, both orthodox theology and ethical obedience," Ron Sider, a professor of theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in "Good News and Good Works."
The evangelical movement first began to win a huge following in the 18th Century, led by men such as John Wesley and George Whitfield. In these politically and theologically divisive times it's worth remembering why.
It was their conservative piety and their liberal humanity.
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