Entrepreneurial Evangelicalism arose within the conversionist activist, predominantly charismatic axis of the movement, and Warner examines this in relation to the spectacular and symbiotic growth of the Evangelical Alliance and Spring Harvest from 1980 to around 2001. Pragmatist enthusiasm, product branding, vigorous and franchised marketing, features normally associated with business growth and management, came to be applied to a movement that had previously been modest in its social and political goals.
'Calverism' is Warner's term for the centrality of Clive Calver in the rise of both Evangelical Alliance and Spring Harvest as focal points for Evangelicals hungry for identity and influence beyond their own constituency. Calver's driven personality, charismatic leadership, expansive vision, punishing personal itinerary and extensive network within Evangelicalsm are depicted as the primary engine behind the early mushrooming of personal membership of EA and the increasing popularity and influence of Spring Harvest. However Warner's analysis of personal membership figures, claims of EA to represent over a million Evangelicals, and other factors behind the presented success story, suggest that such claims were either exaggerated, or unsubstantiated by official statistical data.
A sociological examination of a movement, and of the influence of a prominent leader seeks explanations through causes, influences, personalities, historical happenstance, and is always likely to sound reductionist. There are times when Calver's influence and personal impact does indeed seem to have been a decisive factor. What Warner calls the 'collapse of the Calvinistic hegemony' in the late 60's and early 70's, left the way open for EA to reinvent itself under Calver by including large constituencies of Pentecostal and charismatic new churches within its orbit. Spring Harvest became a recruiting ground for EA personal membership, and the annual gathering a place where styles of worship, teaching emphases, corporate experience of learning and listening in seminars and large worship gatherings, began to present a new brand of Evangelicalism increasingly confident in the relevance, influence and public expression of an Evangelical programme mediated through EA and Spring Harvest and their branded products.
Warner has serious questions about claims about EA personal membership, (potential 100,000, actual highest 50,000+), and indeed he demonstrates that the higher figure was always an aspirational claim rather than data supported realities. In addition, he argues that personal membership taken out at an emotionally charged gathering such as Spring Harvest, did not imply that from then on, new memebrs were committed to evangelical activism and significant funding of EA once the fervour of the big occasion cooled. The failure 'to sustain the period of meteoric growth' Warner attributes to the fact that 'personal members were passive, and unwilling to become active recruiters' of others. So personal membership was never an accurate guage of active committed support expressed in funding, activism or recruiting.
The point of all this for Warner, and his argument has to be read in its detail and complexity, considered critically, and weighed honestly, is that through Calverism, the conversionist-activist axis of English Evangelicalism underwent significant transition. That transition may have triggered short term rapid growth - but the long term effects of 'vision inflation' will be felt within Evangelicalism as a whole, and may not be a fruitful legacy. Here are three observations Warner makes, which give a flavour both of his critique and his conslusions about EA in the last 20 years.
Many Evangelical had unconsciously made a transition from traditional evangelicalism that affirmed the truth of the gospel, to late-modern entrepreneurialism that assumed wholehearted adherence to the gospel guaranteed success for the church. (page 63)
The EA failed to deliver, not because of lack of effort, but because its visionary goals were unrealistic, not merely in terms of propsepcts for future recruitment of personal members, but because of a wholesale failure to grasp the corrosive effects upon evangelical influence and identity of the ineluctable cultural transitions of secularization and postmodernity. Evangelicals lacked a coherent socio-political critique and had failed to come to terms with the implications of a secularized and pluralistic culture; enthusiastic rhetoric and ethical conservatism are no substitute for rigorous and reflexive analysis. (page 64)
The legacy of evangelical boom and bust is apparent; disappointed expectations, a sceptical distrust of subsequent expressions of ambitious vision, and a shift in attitude towards the Alliance so that allegiance to the organistiaon became more provisional, more episodic, more post-institutional. (page 65)
Warner's style is at times unsparing of mistakes more easily discovered with hindsight; and he was himself a participant in much that he now critiques. But the underlying impression I have is of one who now sees the serious theological and strategic miscalculations evangelicalism makes when it buys into a consumerist approach to faith sharing and faith celebration. Bono's scathing observation that joiners of mail order organisations are less "members" than "consumers" of a cause, providing only "cheque-book affiliation", is embarrassingly to the point.
Amongst the uncomfortable questions raised (for me at any rate), by Warner's case study of EA, is whether entrepreneurialism, market penetration, pragmatic activism, evangelical branding and franchising, the search for political influence and social recognition, are anything more than reflections of core values and principles inimical, or at least secondary, to a people seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness....... but more of this anon.
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