NR #1996-021: Top Evangelical Leaders to Convene Summit Near Boston From April 17 to 20, over a hundred top evangelical leaders will gather for a leadership summit in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, Massachusetts: home of Harvard and once a center of American evangelical Protestant scholarship. Warning that Harvard's lapse into liberalism and relativism threatens to be repeated among modern evangelical Christians, the evangelical leaders plan to issue a formal declaration calling the evangelical church to repent of its uncritical adoption of modern secular thought. "Perhaps unknowingly, but certainly unmistakably, the evangelical movement is now returning to the errors of the liberal protestants of the last century," according to ACE council's promotional literature. "Thus, the great need of the moment is to recover the biblical, apostolic witness which alone can restore power and integrity to the church as we make our way into the third millennium." NR #1996-021: For Immediate Release Top Evangelical Leaders to Convene Summit Near Boston * Summit plans to issue declaration calling evangelicals to repent of compromise with pragmatism, consumerism, anti-intellectualism, anti-theological sentiments by Darrell Todd Maurina, Press Officer United Reformed News Service (February 27, 1996) URNS - Are evangelical Christians guilty of "embracing pragmatism and consumerism, with dependence on modern idols such as politics, marketing, sociology, and psychology?" If so, what should be done about it? That's what over a hundred leading evangelical pastors, scholars, para-church leaders, and writers will discuss at an April 17 to 20 leadership summit in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The summit will include the presentation of eight formal papers and its leaders plan to conclude with a declaration and call to the evangelical movement signed by those in attendance. Plans for the leadership summit were first drafted in late 1994 by fourteen top evangelicals organized as the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Chaired by Dr. James Montgomery Boice of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, the ACE council includes two Reformed theologians: Dr. W. Robert Godfrey, president of Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and Rev. Michael Scott Horton, president of Christians United for Reformation (CURE); five Presbyterians: Boice, Mrs. Rosemary Jensen, president of Bible Study Fellowship, Dr. Robert M. Norris, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church of Bethesda, Md., Dr. R.C. Sproul, president of Ligonier Ministries, and Dr. Luder Whitlock, president of Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Miss.; three Baptists, Dr. John Armstrong, president of Reformation and Revival Ministries, Dr. John Hannah, professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, and Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville; two Lutherans: Dr. J.A.O. Preus III, academic dean at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, and Dr. Gene Edward Veith, dean of the school of arts and sciences at Concordia University Wisconsin; Congregational theologian Dr. David Wells, professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; and independent pastor Rev. Alistair Begg of Parkside Church in Cleveland. The conference site was selected to underline what evangelical Christianity once was and what it could become again. Founded in 1633, the town of Cambridge became the seat of Harvard College and the collegiate connection made it a center of both academic and ecclesiastical life in Puritan New England. By 1648, the town had given its name to the Cambridge Platform of church polity drafted to govern the Puritan churches of New England and within a few years after that was recognized as the leading seat of Christian scholarship in America. "I think of the history of Boston, and Cambridge specifically, being a place where Protestants historically have really thought about how to engage the culture in a meaningful way," said ACE executive director Ben Sasse. "You see a time when evangelical New England was a center of so much thought in the New World and there was a desire to understand how our doctrines should be worked out in life. Today it's a place the evangelical world would on the one hand reject as secular and on the other hand too quickly take methods from leading cultural institutions while failing to understand the assumptions behind those methods." According to ACE, the decline of Harvard from being a center of academically rigorous evangelical Christianity to its modern condition as a center of liberalism and secularism should serve as a warning to modern evangelicals. "In recent years, many even of the most conservative Protestant churches have lost their faithfulness to the Bible in both faith and practice. Perhaps unknowingly, but certainly unmistakably, the evangelical movement is now returning to the errors of the liberal Protestants of the last century," according to ACE council's promotional literature. "Thus, the great need of the moment is to recover the biblical, apostolic witness which alone can restore power and integrity to the church as we make our way into the third millennium." "Examples of accommodation abound in the pragmatism and consumerism of the church growth movement; in the therapeutic world-view that often replaces classical Christian categories even in conservative circles; in dependance upon such modern idols as politics, sociology, marketing, and psychology; and in the anti-intellectualism and anti-theological sentiments of a relativistic and 'practical' age," wrote the ACE council. "To the extent that the doctrines of the Bible no longer guide preaching, teaching, publishing, evangelism, worship, and the daily life of the people of God, to that extent evangelism has declined to become a movement that is shaped only by popular whim and sentimentality." The name of the "Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals" highlights a central goal of the organization. Rather than attempting to remake evangelicalism in the mold of specifically Reformed, Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, or Congregational confessions of faith, the organizers seek to restore the concept of a "confessing church" - one committed to written confessional statements of faith and the doctrines which united all the wings of the Protestant Reformation. "They declared, and we must affirm, the 'onlys' of what became core Reformation theology: God's revelation is found only in Scripture, salvation is found only in Christ, salvation is the result only of grace, salvation is received only by faith, and it is only by affirming these truths that we can also say 'to God alone be glory," wrote the ACE council. What would it mean for the evangelical world to repent and confess? "Once we have recognized and understood the false values to which we have given our allegiance and their clear contrast to the Gospel, we must accept the Bible's exposure of our sins and repent of those sins, embracing the Bible's message afresh and actually changing our lives as a result," wrote the ACE council. "To confess refers to the corporate act of affirming our agreement with the affirmations that have preserved the church since its earliest days. We are not merely individuals passing on our personal experiences, but members of Christ's historic body, declaring what has been passed down to us." As a result of that repentance, the ACE council seeks to "restore the bond between doctrine and life," to "reassess our evangelism in terms of its message, methods, and motivation," to "examine our church growth practices in light of biblical theology and to train ourselves to think of everything related to church and individual life in theocentric terms," and to "encourage a revival of regular catechetical instruction at every age level, at home and in the church." "Too often, evangelicals have settled for either 'cold orthodoxy' or 'warm heterodoxy'; some take the intellect, others the heart," concluded the ACE council. "Our goal is not a dogmatism that turns human beings into automata, but a warm, pastoral, revolutionary message of hope and doctrinal certainty in an increasingly relativistic and nihilistic culture." According to Sasse, one catalyst for the formation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals was the release of "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," a joint statement by a number of leading evangelicals and Roman Catholics which argued that both groups should make common cause amidst the pressures of modern American secular life. "One of the key examples is just the concern with unity that has just overrun the concern for truth; we know we are supposed to be concerned about truth and to be concerned about unity but we have no idea of how they should relate," said Sasse. "The discussions of ACE had begun prior to ECT, but the example of ECT is one of a number of symptoms that caused ACE to come into existence." "We agree that there are centrals of the Protestant faith to which all confessional Protestants agree and we each through our own traditions seek to reaffirm the importance of the confessions," said Sasse. "Though individually every member is a subscriber to their particular confessions, in many ways ACE is engaged in the sphere of ideas at the level that says evangelicalism was historically the sum total of the Protestant confessional bodies. ACE is seeking to deal with confessions of truth when relativism is an incredible part of the evangelical movement." While strongly critical of the modern state of American evangelicalism, Sasse emphasized that the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals did not seek to drive a wedge between historic confessional Christianity and the modern evangelical movement. "As a group, the ACE council would want to be clear that they believe that evangelicalism as we see it as a movement today is the descendant of Protestant Christianity broadly defined," said Sasse. "We are not outside evangelicalism calling it to become something it is not, but calling it to reformation, to be what it once was." Sasse said that the leadership summit will convene on Wednesday evening, meet all day on Thursday and Friday, and release its formal declaration on Saturday morning. "The declaration will be discussed by the end of the day on Friday, and everyone will understand as well that the eight academic papers will form our understanding as a group of the degree to which the evangelical movement seeks to confess its worldliness and repent of its departure from the historic faith," said Sasse. "I think the general ethos of the meeting as it is conceived by the council members is of inviting a number of people who are expected to be sympathetic to defining the problem as a loss of confessionalism," said Sasse. "The ACE council hopes that the summit will be a time where a lot of those who to all understood appearances are sympathetic will unite in a common declaration to the church." Cross-References to Related Articles: [No related articles on file] Contact List: Dr. James Montgomery Boice, Chairman, Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals [Contact through Sasse to arrange an interview] Charles Morris, Press Officer, Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals 1530 Communication Circle, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80905 * O: (719) 635-7500 * F: (719) 471-4982 Benjamin Sasse, Executive Director, Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals 2034 East Lincoln Ave. #209, Anaheim, CA 92806 * O: (714) 956-2873 * H: (714) 956-5111 ------------------------------------------------- file: /pub/resources/text/reformed: nr96-021x.txt .