A Short History of Global Evangelicalism

Abstract

This book offers an authoritative overview of the history of evangelicalism as a global movement, from its origins in Europe and North America in the first half of the eighteenth century to its present-day dynamic growth in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. Starting with a definition of the movement within the context of the history of Protestantism, it follows the history of evangelicalism from its early North Atlantic revivals to the great expansion in the Victorian era, through to its fracturing and reorientation in response to the stresses of modernity and total war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the movement's indigenization and expansion toward becoming a multicentered and diverse movement at home in the non-Western world that nevertheless retains continuity with its historic roots. The book concludes with an analysis of contemporary worldwide evangelicalism's current trajectory and the movement's adaptability to changing historical and geographical circumstances.

Remapping the Holy Land from the margins: how a Jordanian Evangelical church juggles the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in the Syrian refugee response

“…It always began with singing in English and Arabic, followed by greetings to incoming groups: "Jordanians, Palestinians, Indians, one church!" Hutchinson and Wolffe (2012) argue that both transnationalisation and social activism are central to the Evangelical enterprise. Rather than defining Evangelism by a fixed set of theological doctrines, they understand it as a heterogeneous style of Protestantism with a distinctively networked nature: "it is evangelicalism's genius for creating trans-communal identities which makes it effective in high-change, socially fractured settings" (Hutchinson and Wolffe 2012, p. 224).…”

“…It also resonates with wider tendencies in Evangelical mission towards the indigenization of southern churches. African and Chinese migrants, for instance, have been central to the revival and establishment of new Evangelical communities in Europe and the former Soviet Union (Hutchinson and Wolffe 2012).…”

A transatlantic religious alliance? American and European protestant encounters, 1945–1965

“…By the 1920s, however, modernist-fundamentalist polarisation had disrupted the unifying trend of Protestant cooperation. 7 A close inspection, the religious networks that spanned the Atlantic after World War II, reveal at least four sets of Protestant connections. First, national denominations in Europe maintained official ties with the same denomination in America to which their émigrés had flocked.…”

Nationalism and religion; collective identity and choice: the 1989 revolutions, Evangelical Revolution in the Global South, revolution in the Arab World

“…Turning to the global expansion of Evangelical Christianity, I outline how choice and pluralism were fostered by Evangelicalism, even though checked after the Reformation by the Church‐state and then the Church‐nation, and counterbalanced wherever Evangelicalism became the accepted faith of the majority (Hutchinson and Wolffe ). After Westphalia, there is a complicated dance between Protestantism as a faith based on choice, and nationalism as an ideology based on birthright identity because once a religion based on choice becomes the faith of a majority, as it did in Pietist Scandinavia, New England, Northern Ireland and Victorian Britain, it confers birthright identity .…”