Remember the Clapham Sect?

The past forty years have witnessed two concurrent trends among American evangelicals. The first trend is a renewed emphasis on spiritual formation. Authors such as Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Richard Lovelace, and Donald Whitney have called for evangelicals to pay greater attention to spiritual formation through embracing key spiritual disciplines such as prayer, fasting, Scripture meditation, and practicing hospitality. Often, though not always, the spiritual formation movement has called for evangelicals to engage Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox approaches to spiritual theology, though without abandoning core evangelical doctrines. It would be fair to say that the spiritual formation movement has often been overly privatized, focusing more on personal growth than public faith.

The second evangelical trend is a more intentional commitment to cultural engagement, especially in the political sphere. Groups such as the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition on the right and Sojourners and Evangelicals for Social Action on the left have called upon evangelical constituencies to consider their faith and values as they vote for particular candidates and support certain ballot initiatives. Countless parachurch ministries have mobilized evangelicals to defend particular issues such as the sanctity of human life and the dignity of traditional marriage and combat certain evils such as human sex trafficking and systemic poverty. It would be fair to say that often the importance of personal spiritual growth seems to take a backseat to public ventures among those strongly committed to evangelical cultural engagement.