Ep. 7 / From the Treasure Box of Tradition to the New Wave of Evangelicalism ► Trevin Wax

What if the way we practice faith today is drastically different from how our grandparents did? Join us on evangelical 360 as we uncover the fascinating evolution of the evangelical church in North America with the insightful Trevin Wax. Trevin takes us on his personal journey from mission work to spearheading efforts at the North American Mission Board. Together, we explore how worship styles and denominational distinctions have transformed over the last several decades. We also shed light on the emergence of neo-evangelicalism, a mid-20th-century movement that melded doctrinal fidelity with a proactive social conscience, inspired by pioneering figures like Carl Henry and Billy Graham.

In another compelling episode, we examine the rising fourth wave within evangelicalism, particularly among younger generations seeking structure and rootedness in their spiritual lives. We discuss how timeless spiritual disciplines from the Ignatian and Celtic traditions are making a powerful comeback in modern practices. Trevin offers practical tips for integrating these ancient practices into daily routines, spotlighting the essential roles of the Holy Spirit and community in spiritual growth. Don't miss this engaging conversation filled with insights and actionable advice for enriching your spiritual journey!

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Transcript

Brian Stiller

Hello and welcome to evangelical 360. My name is Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of this new podcast series. On evangelical 360, I interview leaders, writers and influencers about contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life around the world. My hope is that it will not only be a global meeting place where faith is explored from different perspectives, but that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and even inspired.

Christian faith has a 2,000-year history and, while its essentials remain intact, the way we experience faith and live out a religious commitment it's changed. Joining me today to discuss these changes is author and journalist Trevin Wax. Host of the podcast Reconstructing Faith and a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, Trevin helps us make sense of how we experience faith personally and in community, and how it is being reformatted. I think you'll appreciate his very helpful analysis. Trevin Wax, thank you so much for joining me today on evangelical 360. 

Trevin Wax, what a joy to have you here today -- a young man with a great mind, a great heart. I'd like us to begin with a bit of an introduction to yourself as to who you are, what interests you and what is the Lord doing in your own life these days.

Trevin Wax

Well, thanks, brian, for having me.

You know I've always been fascinated by the intersection of Christianity with culture and what it looks like as we're trying to make disciples in our day and in this moment that God has put us in the race and asked us to run.

So I've been doing that for a long time. I grew up in the United States but then wound up doing five years of mission work in Romania, there in Eastern Europe, shortly after the fall of communism, and then I've had that kind of cross-cultural ministry aspect to my life for a long time, served in a variety of roles. I love to write and to teach and to speak and to read a lot and to study, and so the Lord has given me a lot of opportunities to do that, most recently through the North American Mission Board that does a lot of church planting in the United States all across the country and all kinds of different cultural contexts, and so what I love is just to be able to. I like to do what the missionary, theologian Leslie Newbigin, said, that we need a missionary encounter with our world where we bring the light of the gospel into a confrontation and into a conversation with people in the world so that others will experience the beauty of the gospel.

Brian Stiller

You have an interesting theory that I want us to get into, called waves. You look at the various periods within church history over the last few decades. Let's begin back in my early years. What was the typical evangelical church? What did it look like before these waves began to roll up onto the shore of our own church experience here in North America?

Trevin Wax

Well, you know, I think in North America it's interesting because the neo-evangelical movement has been very successful in permeating lots of different denominations and traditions so that there was a time when most churches would have had something like traditional worship of some sort or would have been in some manner.

Maybe they're focused on, you know, a particular kind of liturgy, a particular kind of church style. A lot of the conversations between Christians in a particular town would have been the differences in their denominational affiliations, their doctrinal distinctives or the way that that plays out in worship doctrinal distinctives or the way that that plays out in worship. But I think what's interesting is in the last 50 or so years, a lot of these different denominational traditions and faith families, their church services, look a lot more, they look very similar in a lot of ways, in part because the neo-evangelical movement and some of these waves that have come through evangelicalism and have influenced all of these different denominational traditions have left us with worship services and with different kinds of distinctives that would have been exclusive to one side of Christianity at one point are now you can find traces or experiences of these in multiple places of Christianity. I think the clearest example would be the change in worship style. That has happened over the past 50 to 75 years in all kinds of denominations and all kinds of traditions.

Brian Stiller

You use the word neo-evangelical. What do you mean by that?

Trevin Wax

So evangelicalism, just traditionally speaking, it's referring to that renewal movement that's been part of the church, coming up out of the Reformation and in subsequent years. You could actually say that evangelicalism has grown over the years from the 17 and 1800s into the 1900s, in a series of waves and revivals and different kinds of ways of seeking to renew the church. There's elements of personal piety related to that. There's elements of a return to scriptural, foundational, doctrinal basics that you see there. There's an activist side to that as well. If you think about the, evangelicals were at the forefront when it came to abolishing the slave trade in England. You think of people like William Wilberforce, but evangelicals have also been very involved in ministry to those in need. So you put all of this together that it comes down to the fact that we all have to come to this moment where we move from our sin to Jesus Christ as Savior. It's that emphasis on regeneration, personal regeneration, which is really the hallmark, that conversionist impulse. It's really the hallmark of that conversionist impulse. It's really the hallmark of the traditional evangelical movement.

Neo-evangelicalism refers to a movement that began in the 1940s and 1950s when there were a number of those who were doctrinally fundamentalists, meaning that they believed in the fundamentals of the faith and yet also believed that we couldn't do away with our social conscience that we needed to be engaging the world and yet also believed that we couldn't do away with our social conscience that we needed to be engaging the world, answering the questions that the world was posing, posing questions the world wasn't even asking. So you look at men like Carl Henry and Billy Graham and Harold Ockengay and others. They began to create this space in between what had become a more isolationist fundamentalism and what was there on the other side was really more of a mainline liberalism that became something of a chaplain to the culture rather than really seeking to engage or confront the culture in a number of places. And so that neo-evangelical movement that began in the 1940s and 50s was a renewal movement that then spread into multiple denominations and kind of took on a life of its own.

Brian Stiller

You then move into an analysis of the church following the Second World War and you've identified a number of waves that you think have fundamentally altered the nature of the evangelical church, at least here in North America, and then you propose what you think might be emerging. But let's begin with these first three, identify those, and then let's talk about them.

Trevin Wax

Yes, the first one that I point to is this emphasis on expressive worship, contemporary worship, you could call it the spirit-filled movement. It's the influence of both Pentecostal streams and then charismatic streams into all kinds of denominational traditions. I mean, there was a charismatic renewal movement that took place within the Episcopalian Church. I actually know someone who was converted to Christ in that movement. You see this even in the Church of England. Some of the most vocal evangelical voices in the Church of England today have been very influenced by the charismatic movement, and so what's interesting, though, is that the way that this wave comes into evangelicalism is that it's not necessarily with all of the distinctives of the holiness tradition of the Pentecostal movement, the Nazarenes or whatnot.

What you find is you find that some of the expressions from the worship of that movement have now become very common in all kinds of denominational traditions. You walk into a Baptist church, and you'll find people raising their hands in worship or singing to the Lord in very expressive ways, in ways that would have been unusual in 1950, for example, the same in Methodist churches or in other denominational traditions. So what you have is, even if not all of the particular distinctives, theological distinctives of Pentecostalism or the charismatic movement made their way into evangelical churches. You do have this very robust, visible, evident vision of what it looks like in worship, or the fact that people talk about the personal experience of God. In the Baptist tradition, that was Henry Blackaby, his experiencing God, materials and whatnot. But you see this in all kinds of traditions this desire to be spirit-filled, this understanding that this should influence our worship. I think that's one of the initial waves that makes its way into evangelicalism through contemporary Christian music and beyond.

Brian Stiller

What's the second wave then that you note?

Trevin Wax

Well, the second wave really comes out of the 1970s and 1980s, this emphasis on church growth, and it actually began missiologically, I mean some of those that were putting forth church growth principles and philosophy. They were actually doing this on the mission field, primarily to see how is it that churches get started and then grow, and they were wanting to apply some of those missiological principles back in the United States. What does it look like for us to be comprehensible, seeker, sensitive? You know there was the. You have Bill Hybels with Willow Creek. You had Rick Warren going around in Southern California asking the question what kind of a church would people attend if people were to attend church? And then being able to structure churches evangelistically in order to reach people that were not there. So you have this idea, this coming to fruition of what does it mean for us to create church for the unchurched, for us to restructure and rethink things according to that missiological impulse.

Now, there was a lot of backlash to that, so I would not want to say that this wave influenced all denominations or churches or traditions in the same way, but there are elements of the church growth movement that are now common in all kinds of churches, even in churches that would have resisted some of that seeker-sensitive or seeker-first mindset.

That's the idea that our sermons, our teaching, should be comprehensible to everyone in attendance, that we should recognize that there will be people that are without Christ in our congregations, that you know everything from.

You know the ease of navigating the parking lot to having church signs in your fellowship so that people know exactly where to go, with welcome centers and you have in some churches coffee areas and whatnot Anything that's going to help bring in people in a way that puts them at ease right away as they come into the congregation.

So the other thing I think that you can see across the board is a lot of pastors, in a way that they may not have 100 years ago, ask questions and they measure the success or the faithfulness of ministry in numeric ways, whether it's the number of baptisms or the number of people in the seats, the number of people that we can have in our attendance, the number of members. They tend to measure success in these ways. That correspond with what a lot of those church growth principles looked like back in the day in the 70s and 80s, and so even in the churches that were opposed to some of the extremes of that church growth seeker-sensitive philosophy. They adopted some of the strategies and techniques and tactics of the churches that were most aligned with those philosophies.

Brian Stiller

So you're saying the very thing that we were doing in missions overseas, that missiological impulse to understand the culture that we're speaking to, that took root here in North America with the very sending churches that were doing that overseas.

Trevin Wax

It did, and there was both strengths and weaknesses to that approach. The strengths of that approach is that we're thinking like missionaries, we're wanting to be comprehensible, we're wanting to reach people in our society. The weakness is, at times it allowed culture to drive the agenda of the church, that certain rough edges of Christianity would be shaved off, for example, or we not want to get to some of those areas that would lead to cultural confrontation, and so that can actually lead to a distorted understanding of the gospel. So you wound up having both strengths and weaknesses there. Strengths in that a lot of people were under Christ in that era. Weaknesses in that some of that impulse could lead you astray from faithful, traditional, true Christianity.

Brian Stiller

Okay, so you talk about the spirit-led wave, a seeker-sensitive wave. The third wave I found curious, and wasn't apparent to me as much as the first two waves were. Describe this third wave to us so.

Trevin Wax

I think the third wave, it would be what we'd call the gospel centered wave. It's the it's, it's something of a reaction to the church growth philosophy and movement, that emphasis on pragmatism, whatever works you know, and and attracting and reaching people, the, the. This was a return to expository preaching, where you're just you're, you're taking texts and you're working through them. It was a a return to the gospel as the foundational, most central element of Christianity, rather than it all being about my personal experience, which could sometimes be the weakness of the spirit filled movement, or without it being all about sort of of tips to better living, approaches to life that could tend toward moralism, which was sometimes the danger in the church growth movement in trying to attract people in that way, giving good advice to people. The gospel-centered movement was a desire to return to the centrality of the gospel, the centrality of grace, opposing religion and, you know, sort of moralistic religion with a grace, christ-centered understanding of theology and the Christian life. And so you see this in the rise of the young, restless and reformed in the United States, in North America, in the 2000s and 2010s. You see this exemplified in the United States in North America in the 2000s and 2010s. You see this exemplified in the preaching of a Tim Keller, for example.

But you have this desire, this real focus on the gospel as at the center. The wave of that is a little bit different than the other two waves in that it comes through in evangelical circles anywhere you find people wanting part of the preacher to connect everything that he's teaching back to the gospel, to make sure that Christ, crucified and raised, is there, present in every single message, that it's not simply giving good counsel from Scripture or looking at Old Testament people as heroes to emulate, but showing how, ultimately, we come back to the cross and resurrection of Jesus. And this wave has influenced different churches, regardless of their tradition or denominational distinctives, in ways that you have a younger generation that are committed to wanting to make the gospel be at the center of their, their ministries, not, you know, political partisanship, not activism and all the good things that the church does not, uh, simply giving good advice, but getting back to the good news that it really is the crux of what it means for us to be Christians.

Brian Stiller

What I hear that tends to be dominant as evangelistic preaching, as gospel public media -- I see more of it tending to be God helps you be successful, rather than a focus on the biblical text and the walk with Christ. Is that antithetical to this wave, or how do you read that?

Trevin Wax

Well, the thing that is important to note about all of these waves is that, depending on the particular church, you're going to find different traces of influence. Some churches, the wave I mean there still are churches even now that the wave of church growth never really reached, maybe to their detriment at times. Or that the wave of spirit-filled there's still plenty of traditional churches out there. So it's not as if these waves fundamentally transform every church in a very visible way. But what you find is you do find the landscape. Generally speaking, the landscape is altered. In some churches it's altered more than in others, and the same would be true of the gospel-centered movement.

I was talking with a friend recently who said I think this really hit hard in a lot of places in the Midwest and in the Northeast and in other places, but there's still plenty of places in the South where the gospel-centered wave actually we kind of need that wave to continue to move forward.

So I think, depending on the region, depending on the denominational tradition, you're going to find either trace aspects of these waves or you'll find the landscape pretty significantly altered, depending on the church and the tradition. And I do think you're still going to find these. You're going to find a lot of churches and church leaders in conversation with these waves, with leaders from these different traditions, as to what approach should be taken. But I agree with you there still are a lot of churches that are in sort of that. They've been influenced by that church growth wave where the idea was to attract people by showing how you know how the gospel can, you know how Christianity comes, it can make you successful, based on the terms of success you already sort of have. The gospel-centered movement is still as it moves through. Churches in North America is still something of a reaction to that and, depending on the church or the tradition, in some places that wave has come through, in other places it's still yet to come.

Brian Stiller

Your metaphor of waves is appropriate because waves keep lapping. It's not just one big wave, it's wave after wave, after wave. But again, to follow through on your metaphor, you identify a particular movement that you discern is emerging within the evangelical community here in North America -- Spirituality. Walk us through that.

Trevin Wax

Yeah, is emerging within the evangelical community here in North America. Yeah, you know, I'm always curious to be looking at college students and young people, people in their 20s, because that will tell you a lot about what's coming in the future. And if you look back, look to the Spirit-filled movement, to the rise of Christian contemporary music I mean you could look at the Jesus movement. We can trace this back. And then, if you look at church growth, it was 20-somethings and college students and 20-somethings and 30-somethings that really had grasped hold of those missiological principles that they wanted to apply in North America when the seeker-sensitive wave came through. The same was true of the gospel-centered movement. I mean, there's a reason it was called the young, restless and reformed is because most of the people involved were in there. Most of the young people where the energy was happening were in college, they were at reformed university fellowships and they were coming up through, you know, internships and whatnot. So the reason why I think this fourth wave is something we should keep an eye on is because I see it everywhere when I look at college students, christian university campuses, secular university campuses. There's a hunger for a rule of life, for a return to a very specific understanding of these are spiritual practices that lead to my formation as a Christian. You can see this in the popularity of authors like John Mark Homer, justin Whitmell early. You can see it in different traditions. It's beginning to bubble up in different ways but it's a desire for rootedness in the great tradition of the church but also a desire for structure in life. It's that desire to not have just the fire of evangelical fervor but also the form that would allow that fire to grow and expand. You know this is not something new. Spiritual formation. I mean you can go back to trace what spiritual formation looked like in the lives of the Puritans or what it looked like in John Wesley and the Methodist movement and their methods for spiritual growth. You can find this in, you know, the 1970s and 1980s. You've got Dallas Willard writing a lot about this and what discipleship looks like through these formational exercises and practices. So it's not like it's something new, but it does seem like there's a desire for particular prayer practices, particular church-going practices, bible Bible reading practices and whatnot.

That I see among young people. That's actually mirrored in secular society as well. George, you know, if you look at Jordan Peterson, for example the psychologist I mean, his 12 rules for life was a bestseller and they were predominantly about structure and about rules. You think of books like Atomic Habits that are really taking off among secular people, so this is a desire that you see out in our society more generally speaking, that is then coming to fruition in evangelical spaces as well, and so I think it's something we've got to keep an eye on, because it's something that's going to, I think, shape the landscape of evangelical churches in the next 20 to 30 years, and we need to recognize what will be the strengths of that, what will be the weaknesses of that. What should we be doing to prepare for that wave and to help that wave, as much as possible, lead us to a stronger and more robust and healthier expression of Christianity?

Brian Stiller

For a number of years I've been part of a small group and we've been influenced by Ignatius and the Celtic tradition and the patterns of discipline, of reading the scripture, of praying. And yet, within our evangelical community, is very foreign. It's something we have resisted or maybe just ignored. I think it's to our loss that we have missed these disciplines that come out of the early church. What have you been learning about the lessons that we learned from those traditions?

Trevin Wax

You know, I think of church history much like a treasure box rather than a map. I don't think that, you know, I don't think that we go back. When we look back through church history we don't find a map that traces every step we're supposed to go, but what you do find is a treasure box with a lot of tools that can be helpful in one way or another, some less helpful than others, but you do find, throughout church history, lots of different disciplines, practices. You know, all all sorts of things.

I do think the most important thing for us, I think sometimes as evangelicals because we have a, especially in north america, we have a little bit of a pragmatic, do-it-yourself kind of mentality to everything we can wind up with if we're not careful a do-it-yourself kind of spirituality where we take certain disciplines and tools and we, what, we, we, we focus so much on the techniques that we actually forget that the real place of spiritual formation is in the work of the Spirit.

He is the one who is forming us. It's an abiding in Christ where we actually find spiritual growth takes place. Now, some of these methods and these practices and disciplines can help create the, can put us in the posture for the spirit to do his work in really mysterious ways, but it's not as if we can just take a tool from the toolkit and then apply it and expect transformation to happen. It's much more mysterious, much more personal than that, because that's the key about spiritual formation is it's the spirit who's doing the forming, and I think it's. I think it's an encouraging thing that we see young people wanting structure and discipline. I just want to make sure that that doesn't simply become a new moral list of hoops to jump through that are going to somehow make you right with God. We've got to make sure that the gospel of grace is the foundation for all of these practices and that our reliance on the Spirit. He is the one who's actually transforming the heart.

Brian Stiller

What are the kind of things that one can do as part of the discipline of life, in walking with the Lord? Any suggestions that you might have as to what I might do, what I might read, what framing of the day might give me opportunity to do what you've talked about?

Trevin Wax

You know, I do think different people will be at different stages as to what kinds of disciplines they can do, and it's similar I like to compare it to a spiritual workout, you know, to a physical workout, to just say, you know, sometimes we wonder how in the world did some of the Christians in older times spend so much time in prayer or read so much of their Bibles or know their Bibles so well? Well, it didn't happen overnight. It's the same way when you walk into a gym, you really can't lift everything you'd like to lift the first day. You've got to work at it over time and eventually, over time, you begin to see your you know your body begins to change and time you begin to see your body begins to change and your muscles begin to grow and whatnot. I think we've got to see that similar with the spiritual life as well. We've got to look at this as not just a workout where we're just getting our reps in doing what we can in order to shape our physical bodies. What we're doing is we're putting ourselves before the Lord and asking Him to shape our spiritual bodies. What we're doing is we're putting ourselves before the Lord and asking him to shape our spiritual souls over time, and we know that we need scripture for that, we need prayer for that, we need the community of faith for that.

And so my encouragement to those who are listening, who may want to be just starting out, is just begin with simple prayer at the beginning of a morning. You know a little bit of Bible reading and a little bit of prayer just to begin to frame the day. Then maybe you work out you know a little bit of time in the evening, right before you go to bed. The last thing you want it to be is maybe a psalm or something from scripture, where you want your mind to be focused on the Lord, setting your mind on things above that. Right, there is two times a day prayer and Bible reading. Just even if it's only five to 10 minutes, that's a great beginning.

And then also just to make sure that we're prioritizing our growth in community with other people. You know, when the Apostle Paul says to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, he's speaking to the Philippian church and he's speaking to that plural. It's not just an individual workout he's talking about. He's talking about us together, corporately, working out what God has worked in the salvation that God has worked into our hearts. We're working that out together in community, knowing that it's actually God who's willing, who's working in this and through us, and so I just encourage people to start small but to recognize that over time, those little decisions, those little times spent with the Lord are going to have a massive impact once they're put one on top of the other.

Brian Stiller

Trevin Wax, thank you for your wisdom and insight into the movements of God in society, in church life and in our own spiritual maturing. I'm grateful for your time on evangelical 360.

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