Christianity

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you make it a den of robbers." (Matthew 21:12, 13)

A kind of bidding war is heating up for the identity and loyalty of the evangelical Church. Like suitors wooing a prospective bride, proponents of three schools of thought are competing for the affections of this segment of the Body of Christ. Each claims to provide the best hope for her future, the most promising path to prosperity and fulfillment. Each hopes to convince evangelical believers that it has discovered the Church's proper identity. And each is working hard to woo and win evangelical church leaders to its camp and campaign.

There is in this a sense of the evangelical Church's needing to be cleansed. Something has gone wrong in that movement that arose in the middle of the last century, which set itself apart from fundamentalists and charismatics and took a bold stand for Scripture and the Gospel against widespread liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. For over fifty years, evangelical leaders worked hard to establish a movement with a clear and consistent vision and identity. Evangelical believers took the Bible as the last word on all matters of faith and life, and the Gospel of forgiveness and peace as the first order of business.

Showing disdain for contemporary theological fashion and only modest interest in the long heritage of the Christian past, evangelicals carved out a place for themselves among American churches, then fortified and expanded their presence through theological seminaries, Bible colleges and liberal arts colleges, media and pop culture, conferences and seminars, journals and periodicals, and aggressive efforts in evangelism and disciple-making through church and para-church ministries. Rising from obscurity in the late 1940's, evangelicals attained so prominent a status--ecclesiastically and socially--that, by the late '70's, even secular journals declared "The Year of the Evangelical."

But along the way, and with only a few people taking notice, evangelicalism seemed to have lost sight of its purpose, and acquired some rather unbecoming attributes and practices--attributes