A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future
Revised 36 - 5.12.06
Prologue
In every age the Holy Spirit calls the Church to examine its faithfulness to God’s
revelation in Jesus Christ, authoritatively recorded in Scripture and handed down through the
Church. Thus, while we affirm the global strength and vitality of worldwide Evangelicalism
in our day, we believe the North American expression of Evangelicalism needs to be
especially sensitive to the new external and internal challenges facing God’s people.
These external challenges include the current cultural milieu and the resurgence of
religious and political ideologies. The internal challenges include Evangelical
accommodation to civil religion, rationalism, privatism and pragmatism. In light of these
challenges, we call Evangelicals to strengthen their witness through a recovery of the faith
articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its guardians in the traditions of
Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical awakenings.
Ancient Christians faced a world of paganism, Gnosticism and political domination. In
the face of heresy and persecution, they understood history through Israel’s story,
culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of God’s Kingdom.
Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is confronted by a host of master narratives that
contradict and compete with the gospel. The pressing question is: who gets to narrate the
world? The Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future challenges Evangelical Christians to
restore the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God’s acts in history. The
narrative of God’s Kingdom holds eternal implications for the mission of the Church, its
theological reflection, its public ministries of worship and spirituality and its life in the
world. By engaging these themes, we believe the Church will be strengthened to address the
issues of our day.
1. On the Primacy of the Biblical Narrative
We call for a return to the priority of the divinely authorized canonical story of the Triune
God. This story—Creation, Incarnation, and Re-creation—was effected by Christ’s
recapitulation of human history and summarized by the early Church in its Rules of Faith.
The gospel-formed content of these Rules served as the key to the interpretation of Scripture
and its critique of contemporary culture, and thus shaped the church's pastoral ministry.
Today, we call Evangelicals to turn away from modern theological methods that reduce the
gospel to mere propositions, and from contemporary pastoral ministries so compatible with
culture that they camouflage God’s story or empty it of its cosmic and redemptive meaning.
In a world of competing stories, we call Evangelicals to recover the truth of God’s word as
the story of the world, and to make it the centerpiece of Evangelical life.
2. On the Church, the Continuation of God’s Narrative
We call Evangelicals to take seriously the visible character of the Church. We call for a
commitment to its mission in the world in fidelity to God’s mission (Missio Dei), and for an
exploration of the ecumenical implications this has for the unity, holiness catholicity, and
apostolicity of the Church. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away from an individualism
that makes the Church a mere addendum to God’s redemptive plan. Individualistic
Evangelicalism has contributed to the current problems of churchless Christianity,
redefinitions of the Church according to business models, separatist ecclesiologies and
judgmental attitudes toward the Church. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to recover their
place in the community of the Church catholic.
3. On the Church’s Theological Reflection on God’s Narrative
We call for the Church's reflection to remain anchored in the Scriptures in continuity with
the theological interpretation learned from the early Fathers. Thus, we call Evangelicals to
turn away from methods that separate theological reflection from the common traditions of
the Church. These modern methods compartmentalize God’s story by analyzing its separate
parts, while ignoring God’s entire redemptive work as recapitulated in Christ. Anti-historical
attitudes also disregard the common biblical and theological legacy of the ancient Church.
Such disregard ignores the hermeneutical value of the Church’s ecumenical creeds. This
reduces God’s story of the world to one of many competing theologies and impairs the
unified witness of the Church to God’s plan for the history of the world. Therefore, we call
Evangelicals to unity in “the tradition that has been believed everywhere, always and by all,”
as well as to humility and charity in their various Protestant traditions.
4. On Church’s Worship as Telling and Enacting God’s Narrative
We call for public worship that sings, preaches and enacts God’s story. We call for a
renewed consideration of how God ministers to us in baptism, eucharist, confession, the
laying on of hands, marriage, healing and through the charisms of the Spirit, for these actions
shape our lives and signify the meaning of the world. Thus, we call Evangelicals to turn away
from forms of worship that focus on God as a mere object of the intellect, or that assert the
self as the source of worship. Such worship has resulted in lecture-oriented, music-driven,
performance-centered and program-controlled models that do not adequately proclaim God’s
cosmic redemption. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to recover the historic substance of
worship of Word and Table and to attend to the Christian year, which marks time according
to God’s saving acts.
5. On Spiritual Formation in the Church as Embodiment of God’s Narrative
We call for a catechetical spiritual formation of the people of God that is based firmly on
a Trinitarian biblical narrative. We are concerned when spirituality is separated from the
story of God and baptism into the life of Christ and his Body. Spirituality, made independent
from God’s story, is often characterized by legalism, mere intellectual knowledge, an overly
therapeutic culture, New Age Gnosticism, a dualistic rejection of this world and a narcissistic
preoccupation with one’s own experience. These false spiritualities are inadequate for the
challenges we face in today’s world. Therefore, we call Evangelicals to return to a historic
spirituality like that taught and practiced in the ancient catechumenate.
6. On the Church’s Embodied Life in the World
We call for a cruciform holiness and commitment to God’s mission in the world. This
embodied holiness affirms life, biblical morality and appropriate self-denial. It calls us to be
faithful stewards of the created order and bold prophets to our contemporary culture. Thus,
we call Evangelicals to intensify their prophetic voice against forms of indifference to God’s
gift of life, economic and political injustice, ecological insensitivity and the failure to
champion the poor and marginalized. Too often we have failed to stand prophetically against
the culture’s captivity to racism, consumerism, political correctness, civil religion, sexism,
ethical relativism, violence and the culture of death. These failures have muted the voice of
Christ to the world through his Church and detract from God’s story of the world, which the
Church is collectively to embody. Therefore, we call the Church to recover its counter-
cultural mission to the world.
Epilogue
In sum, we call Evangelicals to recover the conviction that God’s story shapes the
mission of the Church to bear witness to God’s Kingdom and to inform the spiritual
foundations of civilization. We set forth this Call as an ongoing, open-ended conversation.
We are aware that we have our blind spots and weaknesses. Therefore, we encourage
Evangelicals to engage this Call within educational centers, denominations and local
churches through publications and conferences.
We pray that we can move with intention to proclaim a loving, transcendent, triune God
who has become involved in our history. In line with Scripture, creed and tradition, it is our
deepest desire to embody God’s purposes in the mission of the Church through our
theological reflection, our worship, our spirituality and our life in the world, all the while
proclaiming that Jesus is Lord over all creation.
© Northern Seminary 2006 Robert Webber and Phil Kenyon
Permission is granted to reproduce the Call in unaltered form with proper citation.
Sponsors:
Northern Seminary (www.seminary.edu)
Baker Books (www.bakerbooks.com)
Institute for Worship Studies (www.iwsfla.org)
InterVarsity Press (www.IVPress.com)
Eighth Day Books
This Call is issued in the spirit of sic et non; therefore those who affix their names to this Call need not agree with all its content. Rather, its consensus is that these are issues to be discussed in the tradition of semper reformanda as the church faces the new challenges of our time.
Over a period of seven months, more than 300 persons have participated via e-mail to write the Call. These men and women represent a broad diversity of ethnicity and denominational affiliation. The four theologians who most consistently interacted with the development of the Call have been named as Theological Editors. The Board of Reference was given the special assignment of overall approval.
For more information on The Call email: AEFCall@seminary.edu