Thread by @Windy_London

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK I'll deal with the Brits in a mo
The American branch of Evangelicalism need to go back and learn the lessons that stopped them having fellowship with brethren around the world in 1846. They completely failed to grasp the race issue. F Douglass was scathing

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK Frederick Douglass's address to the London Anti-slavery League following a failed attempt at compromise by American and British Evangelicals to form an Alliance to counter a resurgent global Catholicism captures the issues
glc.yale.edu/slavery-pulpit…

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK Much of the progress that had been made by British Evangelicals through the 18th and 19th centuries to fully appreciate the imago dei in all humanity and to understand God's heart for justice in the here and now as well as eternity was lost in the Great Reversal of 1920

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK British abolitionists and reformers had laid a fictional foundation that made it possible for men like Spurgeon to build an orphanage whilst saying he would only preach Christ and him crucified

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK Evangelicals like Shaftesbury reformed mental health laws, child labour laws, built schools for the poor, whilst clinging to a reformed evangelical faith

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK Missionaries to China like Hudson Taylor saw immediately the merit of meeting worldly medical needs to adorn the gospel whilst preaching the salvation in Christ Jesus

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK The engagement with "worldly needs" and justice became much less popular after "the Great Reversal". In countering the integral mission proposed by Catholics, Evangelicals proposed a "Word alone" mission to ensure people weren't deceived by a "social gospel"

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK This leaving of all "worldly acts" to "Liberal Christians" was embraced by UCCF, Eric Nash & the camps movement, influenced by Torrey and the unworldly "higher life movement" which disengaged from politics etc

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK By the late 20th Century British "Conservative Evangelicals" had become suspicious of anything that sounded worldly or political but tended to vote Conservative because they had the strictest rules on abortion. Anything that talked about justice came across as progressive/liberal

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK In the early 21st Century the Federal Vision arrived in the UK from USA. This introduced a whole group of young Conservative Evangelicals to Southern US libertarian thinking which seemed innovative and better thought through than the Keswickism unworldliness of the late 20th cent

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK And so today we get young British Conservative Evangelicals gladly agreeing with John MacArthur & Doug Wilson in defending historic American approaches to slavery whilst Charles Spurgeon was on the side of John Brown (who they don't know about)

@litabny @drantbradley @UrbanMinistryUK The abolitionists laid a doctrinal foundation, not a fictional foundation...

That is a very important autocorrect error... Sorry