The other day, during a conversation about calling, Os Guinness told us that we need to redeem the word "evangelical" because it has so many negative connotations. Josh, a fellow participant, asked whether it would not be more productive to simply use a different word, as 'evangelical' has so many unwanted political and historical connotations. Guinness disagreed. He was also extremely pessimistic about the state of Christianity in our generation. And I believe those two sentiments are connected.

Although I'm not a particularly optimistic person, I do have great hope for the future of Christianity. We no longer live in an ultrarational society that rejects things which cannot be proven. We are comfortable with uncertainty, and that comfort allows room for spirituality and paradox. But I do not have great hope for the future of evangelicalism as it now is. And that tenuous future is responsible for the fear of the future communicated by leaders such as Guinness. His generation cannot understand how genuine faith can exist without the light of reason. But we are supposed to see things from the light of God, not the light of reason. There is great danger in assuming that we can only communicate God's grace through one particular mode of thinking. If God is truly God, he is God in modernity and God in postmodernity.

I do not consider myself evangelical. Evangelicals read Focus on the Family. Evangelicals believe in capital punishment. Evangelicals listen to radio stations that are safe for the whole family. To become an evangelical is to subscribe to a particular brand of politics, shopping habits, etc. It is descriptive of the majority of Bible-believing Christians in the United States. But that lifestyle should not be prescriptive. And if you are reading this, I am fairly certain you agree with me already, so I won't go any further in this direction.

The challenge as I see it, is confronting the negativity of the older generation. How do we communicate that situation is not quite so bleak as they believe it to be? Granted, most people in our generation do not attend churches. But most of the people attending churches at the moment do not have a faith that dictates more than church attendance. We are more disingenuous. It is not as though church attendance is an accurate gauge of spirituality. It is the spirit of community that is important, not the spirit of church attendance.

Evangelicalism as we know it may disappear, but Christianity will not. If Evangelicalism becomes a petrified forest, we should not place so much importance on preserving it that there is no room for new growth. New trees need sun and water, but they also need space to branch out. And to stifle them is to risk deforestation. To take the forest metaphor even farther, we certainly need to be cautious about allowing weeds to grow too far. But if we are overly cautious we will never see anything new at all. Perhaps it is time Evangelicals started believing in evolution.