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The Younger Evangelicals: facing the challenges of the New World
Robert Webber (Baker Books: Michigan, 2002)
reprinted from the September 2003 edition of Essentials

 

   Robert Webber is a major evangelical leader in the church in America. His interest in history, worship and how these two areas can revenue a dry Protestantism have highlighted, for many, new and refreshing insights. While I would disagree with Webber on significant points in his previous books, it is this, his more recent book that may become one of his best and most significant contributions to the evangelical world. Peter Wilson is minister of St George's Anglican Church, Monbulk in Melbourne. He is currently working on a paper on Astrology as part of a Masters degree on New Age spirituality. This article first appeared in Working Together (2003/2), the journal of the Australian Evangelical Alliance.
   The Younger Evangelicals focuses on three major streams within Evangelicalism: the traditional, the pragmatic, and the younger evangelical. Traditional evangelicals are those align themselves with post-world-war-two evangelicalism. Pragmatic evangelicals who align themselves with "new ideas such as those introduced by the church growth movement, the mega church movement, contemporary worship, and seeker churches" (page 15). Webber's book is a description of the emerging involvement that he calls the younger evangelicals who are different again from either traditional or pragmatic and generally born post 1975.
   The book is broken up into three sections: Part 1, Introduction to the Younger Evangelicals; Part 2, The Younger Evangelical Thinkers; and Part 3, The Younger Evangelical Practitioners. Part 1 of the book is the section I enjoyed the most because Webber traces the inception of the evangelical movement through to the end of the twentieth century and highlights both the diversity and complexity of it. His analysis helped me to understand some of my own frustrations towards other evangelicals and something of their frustrations with me. Webber argues that evangelicals are in conflict with each other because they misunderstand each other. Primarily, this conflict is because of cultural shifts and the changes from a modern world to a post-modern world. Webber contends that in both contexts, modern and post-modern, evangelicals are applying the gospel but different contexts call for different application and focus.
  For this reason alone the book ought to be read by everyone who calls themself an evangelical. Webber calls for greater awareness and understanding from evangelicals towards each other. It is an important call. One hopes that this call might become a marvelous opportunity to open up to each other in deep discussion; and affirmation of a commitment to evangelism in each context; and praise to God for his ongoing mercy that evangelicalism continues to touch the lives of people through the gospel.  
        


       
 

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