This coming semester at the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality I will be delivering a course introducing North American Evangelicalism. I am hoping to do this through historical moments and stories, looking at the formative American evangelical identity that grew out of the revivalism of the Great Awakenings and following the windy tale to the religious nones and dones of our day. The interesting part, for me, is that no matter where we find ourselves in Christian (and sometimes even secular) spaces the shadow of this evangelicalism is not hard to find.

Doing theology myself from a historically evangelical tradition one of the more difficult tasks was actually figuring out where my own tradition stood in terms of a long, complicated history. I spent a fair bit of time in my doctoral work and dissertation just situating my contributions as an “evangelical” theologian. I find that even today I have deep questions and concerns around where I come from and what narratives I have inherited from my evangelical roots. This course then will be for anyone who has wondered just where these evangelicals came from and how they came to be the ways that they are today.

Poster for upcoming OSTS courses.

In my course on North American Evangelicalism we will spend five sessions covering the following topics:

  • Who are the evangelicals? We will investigate some of the efforts to describe and define North American evangelicals.
  • Before the Fundamentalist movement. We will look at the events and people that left their mark on the evangelical movements and traditions that have taken root in North America.
  • The Fundamentalist movement. We will examine the turn of the 20th century movement that continues to cast a long shadow over Christianity today.
  • The Tension of Witness. We will explore some of the ways that evangelicalism has sought to crawl out from under the shadow of the Fundamentalist movement while at the same time remaining true to a faith that wants to communicate good news to the world.
  • The Future of Evangelicalism. Finally we will turn our attention to the contemporary situation where we see efforts to renew, recover, entrench, and even ditch evangelicalism today.

As a bonus, this semester OSTS is offering a great buy one get one free on registrations. They always have a good array of interesting courses taught by excellent scholars and practitioners, you will get good value for your tuition dollars. I have enjoyed teaching with the school over the past few years, the classes are often quite engaging with the students bring great questions to enrich our conversations together.

Hope to see you in class!