On January 15th Matthew Lee Anderson wrote an essay examining the thinking of young evangelicals in “The City.”  I think this is an important article to read for anyone who is thinking about the Evangelicalism of tomorrow.  One paragraph that really stood out to me was;

In addition to their political, national, and familial affiliations, young evangelicals have slowly moved away from identifying with their own theological systems and heritage (the trend of evangelical converts to Anglicanism that Robert Webber first noted has not abated–if anything, it has expanded toward Rome and Constantinople). Such conversions belie, I think, evangelicalism’s failure to articulate its own theological distinctives and advantages and its rich intellectual and spiritual heritage. Few young evangelicals who convert have read–much less heard of–the writings of John Wesley, Andrew Murray, A.W. Tozer or other giants of the evangelical past (one wonders whether the new evangelical leaders like Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, Rob Bell and others have read them). And even fewer evangelicals are inclined to give the tradition in which they were raised the benefit of the doubt, to see the errors and problems and remain regardless.

It seem that we are facing the fruit of our disconnect with history.  People either don’t see the need to be a part of anything or they are running to the places where tradition is evident.  Thinking about this brought to mind a prophetic warning by Edmund Burke that always makes me nervous when I look at things today inside and outside the church:

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated… that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding the leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation – teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers… No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

You can also catch more from Matthew Lee Anderson at his blog called Mere Orthodoxy.