A Warning to Evangelicals

A former editor of  Christianity Today  magazine, Philip Yancey is author of more than two dozen books.  His books have sold more than fourteen million copies, making him one of the most successful evangelical authors in the world.  Philip’s newest book,  What Good Is God , includes a speech he gave at his alma mater, Columbia International University.  The following is an excerpt from that speech.

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I have learned to appreciate other traditions of the faith.  While writing a book about prayer I learned more from Catholics than from any other group; they have, after all, devoted entire orders to the practice.  Similarly, I learn mystery and reverence from the Eastern Orthodox.  In music, in worship, in theology, they teach me of the mysterium tremendum involved when we puny human beings approach the God of the universe—a lesson difficult to learn in evangelical churches where worship is led by guitar players in shorts and sloppy t-shirts who wear their baseball caps backwards.

I have concluded that God did not oversee the tortuous process recorded in the Old Testament, and Jesus did not spend his working life among twelve Jews, solely to redeem American evangelicals.  Something bigger was afoot, and that something should inspire humility.

Do not misunderstand me.  Unlike some of my friends I do not disdain the word evangelical, nor do I confuse it with the media’s caricature of evangelicals as right-wing zealots.  The word means good news, and I have seen that good news broadcast in more than fifty countries where underpaid missionaries and relief workers bring healing, education, justice, and practical help to the disadvantaged because they believe by doing so they are serving God.  “You can get evangelicals to do anything,” said a friend of mine who recruits them to work in the inner city of Chicago.  Then he added the caution, “The challenge is, you’ve also got to soften their judgmental attitudes before they can be effective.”

Langdon Gilkey’s classic book  Shantung Compound  describes a community of Christians brought together by force: during World War II Japanese occupiers corralled foreigners, including many missionaries, into a concentration camp.  The evangelicals did not fare so well.  They complained about their circumstances, gossiped about the others, and hoarded rather than shared their parcels from the West.  By Gilkey’s account, of all the groups imprisoned, evangelicals demonstrated the most pettiness, fractiousness, and selfishness.  (Trappist monks fared the best.  After superiors lifted the rule of silence, the camp seemed to them like a holiday retreat.  They had variety in food, they could talk and laugh and swap jokes, and they were around women!)

As I survey the history of evangelicalism I see much good.  I also see a history of disunity and a past that includes shameful lapses in ethics and judgment.  Some of the denominations you come from, such as Southern Baptists and Methodists, formed over the issue of slavery: their leaders owned slaves and wanted to continue the practice.  Many evangelical denominations, including my own, actively opposed the civil rights movement.  Read current surveys and you’ll find that evangelicals’ marriages end in divorce at a rate similar to everyone else’s.

I noted this morning that outside this chapel stands a stone monument to one of the primary values of this school, Victorious Christian Living.  Although I certainly do not oppose that ideal, I would simply add, be careful.  Be humble.  Prepare for a fall…

We dare not lower the ideal, yet neither should we present the ideal as the norm.  D. L. Moody, asked whether he was filled with the Spirit, replied, “Yes.  But I leak.”  Perhaps you should install another stone beside the Victorious Christian Living monument: “Yes, but we leak.”