Robert E. Webber’s books and articles on worship, generations, faith and evangelicalism provide a useful commentary on trends in North America, UK and down under.
His book, “The Younger Evangelicals”, published 2002, is a bit like Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical coming to America.
As much as I find it hard to sit comfortably with some of his sweeping generalisations, I think Webber has done a good job of painting an emerging landscape of younger generations of church leaders on the edge. He writes about three streams of evangelicals: “traditional” evangelicals (1950-1975), “pragmatic” evangelicals (1975-2000) and younger evangelicals (2000-). Some of the shifts described are: propositionalism to narrative, rationalism to embodiment, market to mission, power to servanthood, information to formation, program to narrative, constraint to expression, rallies to relationship, and theory to action.
