2 of 3

All of those stories see a glorious future.
Absolutely. And so does the Christian story.

Most of the "calls" and "covenants" issued by evangelical groups are created in some face-to-face meeting. But this call was crafted by e-mail and on the Web. How did that work?
It worked rather well, but it was very difficult, very time-consuming. I started off by just making a list of concerns. At various times, there were 36, 39, even up to 41 different items. We e-mailed them out broadly and said respond to this, and about 300 people responded. We read everything that came through. There wasn't a single response that wasn't seriously considered.

The way the call was developed dovetailed nicely with how the Web works. Once you put something out there, you really don't have control. We had people recommend the working document to other people, so then we would send them a copy of it.

And then one day, the current scheme just fell into place. Bang, it was there. In the end, there were four people who were e-mailing back and forth two or three times a week. And those are the four people who are called the theological editors.

So you and Phil Kenyon were conveners, and there were four theological editors, a 25-person board of reference, and a long list of participants.
And now we're sending it out for signatures. Soon we'll probably have 500 or 600 people.

Why did you take on this arduous process?
One of the things that drove me to put this together is the enormous diversity among evangelicals. There is no longer a common set of convictions around which evangelicalism evolves. One of the things I wanted to accomplish was to say that the items in this call are the fundamentals.

You sound like a fundamentalist.
God's story is no myth. It constitutes the fundamentals of the faith that are applicable to the life of the church in a postmodern world. I do not think that it's any different from any historic document that attempts to unite people, but it is articulated differently. The story-formed consciousness of the document is a new kind of hermeneutic; we're calling people into a united grasp of the Christian faith that restores the biblical narrative as the primary one from which all ministry derives.

The big problem is that we have compartmentalized the story, and we have tried to analyze each piece of the story and even prove it. In doing that, we've lost the story. We need to regain the fullness of the story and resituate all ministry within the story's fullness; modern evangelicals, by creating a faith of propositions, have divorced theological reflection from ministry. I hope to see that corrected.

Another key element in this document is a consciousness of the church. Why is it important always to think about the gospel in the context of the church?
God has always been about the business of creating a people to witness to himself. God calls a family into being with Abraham, calls a nation into being with Moses. And now God has called a universal body of people, the church, to be a continuation of the presence of Jesus in the world and thus a witness to the reality of God and to God's story.

I'm asking people to see all of history through the story of God. God's story is the substance of the church, its worship, its spirituality, and its life in the world.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9