Reinventing English Evangelicalism - History Explained

Categories: spiritual-journey, evangelicalism

Date: 02 December 2008 10:48:27

There are books which you come across every so often that make you go ah-ha, that explains it or I can identify with what (s)he's saying there. Reinventing English Evangelicalism1966-2001 by Rob Warner is one of those books. As ususal this is a book which came out a while ago, (last year), but it's one I think is well worth flagging up.

I picked it up to read for the research, but came away having heard my self responding, several times, in the ways described above. It's a book which looks at pan-evangelicalism in England during the late 20th century, focusing primarily on the Evangelical Alliance, Spring Harvest and Alpha amongst other things.

I was a Baptist teenager and then twentysomething, during the 1980's and 90's and so my life followed a predictable path as I entered the "evangelical bubble". I did attend Spring Harvest a number of times, particularly in the 1990's, and yes I think it was there I got sucked into joining both the EA and Care for the Family for a while because of some special offer, together with having encountered the personality which was Clive Calver.

I have done Alpha, although I was one of the numerous people who did it when I'd been a Christian for a number of years and should probably have been banned from going anywhere near it.

During this period I developed a faith which involves me being almost a spiritually scizophrenic, i.e. veering towards strict Calvinist one one side and then fluffy hippy spirituality on the other. Until reading this book I never quite understood why, but now I do. I grew up in that age well after the EA had nearly blown apart and Martyn Lloyd Jones and John Stott were arguing it out, but the fall out from that and the whole charismatic debate were influencing my experience in "the average church". There were huge power battles going on that I didn't really get at the time, particularly being from a non-Christian home.  By the time I would have been old enough to understand there was a happy medium being reached and Spring Harvest, EA and Alpha were beginning to be in the ascendancy. but much of the teaching I'd grown up with definatley came from the traditional Calvinist end of things - oh and yes I did spend some time in a strongly UCCF CU. Add into that the radical Greenbelt teaching and you have the mix that influenced my thinking.

As for where I am now, well I'm a classic post-conservative - I guess. I want to hold onto my heritage which is why I desperately try to hold onto being evangelical, but at the end of the day simply being Christian is most important.

All of that is a long way of recommending anybody in their late 20's to early 40's who has been / is evangelical, and wants to understand about their history and how it was constructed, to read this book.

For an extensive, and excellent grown up, academic and less personalised review of the book which goes into much more depth see Andy Goodliff's three part review, (part 1, part 2, part 3).