From Patheos-I dealt with this snarkily yesterday, but here’s a less-jokey follow-up … So Rachel Held Evans has joined the Episcopal Church. Good for her! (And good for the Episcopal Church!) Some of my best friends are Episcopalian, after all.
This is being treated as “news,” because Evans is a newsworthy evangelical figure. Fair enough, I suppose. But, weirdly, some have decided that the news here is that by joining the Episcopal Church, Evans is somehow “departing” evangelicalism.
Nonsense. “Evangelical” and “Episcopalian” are overlapping categories, and always have been. The Episcopal Church has around 2 million baptized members and a good chunk of that total is evangelical. It’s part of the worldwide Anglican Communion — a church of more than 80 million members which, likewise, includes tens of millions of evangelical believers. Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, is one of them.
White evangelicals in America have always had an affinity for Anglicans and Episcopalians. They lionize the Episcopalians among America’s founding generation as champions of Christianity. And they love C.S. Lewis, John Stott and N.T. Wright.
Read more:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/03/19/episcopalian-and-evangelical-are-not-exclusive-categories/#ixzz3UvUmSDKC
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