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A friend who runs an inner-city shelter for drug addicts and homeless people made this observation: "I love evangelicals. You can get them to do anything. The challenge is, you've also got to soften their judgmental attitudes before they can be effective."

I have seen the truth of both statements.

You can indeed get evangelicals to do anything. Last year in Cape Town, I met Joanna Flanders Thomas, a dynamic and attractive woman of mixed race. At the most violent prison in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela spent several years of confinement, Joanna started visiting prisoners daily, bringing them a simple gospel message of forgiveness and reconciliation.

She earned their trust, got them to talk about their abusive childhoods, and pointed them to a better way of solving conflicts. The year before her visits began, the prison recorded 279 acts of violence; the next year there were two.

Two months later I traveled to Nepal, the world's only Hindu kingdom, a dirt-poor country where the caste system lives on. There I met with leprosy health workers from 15 nations, mostly European, who serve under an evangelical mission specializing in leprosy work. Historically, most of the major advances in leprosy treatment have come from Christian missionaries—mainly because, as my friend put it, "You can get them to do anything." I met well-trained surgeons, nurses, and physical therapists who devote their lives to caring for leprosy victims, many of them of the Untouchable caste. Several of the missionaries had run the Katmandu marathon, and two had taken a wild motorcycle trek across mountains and rivers into neighboring Tibet. None that I met fit the stereotype of "uptight, right-wing evangelicals," yet all would claim the word evangelical.

From Nepal I went to Beijing, China, where I attended an international church, 2,000-strong, comprising members from 60 nations. An African dance troupe led the music that morning, and the rented hotel meeting room rocked. I met diplomats, business executives, an Oxford philosophy professor, and platoons of young evangelicals who had moved to China in order to teach English and in the process communicate their faith to the Chinese.

Later I met representatives from the Chinese underground church. In the last 30 years, despite periodic government crackdowns, the house-church movement has burgeoned into perhaps the largest Christian awakening in history. Some experts estimate that 70 million Chinese now worship in house churches.

One of the leaders met with me even though authorities had explicitly forbidden it. "I'm 89 years old and I've already spent 23 years in prison," he said defiantly. "What are they going to do to me?"

When I return from such trips and read profiles in Time and Newsweek about U.S. evangelicals, I feel sad. Many Americans view evangelicals as a monolithic voting bloc obsessed with a few moral issues. They miss the vibrancy and enthusiasm, the good-newsness that the word evangelical represents in much of the world. Evangelicals in Africa bring food to prisoners, care for aids orphans, and operate mission schools that train many of that continent's leaders. There, and in Asia and Latin America, evangelicals also manage micro-enterprise loan programs that allow families to buy a sewing machine or a flock of chickens. About a third of the world's 2 billion Christians fall into a category to which the word evangelical applies, a large majority of whom live outside North America and Europe.

A friend of mine visiting a barrio in São Paulo, Brazil, began to feel anxious as he noticed the minions of drug lords patrolling the neighborhood with automatic weapons. The streets narrowed to dirt paths, plastic water pipes dangled overhead, and a snarl of wires tapped power from high-voltage lines. The stench of sewer was everywhere.

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June 2005, Vol. 49, No. 6