I’m currently doing a revision and some rewriting of my book, Evangelical Spirituality: From the Wesleys to John Stott. The past 20 years have seen a huge increase in interest in Spirituality as a subject for scholarly activity and research. When I wrote Evangelical Spirituality in 1991 there was very little published on the Evangelical spiritual tradition. This is now changing, and Evangelicalism itself has become a major area of scholarly activity – the recently published Cambridge Companion to Evangelicalism is evidence that Evangelicals (a much more varied group than often supposed) are a substantial and important tradition.
So as I’m ploughing through the cosmetic reformatting, converting over 1500 endnotes and in-text references into newly formatted footnotes, and reconstructing and updating the bibliography; then I’ll do the revision and updating of the text. While doing all this, I’m being re-introduced to a community of saints, attractive or annoying, conciliatory or confrontational, melancholic or exultant, but whose love for Jesus transcends differences in temperament, diversity of experience and variety of theological emphases. As noted a couple of days ago when quoting R. W. Dale, (pictured) many earlier Evangelicals lived out their faith at profound levels of thought and spiritual experience. This meant that when I wrote the book I was able to follow through on my chosen approach – which was to take two contemporary significant Evangelical figures, and to compare and contrast their spiritual experiences, the way they lived the doctrines they believed, and how their theological emphases exerted leverage on lifestyle, spiritual discipline, relationships and social action.
The latest pair I dealt with was Martyn Lloyd Jones and John Stott. So here is the question –
if I were to write a further chapter, comparing and contrasting two contemporary leading Evangelicals, who should they be?
Who in their lives, Christian activity, writing, teaching stands anywhere near some of those earlier pairings – the two Wesleys, Whitefield and Edwards, Hannah More and Charles Simeon, D L Moody and Frances Havergal, Lloyd Jones and Stott, to mention only a few. I’d be interested to hear suggestions – is it just me, or am I right that there’s a dearth of people of stature, significant figures who both define Evangelicalism at its best and embody a tradition that is still living, growing and enriching the Body of Christ?
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