ABSTRACT
Few parts of the world have been unaffected by the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its advocates rarely failed to make some kind of impression. They regularly elicited three types of response: some degree of eager interest which involved significant numbers of conversions; repressive counter-measures which amounted to an implicit tribute to their effectiveness; and a sense of threat among their competitors which led to a renewal of devotional zeal, or at least an attempt to reform abuses, among those competitors. At times, of course, the three responses overlapped. In each case the sense that a phenomenon, welcome, dangerous or curious, was occurring, was a common factor. That sense was justified by the enduring nature of the evangelical phenomenon. Numerous Protestant Churches still describe themselves formally as ‘evangelical’, while the term has also been used to describe a party, or a way of thought, within Churches which do not use the term in their official titles. In 1970 there was formed a body styled ‘Conservative Evangelicals in Methodism’ and in 1983 the ‘Church of England Evangelical Council’ was set up, while the ability of evangelicalism to cross denominational boundaries was seen in the emergence of the National Assembly of Evangelicals in 1965 (Bebbington, 1989:270). In the United States the National Association of Evangelicals represented thirty denominations with 1,300,000 members in 1947.
