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The Christian vision of the future now seems increasingly to belong to evangelicalism. The evangelical movement is coming more and more to constitute the mainstream of American Protestant Christianity-to the irritation of others who believe that they ought to have pride of place.

In a 1990 survey of the 500 fastest-growing Protestant congregations in the U.S., 89 percent were found to be evangelical. Scarcely any part of the world has remained untouched by the global renaissance of evangelicalism. Even Latin America, traditionally regarded as a stronghold of Roman Catholicism, is now expected to become numerically dominated by various forms of evangelicalism by the year 2025.

In Europe, evangelicalism has had a lesser impact and is often regarded as an English-language movement. The Church of England has been deeply affected, however, especially during the last two decades, by a resurgent evangelicalism within its ranks.

Young people are attracted to the movement, partly on account of its inherent spiritual and intellectual appeal and partly on account of the sense of well-being and optimism within its ranks.

The inspirational nature of the evangelical vision is now being supplemented by the forging of increasingly rigorous theological foundations, and its intellectual credibility has been enhanced by the growing number of academic theologians within its ranks. Head and heart are being brought together in a movement that is looking forward to the future with a sense of expectancy and anticipation. The future seems to beckon to evangelicalism, inviting it to advance and mature still further.

But will it? Will a movement that today seems to hold such promise for the future of Christianity become an irrelevance tomorrow?

Perhaps it will; nobody can say. But what can be said is this: Evangelicalism can never afford to take its recent successes and achievements for granted. There is evidence of weakness and complacency within its substantial ranks and, above all, a lack of willingness to look into the future and plan for what may lie there. Evangelicalism stands under the judgment of God, as a movement to which much has been given and from which much is demanded. It needs to look to its roots and foundations, continually asking how its gifts may be related to the needs of Christ's church and the furtherance of his gospel.

This task of self-examination must begin, however, by asking, Why is evangelicalism so attractive?

Some writers have a neat and tidy answer: Evangelicalism is attractive because it evades the real issues and offers cheap and easy fixes to complex problems. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong articulates this dismissive approach in his book "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism:" "The only churches that grow today are those that do not, in fact, understand the issues, and can therefore traffic in certainty. They represent both the fundamentalistic Protestant groups and the rigidly controlled conservative Catholic traditions."

The smug assumption behind his assertion is that the extent of one's popular appeal is inversely proportional to "understanding the issues." A more serious approach to the question of the growing appeal of evangelicalism would be to consider the factors that appear to motivate people to become and remain evangelicals. The following factors are known to be people's major considerations.

THE FAILURE OF 1960S LIBERALISM

One of the most alarming trends in twentieth-century Christianity, which reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, was a form of what Gabriel Fackre has termed "Christological heart-failure," grounded in the assumption that Christianity had become an irrelevance to modernity. The only hope, many radical thinkers in the mainline denominations believed, lay in modernizing Christianity.

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June 19 1995, Vol. 39, No. 7