Last week Eric Metaxas talked about Russell Moore’s appearance at the Justice Conference in Chicago. Moore challenged the 2,500 young evangelicals there to expand their notion of “justice” beyond the popular issues of helping immigrants and the victims of sex trafficking to include the dignity of human life, the rights of children to have mothers and fathers, and the need for sinners to embrace the good news of Christ.
In other words, we must carefully define “justice” if we want to be champions of justice.
And speaking of definitions, the Justice Conference is sponsored by World Relief, the relief and development arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. As such, the group has helped tens of thousands of people in crisis and poverty around the world.
But this gathering wasn’t typical of what’s often defined as “evangelical.” The mission of the event, according to Stephen Bauman, CEO of World Relief, was to “bring out the broader voice of justice and let people decide what’s true, what’s right.” And yet, the conference invited several well-known progressive, non-evangelical speakers such as Cornel West and Father Michael Pfleger. Another speaker, Mark Charles, referred to the Declaration of Independence as “systemically racist” and told the crowd, “Everything you own is stolen.”
Mark Tooley of the Institute of Religion and Democracy rightly replied that the Declaration, though delivered to us by imperfect men and lived out imperfectly ever since, has served as a beacon of freedom and human dignity around the world.
But then there’s this: two of the conference’s most prominent “evangelical” speakers—Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis—have rejected the historic Christian teaching on marriage. Now today it’s those issues in particular—on marriage, sexuality, and identity—that create the question: what is an evangelical, anyway? Within evangelicalism, is the historic biblical position on sexuality up for grabs?
Continue reading BreakPoint – What Really Makes Someone an Evangelical Anyway?
