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That daily experience—easy to summarize in a glib sentence, but quite different in the living—has not changed his fundamental convictions, nor even altered his politics much, but it has tempered him. At 50, he became a father for the first time. His wife is Joy Carroll, one of the first women to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. (They met on the speakers' platform at Britain's Greenbelt Festival in a panel on "What's the Point of Being an Evangelical?")

The first lesson for American Christians from Wallis's experience, then, is If you're going to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk. That does not mean that all true Christians are called to move to an inner-city neighborhood. It does mean that we cannot in good conscience continue to call ourselves followers of Christ if we fail to acknowledge his demands on our lives.

This would not come as news to our evangelical ancestors. The closest thing we have to an evangelical family album may be The Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, 1730-1860 (edited by Donald M. Lewis of Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., and published in two volumes in 1995). Here in condensed form are the lives of men and women from the founding generations of the modern evangelical movement. Again and again we read of conversions, of lives profoundly changed, of fervent preaching.

Some readers may be surprised to discover that these early evangelicals were social activists as well. The British evangelical crusade against slavery is well known, but that was only one of many such initiatives. Evangelicals founded hospitals, schools for the blind and for orphan girls, savings banks for working people, and homes for indigent sailors. They ministered to prostitutes, prisoners, and the mentally ill. Wherever they saw a problem, they attacked it. The gospel, they believed, demanded nothing less. Their Christian witness was a seamless whole in which the preaching of God's saving Word and the practice of Christ's love were woven together.

What happened to that resolve, that energy, that clear sense of a moral imperative? (Yes, sometimes blundering overconfidence—but those hospitals got built, and the homeless were given shelter.) Where among American evangelicals today do we find its like? How can we recover the Spirit-directed activism of our ancestors?

O ne place to look is the office of Sojourners/Call for Renewal. One of the evangelical traditions firmly maintained there is gratuitous ugliness. A handful of photos—Malcolm X, King, others of that vintage—adorn the walls, but in general I was reminded of the missionary offices I have frequented over the years. Another, more attractive tradition very much alive there is evangelical warmth of hospitality. When I visited, I was struck by the warmth of my hosts.

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June 14 1999, Vol. 43, No. 7