The Next Evangelicalism : Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong-Chan Rah

If you are a white, middle-aged, raised-in-the-suburbs evangelical Christian who is socially and politically conservative and either active in the church or in vocational ministry, this book is going to offend you a few times and possibly even hurt your feelings, but you need to read it anyway especially if you care about the future of the Church in America. The author, Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, has a message of hope for the American Church but one that is going to require an adjustment in our heads and hearts. That American demographics are on a trajectory of great change is not a news flash for most people. Since the 1960’s birth rates, immigration patterns, and intercultural marriages have led to what some have called the “browning of America” and now it is estimated that by 2050 there will no longer be a majority culture in America. While many are heralding this as a tragic loss, Rah defends the thesis that de-Europeanization is not tantamount to de-Christianizing our country. In fact, the author asserts a preponderance of the new immigrants coming to America are Christian by faith and socially conservative with strong family values. His point: the Church in America will experience this shift long before the general culture does and if embraced properly will stem the tide of decline most churches and denominations are experiencing today. But for this to happen there is a cost and that is to reexamine our notions of ‘doing church’ which make sense for a predominantly white industrialized culture, but may not be as Biblical or Christian as we suppose although certainly comfortable. The other and more painful point the author makes is how deeply embedded racism is in our culture and especially in the church. What makes us so profoundly blind to it is that most Americans have no sense of corporate sin and thus we see ourselves as innocent. And when you feel innocent, it’s hard to want to change your ways and racism must be addressed if our churches are going to reflect our new reality. That said, I felt the author might have said a little something about the fact that while white Americans have their own share of guilt they don’t have a corner on the market with racism. Racism has no boundaries and I know too much about world history and other cultures to ever buy in to the idea that we need to do all the repenting. I also wonder if the author is not a bit overly idealist in his multicultural vs. homogenous church model. Having some experience in missions, I have seen the church in other countries quite apart from any missionary input organize along ethnic lines. Is there then a brown cultural captivity as well or do things just tend to shake out that way no matter what country you are in? It was God’s idea in the first place to separate nations by languages and this too has purpose. Put another way, it might just be simple economy of effort that makes people of like culture and language gather their own churches. Put yet another way, perhaps the church will naturally become more multicultural as the American landscape becomes so in the years ahead. Overall, I think The Next Evangelicalism is an insightful and helpful book and even if you don’t agree with all his conclusions, in the wake of political hysteria about immigration, it is a reminder to American evangelicals that ‘welcoming the stranger’ may be the form of our next Great Awakening.