Donald W. Dayton - Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage

B Y J IM W ALLIS

W hen Don Dayton wrote a series of essays titled Recovering a Heritage for Sojourners magazine (then called Post American ), he was responding to a young evangelical movement that at the time seemed radical, but was in fact a return to an orthodoxy that had been lost. These essays eventually became his seminal book, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage . In it Dayton masterfully recounted the work of revivalist minister Charles G. Finney, reformists Theodore Weld and the Grimke sisters, and the men and women of Oberlin Colony, and he reminded readers of the history of the evangelical movement in America as a call back to our best spiritual values. I had never heard about an evangelical movement that was once committed to social justice and even helped to change America in its time.

In Discovering an Evangelical Heritage Dayton showed that many evangelical Christians in the nineteenth century didnt distinguish between a private faith focused exclusively on personal salvation and radical concern for the poor and oppressed. Personal piety was largely connected to works that went beyond charity to social reform and justice. It wasnt an evangelical faith concerned only about heaven and the life hereafter but about bringing the kingdom of God into this world . As a result, evangelicals were heavily involved in the abolition of slavery, fighting for the poor, and womens rights. Evangelical revivals called people not only to personal atonement but to putting faith into action. At their altar calls people would come to Christ and immediately sign up for the anti-slavery campaign!

Since its founding, Sojourners has articulated the biblical call to social justice. For many of us who grew up in the post-war evangelical American churches where faith had been privatized, Don Dayton helped us understand that our longing to embrace the world was grounded in both Scripture and history. He revealed the public evangelical faith that is our great inheritance. And that revelation even helped to renew our faith personally. Daytons voice in our magazine was a dramatic historical demonstration that our evangelical heritage involved a deeply personal faith that expressed itself in a commitment to real changenot just in our hearts but in the world that God so loved. The kingdom of God is the central message of the New Testament, intended to change the world and us with it.

In Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage, an expansion of the original book, Don Dayton and Doug Strong show it is not heretical or communist to talk about social justice in the church. On the contrary, a personal faith that issues itself in a fundamental commitment to social justice is the very stuff of orthodoxy and is deeply embedded in American history. Dayton showed us young sojourners that we werent the first people to connect faith to justice, but that integrating both goes back into the heart of church history. Separating personal faith from public expression is a rather recent American heresy. That was humbling, reassuring, and grounding for us as well.

The good news now is that a new generation of evangelical Christians is hungry to do exactly what these earlier reformers were doing. So I would urge you to read this update of a classic book, and ask how we can put our evangelical faith into action that makes its own history.

Jim Wallis
July 2014