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This article was first published in the July 17, 1981 25th anniversary edition of Christianity Today.

Christianity Today has been the prime agent in demarcating, informing providing morale for the neo-evangelical, now evangelical, movement, at least in North America. We who have awe for the printed word have to remind ourselves that Christianity Today is only a magazine and, as such, has limited power. But within those limits, it has in 25 years achieved something that is both gossamer and global. Gossamer, because the evangelical strands are wispy, tangled, and elusive. Global, because the evangelical net is covering ever more of the Christian world near the end of the second millennium Anno Domini.

A geographical image can illustrate the two main components. Picture the editors, first in Washington and now near Wheaton, looking out their windows in two directions. Northeasterly are the relics of evangelicaldom, where once their own spiritual ancestors thrived. Today they see valleys of dry bones, landscapes of empty cathedrals, eroding stones. Is a polar ice cap of the spirit to stretch from the steppes through secularized Scandinavia and reminiscently Christian Western Europe, through Canada and the American Frost Belt?

Christianity Today leadership 25 years ago began to aid conservative Christians who would try to witness new life in dry bones, try to rescue treasures on that landscape. From that world came ancient creeds that could still define truth. The Reformation evangel from that soil still held appeal. The editors, more at home with the "second-generation" movements that occur after passions and ambiguities diminish, found seventeenth-century Reform documents congenial. They also lived off the Pietism and Puritanism and then the Methodism and earlier evangelicalism that all suffused those more starkly scholastic formulas. The magazine could never abandon the believing remnant of European evangelicaldom, though it could report on little new fervor there.

The southerly view from the editorial windows featured the world of evangelism. Of course, evangelicaldom and evangelism are tangled together, but here let the two terms represent head and heart, reason and the affections, cultural artifact and soul hunger, mannered churchliness and individual fervor. Christianity Today leaders have been uneasy with "enthusiasm." But they knew they had to reckon with and, in positive ways, to exploit the more robust evangelism. Most of them had been born in its world.

In that vista, these journalists looked out on "south sides" of northern cities and talc American South, where black Christians were evangelistic though they seldom drew on the formulas and habits of evaligelicaldom The magazine seldom led the blacks, but it did welcome some leadership from black Protestantism. The white Sun Belt, whose population grew twice as fast as that of the Frost Belt these years, offered more promise. The editors and some of the swaggerers in boom-or-bust Sun Belt Protestantism distasteful, but they encouraged the more serious and restrained church leadership. Most of all, they did not scorn the millions who had once been disdained as "Bible Betters," but instead promoted the best of their values.

On that southern terrain not least of all in Latin America and Africa, but moving northward in influence, was Pentecostalism. The editors found it's "the-Spirit-talked-to-me-directly" versions abhorrent Sometimes even charismatic moderates seemed to be pushing the edges of older evangelical syntheses. But the Christianity Today demarcators drew many Pentecostals inside the boundaries of legitimacy and applauded the growth of the movement.

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48