Tag: evangelicalism

Ed Stetzer on Hanegraaff Switch: What CT Gets Wrong About Orthodox Conversions

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
Writing in Evangelical flagship publication Christianity Today, Ed Stetzer, who is a professor at Wheaton and heads up the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism, made some guesses about why Evangelicals become Orthodox Christians in “Hank Hanegraaff’s Switch to Eastern Orthodoxy, Why People Make Such Changes, and Four Ways Evangelicals Might Respond“: The obvious question is what draws evangelicals to more liturgical traditions—and…

Protestants and a Churchless Tradition: “Sola” vs. “Solo” Scriptura

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
One of my ongoing fascinations is what I have come to refer to in my head as “the Evangelical appropriation of tradition.” Charismatics are celebrating Lent. Baptists are talking about the Eucharist. The inscrutable maybe-universalist and now Oprah-darling Rob Bell is even using the phrase the tradition. Maybe this tradition stuff isn’t so bad. I can branch out a little. I can…

“I Don’t Worship God by Singing”: So Why Bother Going to Church?

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
A reader alerted me to best-selling author Donald Miller‘s Feb. 3 post “I Don’t Worship God by Singing. I Connect With Him Elsewhere,” and I was immediately struck by both the rightness and the tone of his critique: I’ve a confession. I don’t connect with God by singing to Him. Not at all. I know I’m nearly alone in this but it’s…

Conversions and Conversions: Romanians between Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism

· Guest Author
The following by guest author Mihai Oara is in response to the 2006 Gospel Coalition piece John’s Story: Why I Left Eastern Orthodoxy for Evangelicalism. While in the United States we can see many conversions of Evangelicals to Orthodoxy, the situation is quite the reverse in traditional Orthodox countries. This phenomenon is relatively easy to explain in a purely mathematical way: if…

“A Premodern Sacramental Eclectic”?: Evangelicals Reaching for Tradition

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
An Evangelical friend who is interested in Orthodoxy sent this link to me: Ten years ago I was a poverty-stricken Christian…and I didn’t even know it. My poverty was theological and it was the sad consequence of my arrogant sectarianism. By restricting my Christianity to the narrow confines of modern charismatic evangelicalism I suffered from a self-inflicted theological poverty. I needed the…

“God is much bigger than… your style [of worship] or mine.”

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
I recently posted the image above from my professional page on Facebook, and it drew this response: I guess King David worshipped incorrectly then. You know, the whole leaping and dancing and shouts of joy thing? Totally got it wrong. Tambourines? Lyres? If you know anything of Israeli culture, liturgical worship was not the norm until much later. My response: King David’s…

Institutionalizing the Revival: The Culture of Revolutionary Christianity

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
I was digging recently into the darker recesses of my childhood memories and came upon a name I probably haven’t thought about in almost thirty years—Sutera. I really couldn’t remember what the name meant (and I half suspected that I was simply thinking of Chicago’s original lead singer), but I started doing some Googling and discovered the names Ralph and Lou Sutera,…

Emergent Church Leader Performs Same-Sex Ceremony

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
(Christianity Today) Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian and a prominent Christian speaker, led a non-traditional marriage commitment ceremony this weekend, according to The New York Times. Held at the Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase, Maryland, this ceremony included “traditional Christian elements,” but no bride. And the groom—one of them—was McLaren’s son, Trevor McLaren. The Times reports that…

The Sinner’s Prayer: Baptists Debate the Evangelical Initiation Rite

· Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
We ran a piece yesterday regarding the Calvinism/Arminianism debates at the Southern Baptist Convention Great Commission Baptist Convention, and now there’s another fascinating doctrinal development at the convention: The vote wasn’t taken with every head bowed and every eye closed, but delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting today supported the “Sinner’s Prayer” after considerable debate. Jimmy Scroggins, chairman of…