Written by: gfesadmin on February 28, 2013

…time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecclesiastes 9:11

Throughout the past two hundred plus years of world history, much has changed.  Horse drawn wagons have given way to automobiles.  Hand written letters have given way to instantaneous text messaging.  Stories of far away lands have given way to sitting on your couch and connecting with them visually every evening via your 52 inch HD screen.  Change is all around us, yet for many in the Evangelical movement they would submit that there has been little change in their thoughts since the first century. Evangelicalism in it’s age has been around roughly 250 years.  During that same time period, culture, global health, lifespan and industrialization have pressed great change and more specifically how evangelicalism is interpreted within culture.  Please watch this statistical analysis performed by Hans Rosling a world health expert.

Missiology scholar David Hesselgrave writes, “Though Christianity is supra-cultural in its origin and truth, it is cultural in its application.” We apply Christianity in the midst of identities that have been greatly shaped by our heritage and culture.

This past week while reading Evangelicalism In Modern Britain by D.W. Bebbington I was struck by his claim that Evangelicalism is bound up in the flux of world, regional and local cultural events.  Each culture providing a context in which those participating in Evangelicalism interpret understanding and then action. These outward expressions will vary greatly depending on the cultural norms of ones society.

We Are Shaped by Culture

High Culture and Evangelical Opinion… Bebbington states, “The process of change can best be seen as a pattern of diffusion.  Ideas originating in high culture have spread to leaders of Evangelical opinion and through them to the Evangelical constituency. By this means novelties of one age have become the commonplaces of the next.” Much like today, high culture affluence in Britain had great impact on key leaders within Evangelicalism.  Once these leaders spoke, forms would be inculcated as biblical presidents regardless of their scriptural basis or not.  A similar diffusion pattern existing in global health. For instance in the late 1700’s people still believed, that disease was spread by bad odors. It was also assumed that diseases of the body resulted from sins of the soul. The idea was generated, and then disseminated to all.

Secular Press and Popular Protestantism…Throughout the past 250 years in Britain and subsequently world wide, popular protestantism has been among the chief organizations dispensing creative and technological ideas running only parallel to the secular press.  People will often listen with greater intentionality to the news and those speaking with clergy identification.  Often, this information would travel through two main dimensions, the spatial and social. Ideas and creative thoughts would travel down from the elite to the common people and then outwards from the center to other peoples and lands.

200 Years in Four Minutes

Change is inevitable!

How are you being shaped by culture?

What forms have you accepted as norms which may be more cultural?

How has Evangelicalism changed you? How is it changing?

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