Review : The Younger Evangelicals 133

This book is an apologetic for and a chronicle of one of the latest editions in the ever-widening evangelical saga. Robert E. Webber is Myers Professor of Ministry at the Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and president of the Institute for Worship Studies. He taught at Wheaton College from 1968–2000. He has authored numerous books on the general subject of evangelicalism, including Ancient-Future Faith (Baker, 1999) and Ancient-Future Evangelism (Baker, 2003). The author’s research and contact with his subject are aptly demonstrated in the book under review, although the ideas and practices of the new group he portrays are still largely from anecdotal accounts at this early point. In this book Webber “interprets the changing face of evangelicalism since about 1950 and projects where evangelicalism is going in the next decades” (p. 13). Webber introduces the subject by placing the new movement, called the younger evangelicals, within the history of evangelicalism that spans roughly 1950–2000. From 1950–1975 there flourished a group that he calls “traditional evangelicals,” or what I would term the new evangelicals, that arose out of the old fundamentalist/evangelical coalition that itself had emerged from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s. The new or traditional evangelicals repudiated the essential motifs of the fundamentalists. From 1975–2000 a new stirring of “pragmatic evangelicals” appeared, baby boomers that turned against the traditionalists and created the mega-church, seekersensitive, market-driven, and generation-targeted philosophy of church