Jonathan Stephen of FIEC and Melvin Tinker of St. John's, Hull, Anglican church, answer questions about a recent initiative among conservative evangelicals.
EN: Tell us about Essentially Evangelical.
JS: EE is a network of Christian believers who stand for historic, biblical evangelicalism and its contemporary application. On that basis we aim to work together in whatever ways will help in the building of Christ's church.
MT: We adopted a statement that we wanted to 'bring churches back to the Bible and the Bible back to the churches.' For all the protests to the contrary, we believe this is the fundamental issue. Many would want to pay lip-service to how 'biblical' they are and yet in practice allow other things to occupy a central place - either 'worship' (read 'praise') or a cold 'evangelical' orthodoxy which is far removed from the spirit of the NT and those who stand in the evangelical tradition like Whitefield and Spurgeon - so a subculture gets in the way of the Bible. We long for full blooded evangelicalism in faith and practice.
