I was talking to a friend yesterday who started making fun of "evangelicals." Her shtick was that evangelicals are the idiots who scream into their microphones and rant about everyone and everything going to hell. When she asked if I were one of them, she was joking. I replied that my theological convictions are evangelical yet I don't tend to yell and I certainly don't regularly condemn people to hell from the pulpit or anywhere else for that matter. She was surprised that I would associate myself with evangelicals given her completely secular idea of what that means.
How do we reclaim ground once we have lost it? I don't have any idea whether her opinion of evangelicals was changed for the better given her regard for me or whether her opinion of me took a shocking hit given her disregard for evangelicals. She still has the image of what she has seen and heard that has formed her definition of evangelical long before she met me three years ago and she has current images that continue to shape her impression. She also has known me for three years and has become a good friend in that time in a context where she would never expect an evangelical to appear at all, much less be there weekly for three years, an AIDS food bank.
I wonder how helpful labels are when it comes to our religious identity when I have these kind of conversations. Secular people, by all polling data, have a decidedly negative opinion of evangelicals, which they view as judgmental flat-earth society type people who deny any scientific claims and advances by positing some very unlikely and silly sounding alternatives such as God put the fossil evidence in the rocks at creation to fool scientists in the 20th century. They don't take us seriously as thinking people and while that isn't my goal in life, it does matter if we are trying to reach them. Paul never apologizes for the cross which he says is folly to the world, and I don't either. If that attitude towards the cross were the mark of an evangelical rather than some of the other things people associate with that term it would be helpful in restoring some credibility to the title. We need, in some ways to recover the gospel and become truly evangelical and apostolic in the original sense of those terms rather than simply condemning all the time.
