What is Evangelical Churchmanship?

To answer this question adequately would need a theological treatise rather than a short magazine article.

It will be well to consider first the Spiritual Basis of Evangelical Churchmanship and if we had to choose one text to describe it, Ephesians ii. 8 would seem to be the fittest. “By Grace ye are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God.” The Evangelical emphasis has always been placed first and foremost on the personal experience of divine grace. To put it in other words: the consciousness of “conversion” or the “New Birth” has always taken a prominent place in the Evangelical message. The need of the soul to obtain the assurance of the Divine forgiveness and pardon through the grace of God is the very heart of Evangelical Truth. This personal dealing of the soul with God was the great dynamic at the Reformation. It was Luther’s long spiritual struggle to find a “gracious God” which led to his conscious “conversion”and to the inauguration of his great spiritual movement. Bilney in England went through much the same experience and soul-struggle. He could get no peace of conscience, no assurance of salvation, through works of “righteousness,” through vigils, fasts, Masses and Indulgences. He had not then realized that, as Ruskin well put it, “The root of every heresy and schism is man’s desire to earn rather than receive his salvation.” It was only when he grasped the meaning of the truth that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief” that he got peace for his troubled conscience. Calvin also had a similar spiritual struggle. Again this personal experience of the grace of God in Christ was the outstanding feature of the Evangelical Revival of the 18th century. It was when John Wesley was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans that he felt his heart “strangely warmed, I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

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