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Northern seminary's Bob Webber likes to tell this story. One day during his tenure at Wheaton College, a colleague remarked, "Webber, you act like there never was a Reformation."

Bob recalls saying, "You act like there never was an ancient church."

The trick for Protestants, of course, is to hold these two sources of our historical identity together, frequently returning to both periods to rediscover the wellsprings of our beliefs and our worship.

Without forsaking the achievements of the Reformation, Webber has long been known for calling our attention to the rich deposit of the ancient church's faith. Almost 30 years ago, he and a group of colleagues produced "The Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals." The document addressed a variety of ills by prescribing a healthy dose of historical consciousness: "We cannot be fully evangelical without recognizing our need to learn from other times and movements concerning the whole meaning of [the] gospel."

At the time, CT's Donald Tinder called the group "an ad hoc group of 46 comparatively unknown Christians … more or less identified with evangelical institutions or views." But despite the authors' relative obscurity, "The Chicago Call" made waves. CT published its text in full, and the editorial page cautiously commended it. Newsweek devoted its entire religion section to "The Chicago Call." And since 1977, evangelicals have been paying increasing attention to the early church.

Now comes another call with Bob Webber's fingerprints all over it. This one addresses different ills, but it retains some of the same historically minded prescriptions. The challenges addressed in "A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future" are external ("the current cultural milieu, and the resurgence of religious and political ideologies") and internal ("evangelicals' accommodation to civil religion, rationalism, privatism, and pragmatism").

Whereas the 1977 call addressed modern ills, this 2006 document focuses on issues in the emergent and postmodern discussions. But it does so from a very un-postmodern stance: Whereas postmoderns tend to fight against any "metanarrative," any grand, overarching story that claims to explain the meaning of history and existence, this call commends "God's story" as the single interpretive narrative by which the church must live.

Once again, CT publishes the text and commends it for study, dialogue, and even debate. In the next few pages, we interview Webber and his Northern Seminary colleague Phil Kenyon, and then provide the complete text of "A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future."

The call says, "Today, as in the ancient era, a pressing issue is who narrates the world." What does that mean?
There are a lot of proposed narratives of the world. Some people say, "Let's narrate the world by Communism." (They're still with us.) Others say, "Let's narrate the world by Islamic fundamentalism" or "Let's narrate the world by democracy." These are the three leading contenders. But God's kingdom is what narrates the world for Christians.

What do those stories say?
The Communist story arises out of an atheistic view and says we have to bring workers and management together to create a communal world. The Islamic fundamentalist story is that Allah will rule over the world through Muslims. One way to implement that is to get rid of all the infidels. The story of democracy says freedom is the most important thing.

All three stories are political. In a contest between Communism, Islam, and democracy, I'll go with democracy. But as Christians, we're about the politics of Jesus and about the politics of the kingdom. Our primary belongingness is to that realm, as opposed to any other political realm. So we're at odds with all earthly politics.

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September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9