What is an Evangelical?

This question has been one that’s bothered me for a while, and as I look around myself I can’t help but wonder if anyone knows the answer.  I grew up evangelical. I still run in evangelical circles. I’m even currently a student at an evangelical seminary, but the title “evangelical” is one I don’t like and don’t use often, if ever. These are a couple of reasons: 

First of all, too many of us have seen forms of evangelism that are unloving, focused only on tallying up converts, based on fear mongering, and so focused on escaping hell after death that it ignores the very real hell people are experiencing on earth. All of that adds up to a view of evangelism that doesn’t make any sense to me. Yes, Jesus did call out sin and call people to repentance, but it was always in the context of loving relationships, concern for physical needs, and defense of the marginalized of society. So if being evangelical means I practice this sort of evangelism, I’m not sure I want to be a part of it.

Second, is what Russell Moore, President of the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has encountered this election year. In the US vocabulary, evangelical is simply a sub-group of conservative republicans that can be pandered to by waving a flag in one hand and a Bible in the other. The actual teachings of the Gospel are unimportant as long as you claim to support traditional values (whatever that may mean), say God bless America enough, and get the right endorsements of ‘evangelical’ heavyweights. As long as you do those three things you can say whatever you want to. You can propose to carpet-bomb all of Syria to get rid of ISIS, you can say you want to kill the families of suspected terrorists, and you can call all Mexicans in the United States rapists. It doesn’t matter that those statements and positions are completely antithetical to the Gospel Jesus proclaimed. You can still win the ‘evangelical’ vote.

For these two reasons I’m ready to join Russell Moore in saying that If that’s what being an evangelical is all about then I want nothing to do with it.

While I don’t carry that label (or any label for that matter) on my sleeve, I still have trouble abandoning it altogether, and here is why. The word “evangelical” is based on a beautiful and important Greek work euangelion, good news. So, evangelicals, I would suppose, are those who are supposed to be sharing the good news that Jesus proclaimed, the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus came announcing a Kingdom that runs contrary to our world. Where the outsiders are welcomed in, where the poor have dignity and are empowered, where the table is always big enough for everyone to join together in communion. Jesus proclaimed a kingdom of peace, whose peacefulness was not maintained by the threat of force but by love, hope, mercy, and grace. Jesus taught us that God wants us to join in living and proclaiming the kingdom that sees no racial, ethnic, cultural, or ideological difference as so insurmountable that community isn’t possible and love isn’t worth it.

If being evangelical means I spread that Good News, then I’m all in, but given all the baggage that term clearly carries, I don’t plan on using it much. You can just call me Blake.