Standing on the shoulders of giants

As the Evangelical Alliance celebrates its 160th birthday, Hazel Southam take a look back through history, and into the future...

On 5 February 1676 Sir Isaac Newton wrote a letter to his fellow scientist Robert Hooke, saying that his achievements owed much to the work of others. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," he said.

This year, as we celebrate the 160th anniversary of the Evangelical Alliance, we can say the same thing. As we look forward to our future, we are able to do so because of the tireless work of those who came before us.

The history of the Alliance is peppered with the great and the good: those who are now household names, but who in their own day were simply living out their faith. So where did the Alliance begin? And whose shoulders are we standing on as we look towards the next 160 years?

Different backgrounds

In 1846, two men from very different church backgrounds were instrumental in founding the Alliance and, by doing so, in overcoming the great divisions that then lay between Anglicans and Non-Conformists.

John Angell James, a Congregational minister from Birmingham, had a vision for an alliance of Dissenters. This vision developed over time so that he hoped it would encompass all evangelicals worldwide, whatever their church background. He worked with Anglican Edward Bickersteth to run the first major inter-denomination conference in London in 1846 that was the foundation of today’s Alliance.

More than 900 senior evangelical church leaders attended representing 15 denominations. Many had travelled for several months to take part in this amazing event.

What they came up with was the Basis of Faith, not dissimilar to the one that we still use today. And the ink was hardly dry on the paper before the first row blew up.

A British delegate proposed that no slave owner should be admitted as an Alliance member. The Americans were in uproar, as one of their churches still accepted slave owners. That was it: the end of a worldwide evangelical union for many years. What they decided on was a compromise, a network of loosely linked, independent national alliances which would not be accountable to each other. One of these was to become the Evangelical Alliance of the UK.

Today, 160 years later, slavery is still a major issue for evangelical Christians in the UK and for the Evangelical Alliance (see Fight the save trade). The Alliance is an active supporter of the Stop the Traffik campaign. The Alliance’s General Director Joel Edwards says, "Human trafficking is a huge issue, as is our response to the poor. Our faith challenges us to be relevant today."

Social reform

In the early 1800s, evangelicals had been instrumental in bringing about the end of the global slave trade. Later, Lord Shaftesbury was to become another social reformer. He campaigned for better conditions in factories, for the poor, for improved housing and for women and children then employed in the mines. On his shoulders we stand.

A key issue for the infant Alliance was religious liberty. The late 1840s are full of stories of the Alliance representing the causes of Christians across Europe who were being persecuted for their faith. This includes Baptists in the German state of Saxe Meningen who were prevented from meeting together or celebrating communion. The pastor wasn’t allowed to visit people’s homes. So the Alliance wrote to the Minister of the Interior, and the situation changed.

In Turkey, religious persecution was common in the 19th century. In 1855, in response to a petition sent by the Alliance, the Sultan of Turkey made a declaration of religious freedom across the Turkish Empire. By the 1860s, the Alliance had appointed a foreign secretary to head its religious liberty work, defending not just Protestants, but also Jews and Catholics.

Notable successes included persuading the Shah of Persia to donate land on which to build churches that had been destroyed; acting on behalf of persecuted Roman Catholics in Russia and Sweden; and defending the rights of Jews in Rome.

After 9/11 we find ourselves facing similar issues. Edwards says, "In 1846 the Alliance was not afraid to bring biblical witness to bear on the issues of the day, such as religious liberty both here and abroad. This is still present with us today as we seek to make the Bible and its claims make sense in our culture."

Relief efforts

Joni Eareckson Tada performs at an NAE event in the 1970's 

Working for the world’s poorest people has always been a concern of the Alliance. A realisation of the need for relief work in the name of the Gospel resulted in the foundation of Tearfund in 1968.

In 1960 (the UN World Refugee Year), the Alliance received donations of £4,000, but was not able to handle funds on such a scale. So it commissioned research on relief and development. When George Hoffman joined the Alliance in 1967, he was handed a file which, combined with his vision, became Tearfund a year later.

An early fundraising event was a Cliff Richard concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969. That raised enough money to send a Land Rover to Africa. Today, Tearfund has an income of £52.5 million and supports 565 projects, working with 297 partner organisations in 70 countries.

Today’s vision for the Alliance is social and spiritual transformation through initiatives such as Micah Challenge, the global campaign to halve world poverty by 2015, following on from Tearfund and Jubilee 2000. Edwards says, "My vision is to see the global Christian community get behind Micah Challenge and its commitment to halving world poverty, in partnership with world governments."

The Alliance was also at the heart of the milestone Billy Graham crusade in Haringey in London in 1954. Two years earlier, Alliance leader Roy Cattell had been involved in pilot meetings where Graham had shared his desire to mount "the greatest evangelistic effort, humanly speaking, that the Church had ever committed itself to".

Now in 2006, Graham is still talking about having one last crusade in London.

Other great evangelical leaders have represented the Alliance in the past, including Martyn Lloyd Jones, John Stott and Clive Calver.

Seeing further

Standing on the shoulders of such giants, what does the future look like to Joel Edwards? "Where evangelicals are in 160 years’ time depends on where we go in the next 50 years," he says. "We must keep our nerve and be confident and not see ourselves as a minority attempting to survive the 21st century. We must recognise that we serve Christ, who’s committed to the future of Christian witness. We really do have the Good News. It really is available to people with spiritual hunger. We have the privilege of serving our community in this way."

The first Champions of Respect Awards were presented at the Alliance's 2005 Temple Address 

He goes on to say, "If we can remember this then we will have as prosperous and effective a future as the Alliance has had a past. How one will measure that success in 160 years’ time will be different from now, but I’m confident about being able to survive for another 160 years - very confident."

While many of today’s issues have continued to echo over the past century and a half (religious liberty, human trafficking, diversity and unity), others are very different, says Edwards. There are moral issues such as human sexuality and anti-social behaviour that must concern Christians as we attempt to live out our faith in a relevant way.

Doing so in an age with little Christian knowledge is "both exciting and daunting", says Edwards. And it’s particularly highlighted by the current focus on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. "This book and film offer us a conversation piece for people who are looking for truth, but who don’t necessarily talk about truth in the same vocabulary as evangelicals do," he says.

"These are opportunities to talk about Christianity. We must register the extent to which The Da Vinci Code and other elements of our culture confuse fact and fiction in the popular perception. That’s daunting, because it means that, first of all, we have to establish the grammar to have the conversation about what’s true and false."

Working together - Anglican with Baptist, Pentecostal with New Church - is now the hallmark of the Alliance and its Alltogether style of activity. This is a far cry from 1846 and something to be celebrated, says Edwards. "We are all so used to working together now. The fact that we have sustained a pattern in which a third of us are Anglicans, a third Baptists and a third made up of a combination of other Protestant churches is, I think, a fitting tribute to what began 160 years ago."

So what will our legacy be in 160 years’ time? Will we seem to be giants to those who come after us? "I think that whoever is doing this job in 160 years’ time will say that we didn’t sit back on our laurels," Edwards says, "but that we worked hard in the closing days of the 20th century and the opening decades of the 21st century to think about our identity, in establishing a vision for the future aiming to present Christ credibly, committing ourselves to being a movement for spiritual and cultural change in the long term."

Let every £2 coin you see be a reminder. Read the inscription round its edge: Standing on the shoulders of giants. This is the Evangelical Alliance’s past. And its future.