In 1951 Bill Bright and his wife, Vonette, made a simple sort of 'contract' with Jesus. They pledged all their resources to the spread of the gospel. Then they sold their food business and later an Oklahoma oil drilling company. And they used the finances thereby gained to help found Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC). Today CCC is perhaps the largest Christian para-church organisation in the world. It works in 191 countries, has a full-time staff of 26,000 as well as more than 225,000 trained volunteers.
On July 19 Dr. Bill Bright died. He may not be the last famous post-war evangelical pioneer to die in the next year or so. While wishing to avoid all reference to Mark Twain's famous quip about his prematurely reported passing ('Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated'), both John Stott and Billy Graham are, after all, in their 80s.
What is an evangelical?
Other less concrete reasons too beckon the question of evangelicalism's future. Its very size gives rise to concerns about its breadth. Does the word 'evangelical' really mean much anymore? Are we not often forced to qualify the term, speaking of being a 'conservative evangelical' or a 'classic evangelical'? Some I have heard suggest jettisoning the term altogether. And then there are questions about evangelicalism's relation to the church. Obviously, in England this is dominated currently by the issue of evangelicals in the Church of England and the current Archbishop of Canterbury. But there is a more foundational question. Does evangelicalism need to have a better concept of church? Where is the sense of church discipline? Does not the gospel entail discipleship and committed involvement with a local church? Should not then evangelicalism insist upon moral discipline, and a pure equally-yoked connection with other evangelical believers? Surely it must; but then why so often has it not, and what then about the future?
