For those interested:

Harold Heie (Senior Fellow for Christian Studies, Gordon College) made an announcement on Peter Enns’ blog (read “The Future of Evangelicalism”)  that he will be hosting a discussion on The Future of Evangelicalism with the participation of twenty other Christian scholars. David Bebbington’s “pillars of Evangelicalism” will be revisited during the series which will cover the following topics:

  1. Evangelicalism and the Broader Christian Tradition
  1. Evangelicalism and the Exclusivity of Christianity
  1. Evangelicalism and the Modern Study of Scripture
  1. Evangelicalism and Morality
  1. Evangelicalism and Politics
  1. Evangelicalism and Scientific Models of Humanity and Cosmic and Human Origins
  1. Evangelicalism and Higher Education

 

I thought I would notify readers of this blog since this is a topic adjacent to the series of post being written by JohnDave Medina and me.

Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, Time Magazine’s cover story this month is “The Rise of the Evangélicos” or Latino/a Evangelicals. To read the full article one had to be an online subscriber or find a hard copy of the magazine, but you can access a preview here.

Indirectly related to these discussions is Arlene Sánchez-Walsh’s blog post “Pentecostalism’s Long Road to Ruin?” which asks whether “critical intellectual inquiry” will be the demise of Pentecostalism. Sánchez-Walsh asks several provocative questions, including some about who should be the “gatekeepers” of orthodoxy and how one should define Pentecostalism’s purpose. I includes this link here because I find an interesting parallel between Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism at this stage in history: both originate (mostly) as American Christianities, both are younger movements, both flourished in the twentieth century, both face identity crises in the twenty first century. Similarly, one might ask whether the difference between the two (especially when reading the Time Magazine description of Lationo/a Evangélicos) will be easily discerned in the coming decades.