Evangelicalism wears many hats these days. To the academics, it rings “inerrancy”, “Reformation”, “gospel”, “First Awakening”, “puritanism”, “pietism”, and more. To the general public, it represents a political faction that emerged since the W. Bush era, an impression that pundits from Rush Limbaugh to Rachel Maddow might incur. But taking that away, when focusing on the mere Christian tradition of the word, I suspect the larger evangelical community has only a distant memory of what evangelicalism is about. The Christian movement that was once the life force of Protestantism now struggles with a fading identity that leads to an existential crisis. The consequence is more than the eclipse of a brand but involved with our understanding of Christianity in America as a whole.
Echoing what John Stott says in Christ in Conflict, I believe that evangelical Christianity is “true” and “original”. By that, I am appealing to its methodology and not its doctrine. In other words, I am advocating the movement’s spirit in expounding the original intention of the biblical authors, insistence on the infallacy of the biblical message, and its mandate in engaging with the culture. This website is created for the purpose of witnessing how an evangelical Christian engaged with the world. I picked the Michelangelo’s painting of God touching Adam as the face of this website not only for aesthetic reason but also its symbolic message. Christianity in America has taken herself away from mainstream culture for so long that we have rendered ourselves irrelevant, and the world largely looked at us in agreement. The Church needs to re-engage with the world as God is reaching out to touch Adam in the painting. In doing so, we will need to look both inward to ourselves and outward to the world at the same time.