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Evangelical leaders are worried about the future of the movement.

That's one conclusion I reached after editing "What's Next?" in the October 2006 edition of Christianity Today. For that article, we asked more than 100 evangelical leaders about the challenges evangelicals face in a number of spheres: politics, higher education, culture, international justice, relief and development, and so on. Two quotes, in particular, suggest the nature of the worry.

Evangelist Greg Laurie: "The church has made such tremendous strides that now my only concern is that we're so cutting edge, we're so cool, and we're so hip. But are we still preaching the authentic gospel message?"

Franklin Graham of Samaritan's Purse: "The most important challenge that will face evangelical relief in the next 50 years is to make sure we don't dilute our faith as we respond to hurting people around the world."

This is not a new worry, of course. Theologian David Wells has for years complained about evangelical capitulation to culture:

Preaching finds its echoes in secular teaching and counseling. Evangelism finds its echoes in sales. Pastoral counseling finds its echoes in the efforts of the caseworker. Church ritual finds its echoes in the formal procedures of the court and legislature. And the administration of church programs finds its echoes in the management of countless secular organizations.

Looking back at the movement, historian David Bebbington, among others, has noted how the Wesleys' "optimism of grace" fit well the optimistic temper of the Enlightenment and how the Keswick movement's cultivation of the "victorious life" owed much to 19th-century romanticism. While evangelicals have been adept at adapting to culture, we have not always been able to retain a critical distance from it—being in the world, but not of it.

The reasons are many. Wells, for instance, says evangelicals have lost "their capacity to think theologically." Historian Mark Noll says it has a lot to do with the "scandal of the evangelical mind," which "may be addressed by the scandal of the cross" and by "an alteration of attitudes."

To such admonitions, many evangelicals say a hearty amen. Theologian Simon Chan is one such evangelical. But while applauding the analysis and suggestions of such thinkers, he asks, "How are evangelicals to change their attitudes? How are the essentials to be recovered?"

To answer these questions, Chan outlines a theology of the church that appears to have great potential for stopping evangelical cultural accommodation in its tracks.

Chan is Earnest Lau Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological College in Singapore and author of a number of books, most recently Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community (InterVarsity, 2006), in which he outlines his ecclesiology.

Chan is not the first to zero in on ecclesiology. From the Chicago Call of 1977 to recent compendiums—like John Stackhouse's Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion? (Baker) and The Community of the Word: Toward an Evangelical Ecclesiology (InterVarsity), edited by Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier—a number of evangelicals have suggested that our theology of the church lies at the root of many evangelical problems. But Chan's book is not a complaint. Rather, it presents a sustained argument from a single, coherent point of view, biblically and historically grounded, which can enable the church to withstand the temptation of cultural accommodation.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11