How To Understand Your Evangelical Friend

By Rob Bryceson

When you pastor a church that’s part of a denomination called The Evangelical Covenant, you often get asked “What does Evangelical mean?” When most people hear the word, they usually think of Caucasian, right-wing Republican conservatives who are anti-abortion, anti-welfare, church-going Christians who want lower taxes and think prayer in schools will solve our social ills.

Because the press defines the term for our culture, it seems to have become a description of a kind of political movement rather then what it really is; a religious belief system. What holds Evangelicals loosely together isn’t politics at all, but rather, an approach to understanding God through Jesus Christ and the Bible.

The National Association of Evangelical’s produces the following statements of Faith

1. We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.
2. We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
3. We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory.
4. We believe that for the salvation of lost and sinful people, regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential.
5. We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life.
6. We believe in the resurrection of both the saved and the lost; they that are saved unto the resurrection of life and they that are lost unto the resurrection of damnation.
7. We believe in the spiritual unity of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ.

All Evangelicals would hold to these tenets. There are lots of people going to Evangelical churches who actually are not Evangelical. For our church and denomination it’s simplified. On our denominational website under beliefs you would read, “When new members join a Covenant church, they are asked two questions about belief: Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior and promise to follow him as Lord? and Do you accept the Holy Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, as the word of God and the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct? They are then asked if they intend to live as faithful followers of Christ and members of the church and denomination.” This last sentence is actually implied in the acceptance of following the holy Scriptures. We tack on the denominational ending for our tribe but other Evangelicals of course would not.

Actually we would be seen as pretty liberal by most ordinary Evangelicals. What makes us weird is that we allow women to be ordained and hold positions of top leadership in a church. We do water baptisms for both infants and believers. We don’t produce a doctrinal statement on many of the secondary issues of faith and practice like miraculous sign gifts (i.e. tongues, prophecy and healing), end times events (eschatology), or predestination (God elects those chosen for heaven or hell in advance). That makes us liberal by other Evangelical standards. In fact, among all Evangelicals there are a lot of doctrine and belief differences.

We have a retired psychologist named Frank who hangs out at our coffee shop and he told me that psychologists and psychiatrists are constantly being reminded that just because you can diagnose someone from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual doesn’t mean you know anything about them. In our modern era of social media and short-attention-span-headline-reading-only-populace, we think because we can give a person or a group a label we have diagnosed them and know all we need to know. We’re wrong of course.

If you want to learn to talk to your Evangelical friend here are some helpful hints:

First – The Bible gets the final say. We study the Bible a lot; alone, in groups and during church services. Your serious Evangelical friend has a least two Bibles in different translations and probably more. We like study Bibles were we get maps, footnotes on history and geography, cross-references, and all kinds of extra encyclopedic information included in our Bible. If you don’t have a study Bible and mention to your Evangelical friend that you were thinking about getting one, she will probably get one for you as a gift in less than a week. If your Evangelical friend doesn’t have a study Bible, you know they’re a newbie.

You need to know that all of our thinking, behavior, ethics, values, morals, choices, and decisions get filtered through the Bible. This is getting tougher and tougher for us pastors because so many of our people come in completely biblically illiterate. However, if you’re going to engage with an Evangelical you have to understand that you can’t just dismiss the Bible and pull your belief systems from the consensus of society and the culture at large. We believe all cultures are manmade and have certain components naturally hostile to God and his ways. We call this “The World” or “The World System.” We work on not conforming to the culture but being prepared to oppose it where it’s wrong, even if we don’t agree with each other on which aspects of society are godly or not.

Second – We aren’t organized as single power group. There is actually no leadership structure among Evangelicals. There are national and local associations, but many Evangelicals don’t participate and it has no authority over individuals or churches. Evangelicals are found in many different denominations from Lutherans and Presbyterians to Seventh-day Adventists and Southern Baptists. Charismatics and Pentecostals are all Evangelical and so are Reformed churches. There’s just too many to name. Evangelicals are strong among the black churches and Hispanic Protestants. I’ve never seen an Asian Protestant church that wasn’t Evangelical but that may just be my tribal circle.

There isn’t an authoritative structure among Evangelicals, so often in our magazines, social media circles and conferences we resort to Christian celebrity status for our cues. Billy and Franklin Graham, of course, are familiar names, but there are many others. Our favorite authors and conference speakers are people like Beth Moore, Francis Chan, TD Jakes, and Max Lucado to name some diversity. They are just a few of hundreds though. There are Evangelical radio stations, music companies, book publishers and online news sites and magazines, Relevantmagazine.com, ChristianPost.com, ChristianityToday.com, and its subsidiary Leadership Journal, Charisma-magazine.com, to name a few. I can’t tell you how many times articles and headlines have the phrase, “Mega-church pastor, so and so,” . . . I guess the large churches and leaders are somehow supposed to be our superheroes and have more say than other Evangelicals. At least they end up being the spokespeople when Evangelical publications are looking for quotes and opinions. Secretly though, all of us who don’t attend their churches don’t really care what they think. Don’t assume the mega-church pastor speaks for us.

Lastly – We don’t care if you call us hypocrites and we’re too polite to argue with you about it. We see ourselves as always being under construction. Jesus is working on each of us individually to become more like him and he’s sanding off the aspects of our character and thinking that aren’t fitting for his kingdom. We already know that we’ve got a long way to go but the standard of measure isn’t me or your Evangelical friend. The standard of measure is the Bible and we don’t’ dumb it down to suite ourselves. If you think that telling us we’re falling short of the standards deconstructs our whole belief system, you’re mistaken. If you’re going to challenge us, it has to be on ways we aren’t following the Scriptures. Please don’t say stupid stuff like quoting some obscure Old Testament passage you read on Facebook and now you think you’re informed enough to challenge our beliefs and practices. Evangelicals who’ve been in church for a long time have studied the Bible way more than you realize and we’re too polite to get into arguments over things. As a result you might mistake our silence as cowardice or as admitting defeat. It isn’t.

I was dropping off my daughter at a huge Christian-band-rock-concert-worship-show at the arena a few months ago. The line was stretched from the main doors all the way down to the Flour Mill and along the street to David’s Pizzeria and turned north again wrapping the entire block. Some guy was there on a megaphone preaching hellfire and damnation to the people in line and no one said a word to him. They were too polite. I know they were all thinking “Why is he preaching to this crowd?” as they stared at him in confusion or tried to ignore him.

My daughter who used to work at Tickets West said that the heavy metal crowds were the most polite and the country were the drunkest and rudest. We all know why he’d blast his preaching megaphone at this mostly Evangelical Christian crowd. He knew no one was ever going to scream at him to “SHUT THE #@%* UP” and punch him in the mouth. I wonder if he plans on being at the upcoming Carrie Underwood show?

Rob Bryceson is co-authoring a new feature on SpokaneFāVS called “Ask An Evangelical.”