VIDEO: Am I an Evangelical?- Perspectives from Women and Black Christians
Recent polls indicating strong white evangelical support for morally-questionable political candidates coupled with ongoing racial tensions within evangelical churches and institutions has compelled many Christians to ask, “Am I an evangelical?”
We asked a panel of women and black Christians to discuss this question and give perspectives we sometimes don’t get to hear. Panelists include: Ekemini Uwan, Tyler Burns, Lisa Fields, Katelyn Beaty and Jemar Tisby. You can also download the audio via our podcast Pass The Mic.
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William Douglas
It is a bit confusing to me that you define evangelical by 4 theological/spiritual boundaries and state that you are in agreement with or are inside those but then are not evangelical. And what I hear as 100% of the reason is centered in sociological/political grounds even as you criticize evangelicals for being more sociological/political than theological/spiritual.
And could the nervousness re/ the term evangelical (vague, inconsistent) be not also applied to the way the term Christian is used around the world?
Paul N Larsen
https://justthinking.me/2017/12/24/hijacking-evangelicalism/.
Where to go for Christ-honoring unity-striving, not the divisiveness of The Witness.
https://justthinking.me/2017/12/06/big-bang-racism/.
So sad about Jemar’s slippage.
Phil Faris
I think the values and faith shared by these speakers is in line with what I have found “everywhere” in Bible believing churches. I’m retired military and have moved 37 times since college and attended churches that qualify for “evangelical” status though never really identified as anything other than Bible believing. I don’t think any of the people fit the negative descriptors given in this video for evangelicals as white conservatives who care about preservation of their rights and status. However, I do concede that white privilege and male privilege is a real thing. Oddly, that category or characteristic is itself fraught with confusion by those who use it as a label. In any case, I say white and male privilege is a condition in which we (I’m both) wake up in the morning and never think about my race or gender all day long; Nonwhites and women, may in fact wake up in the morning and never forget about their race or gender all day long. So this distinction is real and significant. However, to say that evangelicals are a white male clique focused on retaining their privileges is probably a prejudice and stereotype that ought to be rejected. Ironically, one speaker actually mentioned that the views presented in this video were actually exactly the ones they were condemning in evangelicals.
Steve
Curious to hear, according to the “Black & Women’s perspective” what being an Evangelical is to them.
I think that the recovery of a fully orbed Evangelicalism must necessarily include a reintroduction of the critical role that the experience of faith, which is qualitatively different, however, from ordinary human or even religious experience is. As Donald Bloesch once stated in speaking to what being an Evangelical means – To affirm a theology of Word and Spirit is to affirm that the experience of faith is correlative with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Since faith is a work of the Spirit in the interiority of our being, the truth of the gospel is not only announced from without but also confirmed from within. In the theology presented here both revelation and salvation have to be understood as objective-subjective rather than fundamentally objective (as in evangelical rationalism) or predominantly subjective (as in existentialism and mysticism and liberalism).