Are Evangelicals an Endangered Species?
Tim Suttle offered some thoughts on the Huffington Post a few days ago about the state of evangelicalism and what is needed to keep it from going the way of the dinosaurs. In an atmosphere of increasing division and conflict, he offers mission as a unifying center that will keep evangelicalism vibrant. Rather than becoming more and more fractured along theological lines, is it possible for the church to set aside our differences and come together to serve? Let’s hope so.
From the article:
Theological diversity is nothing to fear. The Gospel doesn’t need people who will defend it. The Gospel needs people who will become transformed by it and live it out. That’s mission. And even if it does need defenders, the best defense of the Gospel is not an attack on the heterodox — it is a people who have been transformed by the love of God into instruments of redemption, learning to live in fidelity to God and each other no matter what our doctrinal disagreements. A people who have been formed in self-sacrificial love and theological humility of the one, the holy, the catholic and the apostolic — these are the marks of the church. Where these are absent, the church has ceased to be faithful and will most certainly falter.