Should you keep calling yourself evangelical? Should you stay in the mostly white church, campus ministry or organization you belong to now? These two questions usually arrive together, and they get blurred into one. They shouldn’t be. What the word means does not settle whether you should stay in a particular room. What a room has done to you does not settle what the word means. Taken one at a time, both become easier to think about honestly.
Work through this alone in about an hour with a notebook, or across one or two group meetings. The exercises ask you to write before you talk, and nobody has to share anything. The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Vincent Bacote, director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College. Here his account is used for one job: helping you find where you actually stand.
Start with what the word does to you
Before you think about definitions, notice your reaction. Say the word evangelical to yourself, then write down the first three things that come to mind: images, people, headlines, songs, whatever arrives. Don’t edit.
Now ask where each item came from. A sermon? A news story about an election? A Bible study that changed your life? A meeting where you raised race and the room went quiet? Mark each item with its source.
Most of us never chose our definition of the word. We absorbed it. Bacote describes the problem directly. When people hear the word today, he says, “they don’t first think the good news people, or the greatest news of all people.” They think of a religious group defined by its politics and its opponents. If that is the picture on your list, it didn’t come from nowhere.
Lisa Fields frames the task this way in the conversation: “making sure our audience divorces the political block from the actual definition of the word itself is important.” Your list is where that separation starts. It shows which parts of your reaction belong to the word and which belong to how the word has been used.
Sort the word from the poll
Bacote gives the older definition in four parts. The word named Protestants of many denominations who agreed on the authority of the Bible, the need for conversion, a conversion centered on the saving work of Jesus on the cross, and the call to share that faith. He then describes how surveys came to count as evangelical many people with weak ties to Scripture or church whose main commitment was political.
Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, write the four convictions. On the right, write what a pollster or news anchor seems to mean by the word. Then answer two questions in writing:
- Which of the four convictions on the left do I actually hold?
- Which items on the right have I been carrying around as if they were my own?
Then read Romans 1:16 slowly: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.” Paul is writing to a church of Jewish and Gentile believers, and the reach of the gospel is the point of the sentence. Notice what Paul is unashamed of. He doesn’t defend a group’s reputation. He stands behind a message.
Bacote reports John Perkins’s answer at Wheaton in 2018. Asked whether believers should still use the word, Perkins said yes, because its root is the gospel and the gospel is the most important part. Perkins had suffered violence that left him with a steel plate in his head. He had more reason than most to walk away from the label, and he kept it. That is serious testimony. It is not a rule.
The best case for setting it down
The other side deserves a fair hearing, and it is not just distaste. A believer can drop the label for at least three serious reasons.
- Witness. If most of your neighbors hear politics when you say the word, using it may block the very message it once named. Bacote himself notes that believers periodically stop saying Christian and say Jesus follower for this reason, without giving up any conviction.
- Integrity. Some believers judge that wearing the name ties them to a record on race they cannot stand behind, and that saying so plainly is more honest than reclaiming the word.
- Safety. A room where raising race brings accusation again and again can wear a person down. Leaving that room may be wisdom, not weakness. The failures of a church or its leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the failures of Christ.
Now run these through the same sort. Go back to your page. Is each reason a response to the right side, to what the word and its institutions have done? Or has it started to pull at the left side, the convictions themselves? A person can drop the label for every reason above and hold all four convictions more firmly than before. The risk worth watching is narrower: letting the injury done in the gospel’s name cool your trust in the gospel.
Read the room you are in
The second question is harder because it isn’t about history. It is about real people on a real calendar.
Bacote describes a pattern among Black believers in predominantly white churches and parachurch groups. They love what they are learning about the Bible. They agree on doctrine. Then they raise questions about race and meet apathy, or get called divisive. He names the result plainly: “I wind up with a crisis of belonging because it’s like the majority gets to say, which issues are the ones that matter.”
Notice what that sentence locates. The crisis isn’t about doctrine. The beliefs are shared. The crisis is about who sets the agenda. Some people in a hard room are struggling with what the church teaches. Others agree with every word of the statement of faith and still feel like guests. These are different problems, and they lead to different decisions.
Read 1 Corinthians 12:21: “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.” Paul wrote this to a divided church where some members treated others as less necessary. The body image is about mutual need. No part gets to declare another part’s concerns irrelevant. A room where the majority decides which members’ burdens count is falling short of this picture. Naming that is not divisive. It is reading the text.
In your notebook, write a few honest sentences about your current room. What is good there? What has your faith gained from it? When you have raised something that mattered to you, what happened? If you haven’t raised it, what has kept you quiet?
What staying or leaving would actually mean
Bacote’s account takes some pressure off the decision. When Black evangelicals voiced frustration after 2016, he says, many people online treated it as something new. His reply: “It’s a cycle. It’s wash, rinse and repeat.” Believers have stood at this crossroads before, and they have gone more than one way.
He names the paths people took. Some remained in mostly white institutions and kept pushing for change; he mentions one leader who stayed and served on Wheaton’s board. Others joined a traditional Black church or started something new. In his words, “Other people would move to other contexts and still try to have fruitful ministry in some other way.” His summary, “the point being is that they stayed in the game,” refers to the work, not the building. On this account, leaving a room and leaving the game are different things.
He also names a danger on both sides of the decision. Frustration, he says, “that needs to happen, that needs to be processed.” But it can grow until a person forgets they have anything left to do: “it’s almost as if the negative experiences removes people from their agency to believe that there’s something that they still have to do.” He is not dismissing pain. He is warning that pain can quietly make the decision for you.
Read Ephesians 2:10: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” Paul has just said salvation is by grace and not by works (Ephesians 2:8-9). The good works come after grace, as its fruit. They are not a price for belonging. That frees the stay-or-go decision from being a test of your worth. The question is where you can walk in the works God has prepared. Bacote puts it as a question of his own: “are people discerning what the lane is, knowing that they still do have this opportunity for fruitful ministry.”
Disappointment with a room does not have to become distance from Christ. Bacote holds both together: “you can still be a person who’s hopeful, even as you describe your great disappointment, even devastation, betrayal, being duped.”
A practice: the lane inventory
Set aside about thirty minutes this week. Write the answers rather than just thinking them.
- Name the work. List two or three concrete good works you believe God has put in front of you: a person you are discipling, a ministry you serve in, a question you keep being asked, a neighborhood you care about.
- Test the room against the work. For each item, write whether your current room makes that work easier, harder, or impossible, and why.
- Name what is driving you. Write one sentence on what pulls you to stay and one on what pulls you to leave. Next to each, note whether it comes mainly from the work, from fear, from loyalty, from exhaustion, from a need to be safe, or from something else. None of these are shameful. You just need to see them.
- Name one honest next step. A conversation with a pastor, a question raised in a meeting, a visit to another congregation, or a decision to stay put and keep watching for a season. Make it small enough to do within a month.
In a group, do steps one through three privately and share only step four, if at all. The group’s job is to help each person think clearly, not to vote on anyone’s choice. Expect a mix: some still in mostly white spaces, some who have left, some who have never felt this tension. Each can learn from the others without anyone’s experience becoming the standard.
Questions for discussion
- When you sorted your first reactions to the word by source, what surprised you about where your meaning came from?
- Have you felt more strain over what your church teaches or over who gets to decide what matters? How do you tell the two apart in your own experience?
- Which of the reasons for setting the label down carries the most weight for you, and which side of your page does it come from?
- Reread 1 Corinthians 12:21. Where have you seen a church treat some members’ concerns as unnecessary? Where might you have done the same?
- Think of someone you know who changed churches or ministries. Did they leave the room, the work, or both? What made the difference?
- What helps you grieve honestly about a church without losing the sense that you still have something to do?
Facilitators: if someone describes real harm in a church, let them finish before anyone offers a verse or a solution. If the pain goes deeper than a group can carry, encourage them privately toward a trusted pastor outside that situation or a Christian counselor.
What to carry out of this
You may finish with the label settled and the room still open, or the other way around. The two were never one decision. Look again at the left side of your page, the four convictions, and at the work from your inventory. Those two lists will still be true whatever you call yourself next year and wherever you sit on Sunday. Make your decision in a way that keeps both of them intact.