Heading for the door

As, this month, Joel Edwards stands down from his role as General Director of Evangelical Alliance, he gave an interview to EN.

EN: In what ways do you think evangelicalism has changed during your time at E?

JE: So much has changed. When I started at the EA, Spring Harvest was only an infant idea and Word Alive did not exist. I can remember Nicky Gumbel telling me about a new course called Alpha. In the past 20 years the evangelical world has exploded into action. Care for the Family, Soul Survivor, Christianity Explored, On the Move, RUN, Faithworks, Global Day of Prayer, 24/7 and Theos Ð I could go on, but these are all by-products of our burgeoning evangelical confidence.

As I head for the door I have a lot to be grateful for. I have never known so much evangelical confidence in prayer, evangelism, and political and social action. We have come a long way since our groundbreaking Salt and Light consultation and our leadership conferences in the 1980s. Those events raised the bar on evangelical mission in the world and I suspect spawned fresh confidence in social engagement.

Networks and drifting apart

I am pleased to see the rich and unprecedented levels of networks of missional relationships across the UK and the US. There is a flavour of the Spirit as God spawns big transformational ideas over cappuccinos! I suspect it will keep happening. And it’s been great to see the cross-fertilisation of cultures and friendships without feeling it was all my responsibility to get black Christians to talk to white ones!

Having said that, on the down side, I have been saddened to watch a quiet drift taking place between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ evangelicals, which deepened and accelerated in the aftermath of the Toronto phenomena. This is something we really need to attend to in the future if the world is to know us for what we stand for rather than what we disagree on.

A lot of people have asked me about my best achievements. I find this really hard to evaluate. But if I have helped to reposition evangelical witness to be better understood and Christ as more accessible I will be pleased.

EN: You have just finished a country-wide tour of the UK promoting Christian Values. Who has influenced your thinking as you have wrestled with the issues of social involvement?

JE: The tour was to present and expand on the content of my new book An Agenda for Change. It was a huge privilege to go to some 25 centres across the UK and share the message, which is essentially the culmination of my 20 years in the broadest alliance of evangelicals in the UK, and which the Council and staff have embraced as our mission. It is a mission to present Christ credibly, to challenge evangelicals to inhabit the profound meaning of ‘gospel’ as good news, and to go beyond short-term thinking to become a community of people committed to long-term spiritual and cultural change. The tour was an attempt to do more than espouse Christian values Ð although I believe in them! It was a rallying call for evangelicals to reconsider the power, authority and credibility of an undomesticated Christ who can change people and communities if we are willing to go beyond the safety nets of our evangelical subcultures to be good news in the public square.

My thinking has been influenced by my own experiences as much as other people’s work. I come from the school of thought which believes experience illuminates the Word (Acts 15.12-15). So 14 years as a probation officer, which overlapped ten years of pastoral work, convinced me that the gospel was about praxis as much as words. But along that journey my thinking has been enriched and challenged by the Lausanne Movement and John Stott who helped to dislodge me from the dualism often found in the holiness tradition.

But I was also deeply challenged by Stott’s good friend John Perkins, plus Tim Chester, Jim Wallis, Chris Wright, Tom Sine and many others who helped me realise that social action is not the same as the social gospel. As Alistair McGrath said to me when I interviewed him for the book: ‘The social gospel got one thing right and everything else wrong: what God has joined together let no man put asunder!’

Gospel and moralism

EN: Does emphasising Christian values give the impression that the gospel is about how we live more than what Christ has done?

JE: Yes it does give that impression. But we all know that impressions are not necessarily real and I believe Christians often respond to some components of the good news about Jesus as though it were the whole story. But I’m not at all interested in talking about Christian values in that sense. An Agenda for Change is about the uniqueness of Christ, his Lordship in a plural society and how evangelicals tackle the challenges of being good news in this context. Christian lifestyle and citizenship become vital in that context.

Emerging church

EN: EA has recently supported the tour by Brian McClaren. What do you think the emerging church movement has to contribute to our understanding of our mission?

JE: We were very pleased to support Brian’s tour and I was very pleased that he agreed to endorse my book. Brian has also attended the Lambeth Conference where I am writing. The Evangelical Alliance relationship with Brian shouldn’t necessarily be construed as unqualified endorsement for his theology — the EA is a broad evangelical presence. You don’t have to tick every box to value someone’s contribution.

The new and emerging expression of church has a great deal to offer the rest of us. Generally they are passionate about mission and therefore critique the church in relation to its mission. They are not congenitally ecclesiastical Luddites! In fact, I would suggest that whatever we make of emerging communities, their primary passion is mission. Our responsibility is not to cross the road when we see them coming but to sit alongside them for as long as we are able to ensure that we learn about their new thinking about engagement, and offer them the benefits of our insights. In the absence of that dialogue new ideas can get lost along the way.

I imagine John Wesley was a fresh expression! If the Church of England had known what to do with him we might have had a revitalised Anglicanism rather than the start of Methodism. But then again Methodists may think that was a good thing!

Substitutionary atonement

EN: In your book you mention painful discussions about the atonement. At the time of the debate you said that those who drew up the Basis of Faith understood that it meant penal substitution. Do you still think that this lies at the heart of the biblical gospel? If it does what do you say about those who reject it?

JE: That debate was the dark night of my soul. That’s because I am a classical Pentecostal and penal substitution is central to our understanding of what God did on the Cross. The Evangelical Alliance made its views quite clear following those debates. But those were such dark times because it was so hard for me to disagree with a good friend, someone I admire and still love very much. Quite frankly, however, what I will do with those who reject penal substitution isn’t that important in the greater scheme of things. What God will do with them at the gates of heaven is far more important. Until someone brings me conclusive evidence that they are so wrong that God himself has disowned them forever I will still call them beloved family members with whom I disagree.

EN: The penal substitution debate revealed a whole cluster of fault lines which run through broad evangelicalism Ð on things like the authority of Scripture, the new perspective on justification, the nature of God and open theism, etc. Do you think that this calls for a new re-alignment of those who hold to a classic evangelicalism?

JE: That sounds like the content for two or three books! One of the things which baffles me about evangelicalism is its ability to embrace Reformed and Arminian soteriologies in the same family of believers. I have no recollection of either camp anathematising the other: but I also know that that was not the case when the debate first exploded in the 16th century.

Re-alignment sounds a little too contrived for me. But I do think that we need quite urgently to listen to each other again. The easy option is to ‘listen’ from the polemic positions of our tribal publications, but what we really need is to be in the same room together and prayerfully listen with our Bibles opened on the same pages.

EN: Say a little about what you hope to do next. How can we pray for you?

JE: For the first time in our history 191 governments signed up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 — eight specific promises to reduce absolute poverty by 2015. In response, a small group of us were convinced that a global Christian movement, working as critical and prophetic partners with governments across the world, would be a very godly thing to set up. So, in October 2004, Micah Challenge was launched at the United Nations as a global Christian response to the MDGs. Today that ministry is present in 40 national campaigns across the world and has earned the respect of governments, civic society and church leaders around the world.

Last May the international board of Micah Challenge invited me to become its International Director beginning next January. Please pray for wisdom to make the transition and to set up new office systems here in London. Remember the Board and the very courageous national co-ordinators across the world, who often serve with little or no resources.

Above all please pray that God would give us great success in providing a biblical, prophetic and professional input which changes the world for hundreds of millions as we approach 2015 and beyond.

An interview with Joel Edwards