Mennonite Weekly Review

“True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant,” the Dutch Anabaptist leader Menno Simons wrote in 1539. He went on to describe what a wide-awake evangelist ought to do. The list included acts of mercy — feeding the hungry, consoling the oppressed — as well as teaching the Word of God, praying for persecutors, returning good for evil and seeking “that which is lost.”

Menno embraced an evangelical identity. His spiritual descendants should too. In doing so, we should understand how we fit — and in some ways don’t fit — the modern definition of “evangelical.”

Stripped of 21st-century baggage, “evangelical” means gospel, or good news. Menno was right to describe a good-news faith as one that feeds both body and soul. Works of love and words of truth are both evangelical. It’s a wonderful, inclusive term.

But words evolve. In the United States, evangelicals traditionally have been known as those who occupy a middle ground between fundamentalism and mainline Christianity. Many Americans today see evangelicalism leaning to the right, or even encompassing all of conservative Christianity. According to Brian McLaren, a Christian writer popular in some Mennonite circles, a common judgment of evangelicals is “fundamentalists of a slightly less narrow-minded and arrogant attitude.”

Aiming for a higher goal, McLaren makes a distinction Mennonites might find useful. In his 2004 book, A Generous Orthodoxy, McLaren suggests Christians can be “small e” evangelicals, different from the “Big E” version of the religious right.

He defines lower-case evangelicalism as “an attitude toward God and our neighbor and our mission that is passionate.” He believes this brand of faith is more loving and less judgmental, more involved and less isolated, more compassionate and less critical, more generous and less controlling, than “Big E” Evangelicalism.

As Christians with at least one foot in the evangelical stream, Mennonites face choices that are more important than words and capital letters. We must decide what true evangelical faith means to us.

In the June-July issue of Christian Leader, the U.S Mennonite Brethren magazine, Tabor College professor Richard Kyle encourages MBs to follow an Anabaptist version of evangelicalism rather than a American one.

Kyle observes that many U.S. evangelicals have confused American culture with the Christian faith. They may even believe America’s political and economic systems are divinely inspired. They have “sanctified … consumerism and middle-class values” and “pander[ed] unashamedly to the popular tastes of American culture.”

To avoid this evangelical trap, Kyle says, MBs should “assert the historic Anabaptist attributes — namely, the lordship of Christ, discipleship, social justice, the believers’ church, peace, separation of church and state and community as an alternative to rampant individualism.”

Kyle isn’t asking Mennonite Brethren to renounce evangelicalism. He’s suggesting they stand out as evangelical Anabaptists rather than blend in as generic evangelicals.

This message applies to all Mennonites. Whether we identify with U.S. evangelicalism a little or a lot, all can aspire to a true evangelical faith as defined by Scripture and our Anabaptist founders.