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Awakening to a World of Need: The Recovery of Evangelical Social Action
Tim Chester
(IVP, 1993)
In the first half of this century, evangelicals largely withdrew from the public arena, in which they had previously been very active, to concentrate on cultivating holiness and saving souls. In the second half, many evangelicals have recovered their ‘temporarily mislaid social conscience’ (as John Stott puts it in his Foreword), and they have begun to discover how much the Bible has to say about holistic evangelism and a just society. This books tells the story of the growth of evangelical social concern from the 1960s to present day - a story of compassion responding to need, of new organisations such as Tearfund and World Vision, and of theology catching up with action. It explores the influence of key Western and non-Western thinkers such as John Stott and Rene Padilla, of political activists such as Jim Wallis and of major conferences such as Lausanne (1974), as well as grassroots initiatives. He also tackles the tensions that have arisen as evangelicals have thought about the relationship between proclamation and service, and about the biblical basis of social ethics.
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