Growing up in the South there was a refrain we would sing not having any idea what it meant – but it was memorable: “My hope is built on nothing less than Scofield notes and Moody Press.”
While simplistic, it was certainly a succinct way of defining our theology when accompanied by millennial charts and dispensations. Today we might be singing “My hope is built on nothing less than Keller tweets and IV Press.”  Times have changed…but it took years.
Last week I wrote about the powerful combination of dispensational theology and parachurch organizations that produced the historic surge of post-WWII American missions. A generation later, we are seeing a move away from a narrow definition of the Great Commission to what some call “social justice” and others have called “the common good” or to use an older term ” “holistic mission.”
While some have thought (like my friend Roger Thurow in the last blog) this is a recent change, one of the points I want to make is how long it takes for an idea to have consequences. It may be true that the change is new but the groundwork for it goes back decades…and this is typical.
As Jim Wallis told me years ago, “You cannot start a movement but you can prepare for one.” The preparation for this new movement of evangelicals was planted in 1975.
In his paper “Holistic Mission” Rene Padilla writes that in 1975 Dr. John Stott “candidly confessed that at the 1966 Lausanne Congress he had sided with the many who from the emphasis that most versions of the Great Commission give to evangelism deduce that ‘the mission of the church…is exclusively a preaching, converting and teaching mission.’”
Then he added, ”I now see more clearly that not only the consequences of the commission but the actual commission itself must be understood to include social as well as evangelistic responsibility unless we are to be guilty of distorting the words of Jesus.”
Again, that was 1975 and it is only in the last several years or so (IJM was founded in 1997 and Tim Keller published Ministries of Mercy  the same year) that mainstream and mostly younger evangelicals have responded. Why is that? Why did it take so long?
There is always a considerable lag between theology and new leadership. What is discussed and formulated takes decades to be realized in the form of a cause. Cyrus Scofield published his Bible notes in 1909 but it was 1951 when Campus Crusade was founded. It’s true that “ideas have consequences” but they have to wait patiently for leadership to arise to have an impact. This is especially true in evangelical culture. Theology is something of a dry field waiting to be ignited by a spark. That spark is always an entrepreneurial leader.
So my question really is not why this generation of evangelicals is more interested in justice than soul-saving. It is not what the underlying theology is. John Stott and Rene Padilla articulated that long ago. It is what theology is now being shaped that will make a similar change possible two decades from now? What ideas and what consequences will there be in 2050? What leaders will arise to apply that theology to conditions we could not have predicted?