The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity

* A bold vision for the future of North American evangelicalism! Urging the Western church to escape the captivity of individualism, consumerism, and racism, Rah provides a keen analysis of the limitations of American evangelicalism and offers alternative models for congregational renewal, including those drawn from African American, Native American, immigrant, and second-generation Christian communities. 180 pages, softcover from InterVarsity.

Soong-Chan Rah (D.Min., Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) is Milton B. Engebretson Assistant Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois.

The future is now. Philip Jenkins has chronicled how the next Christendom has shifted away from the Western church toward the global South and East. Likewise, changing demographics mean that North American society will accelerate its diversity in terms of race, ethnicity and culture. But evangelicalism has long been held captive by its predominantly white cultural identity and history.

In this book professor and pastor Soong-Chan Rah calls the North American church to escape its captivity to Western cultural trappings and to embrace a new evangelicalism that is diverse and multiethnic. Rah brings keen analysis to the limitations of American Christianity and shows how captivity to Western individualism and materialism has played itself out in megachurches and emergent churches alike. In turn, this prophetic minority report casts a vision for a dynamic evangelicalism that fully embodies the cultural realities of the twenty-first century.

Professor and pastor Rah says the evangelical church has been in captivity to Western white power and must be released in the same way the early Christian church was released from Jewish cultural control. “Racism is America’s original and most deeply rooted sin,” he says bluntly. The church needs to recover a corporate confession of this original sin of building a culture and economy on the backs of Native Americans and black slaves, and a “conspicuous silence” remains on the issue of immigration from white evangelical church leaders. Stories of churches resisting ethnic change in communities, or learning from and embodying ethnic change, are a strong part of his analysis. He finds the term “emergent church” offensive, saying “the real emerging church is the church in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” which now makes up 60 percent of the world’s Christian population. The “next evangelicalism” should embrace a theology of suffering as well as celebration, intentionally give up power, and follow the lead of second-generation immigrants. Rah rocks the white evangelical citadel with this book. (May) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

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