In this issue of EFCA Today, we look at what has shaped the Evangelical Free Church of America movement over the years. We know that our presidents have shaped the movement. We know that leaders at the grassroots level have also shaped the movement. Listen in as Bill Hamel and Greg Strand talk about another major shaper of EFCA ethos and culture. Bill Hamel is president of the EFCA; Greg Strand is director of biblical theology and credentialing. Interviewer is Bill Culbertson, senior pastor of Oxboro EFC in Bloomington, Minn., and member of the EFCA board of directors.

What role does doctrine play in shaping the uniqueness of the EFCA?

Greg: It’s central. Every major mile marker in our history has at its heart biblical truth and doctrine. Our origination in the 19th century was over doctrine—issues about which our fathers and mothers would have been willing to die.

Bill: Not only were they willing to die, but they actually gave up homeland and security to come to America because of doctrine. Without a core doctrinal position, a movement can go in many different directions. Doctrine gives you a basis for who you are. What we’ve talked about more recently is being a gospel-centered movement that is based on solid orthodox theology.

Bill, tell us about the advice you received, when you became president.

Bill: At that time, one of the board members told me that a CEO has a primary role: to uphold values and maintain ethos. That became deeply imbedded in me. There’s a set of core values that I take as my responsibility to guard and to drive. One of our key values is to be doctrinally sound/orthodox. That was part of my driving force in leading the Statement of Faith revision in 2008¹. While we had a wonderful doctrinal statement that fit 1950, so many issues had changed in the theological world that we had to define more clearly who we are².

Greg, you are often the go-to person for doctrinal questions. What types of questions are most common?

Greg: Typically, people outside the EFCA will ask about issues not clearly defined in our Statement of Faith, because they’re comparing/contrasting with their own beliefs or their own denomination. Another huge area is that of moral ethics. Within our movement, one recurring question relates to how we faithfully live out a congregational form of polity.

I also get a number of questions regarding soteriology: How do we live together with different understandings about the doctrine of salvation, i.e. Reformed/Calvinist and Arminian/Wesleyan? Another one today is the issue of same-sex marriage and homosexuality. One that is pretty significant as of late is the historicity of Adam and Eve and what it entails to be progenitors of the entire human race.

Bill: Sometimes a group of pastors will ask about issues we haven’t specified within the Statement of Faith, voicing: Is it OK that my neighboring pastor takes this position when I take this other position? Certainly I belong in an Evangelical Free Church—does he? And similarly, in a local congregation you’ll get situations where people hear their pastor take a position in his preaching that he’s not voiced before, which leads them to question if that’s “Free Church” or not.

Greg: During our Statement of Faith discussions, it was enlightening for many pastors to realize that their position (on one or more topics) is certainly well within the parameters of the EFCA, but it’s not exclusively the position of the EFCA. That was a helpful exercise for all of us, to realize that more often than not, the EFCA is a bit broader than our own views—focusing on essentials of the gospel and being unwilling to divide over nonessentials.

“I wish people would ask, ‘How can our church be more gospel-centered?’ ”

What question do you wish more people would ask, to get at the root of the movement and its ethos?

Bill: I wish people would ask, “How can our church be more gospel-centered? How can this wonderful theological base that’s built on the very words of God be fleshed out in my life and the life of the church and the community in a gospel-centered way?”

Greg: I would agree. It’s not just understanding that gospel-centeredness focuses on Christ. In addition, the gospel has entailments for life, ministry and leadership—it affects everything. Gospel-centeredness is not a case of once you figure this out, you’re done; living in a gospel-centered way means we’re doing this all the time.

You’ve mentioned that underneath many of the questions asked is an unasked concern: What can we do and still be an Evangelical Free Church — how much can we narrow? Is this healthy or unhealthy for a church to define itself more narrowly than the EFCA overall?

Greg: On the one hand, it’s healthy. Local churches need to identify where they stand on some of these theological issues. On the other hand, if they communicate that narrower understanding to be the extent of the parameter, they are going in the wrong direction. Having broad parameters doesn’t mean that you can’t hold a doctrine passionately or robustly. You can! It’s just that you won’t divide over it. That’s the issue. Too often there’s an accompanying “narrowing” as a mark of division or identity, rather than a gracious humility centered in the gospel to be more accepting.

Bill: When Dr. Cedar became president in 1990, Dr. McDill said to him that one of the toughest challenges he’d face would be with those within our denomination whom he defined as “one-issue” people. When we were revising our Statement of Faith, I was in a conversation with Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. I related that we were trying to stay broad yet clearly define the core doctrine. He said, “You know, it’s very unusual in today’s world, and particularly in denominational settings, to have a Statement of Faith that has a breadth to it that welcomes diverse kinds of people.” I think that’s true.

Greg: Evangelicals often believe they have to validate their existence, and they do this by showing where they are different from others. When that happens, you begin to focus on microscopic, one-issue kinds of things. The EFCA’s uniqueness is that we are not overly unique doctrinally. In other words, our beliefs are similar to what other gospel-centered evangelical believers have believed over the years.

Bill: This, then, allows those who love the gospel preeminently to be part of the EFCA despite some differences in nonessential doctrines, and the gospel permeates everything we do.

As you think back over the years, have any doctrinal movements or trends truly shaped who we are?

Greg: In the late 19th century, there was a convergence of three critical issues. Darwinian evolution stated there was no need for God; a German higher critical approach to the Bible called into question the authority and divine inspiration of the Word of God; and the modernist response in the United States to all of this was to deny the Bible’s inerrancy and authority, miracles, and the deity of Jesus Christ. In the midst of this, the Scofield Reference Bible was published (1909), and it became the evangelical response to modernism. So a certain dispensational framework that was espoused by Scofield has had an influence on us as a movement.

More recently, in the 1940s, we were part of and influenced by the fundamentalist and neo-evangelical movements (the latter of which became known as evangelical.) Both groups agreed on the major doctrines referred to as “the fundamentals of the faith,” written between 1910 and 1915 and compiled in The Fundamentals (the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, the deity of Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His substitutionary atonement, and His physical and bodily return).

The difference is that fundamentalists moved in a separatist direction. People like Billy Graham, Ken Kantzer and Carl F.H. Henry, and others who have influenced our movement, were considered neo-evangelicals. That is, they were not going to separate. Instead they were going to engage in culture and be salt and light in the midst of it, and they were going to be educated at the best of institutions and be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ and stewards of the Truth in and through their studies.

Bill: There are always new movements coming around the corner. Greg alluded to the issue of creation. We’ve dealt in recent years with the Openness of God movement (a belief denying that God knows the future exhaustively). We have had to respond to postmodernism and the effect it has had on our understanding of Scripture, hermeneutics and truth. There’s a movement among some evangelicals away from the substitutionary atonement.

Greg: Add to that “eternal conscious punishment.”

Bill: Or the destiny of the unevangelized. These are more issues, but sometimes they feel like movements. We have to be nimble and theologically sound, and respond kindly and graciously.

Greg: Our prayer as we address these issues is to respond with clarity, courage, conviction (because God’s Word is true) and humility. We look at these issues as opportunities to clarify doctrinal truth.

Bill: When we draw lines too quickly or too harshly, not only are we not humble, but we have just eliminated any possibility of redemption if someone’s theology is outside of who we are. There comes a time when you have to draw a line in the sand, but that’s not the way you first respond.

How might we continue to shape our future in the EFCA?

Bill: We are working on tools to help our churches and pastors teach our new Statement of Faith. As pastors understand and teach the core theology of who we are, that goes a long way toward preempting some of the movements away from the gospel.

Greg: Not just today but in the future, we want to avoid two errors. We don’t want to move in a liberal direction, concluding that we need to update the truth of the Bible to make it relevant and palatable to people today. For Bible-based, gospel-loving people, this is not the solution to the contemporary issues before us. There is a long history revealing that such a move is death for churches, movements, associations and denominations. By God’s grace, may that not happen to us. The other error is to narrow too much. These issues will inevitably come at us. The danger is that rather than engaging them with the Word of God, trusting that it is the final authority, we narrow to a comfortable, known position so we don’t even interact with what’s going on and the questions that are being raised. Then we make that more narrow position the evangelical position and a litmus test for everybody else.

“We are working on tools to help our churches and pastors teach our new Statement of Faith.”

What does the phrase significance of silence mean? How does the local church implement it?

Bill: Historically, that phrase was coined by Dr. Olson in his book This We Believe. The EFCA will be definitive on the essentials: who God is, what the Scriptures are, Christ’s work, the role of the Holy Spirit, etc. But about doctrinal truths that are outside our Statement of Faith, we are silent, and there is freedom and openness. Now the reality is that even in Dr. Olson’s era, there were some unwritten rules about who fit and who didn’t fit. Every generation has to wrestle through whether or not we really believe this.

Then there’s the second part of your question. Let’s say you have a pastor who is Arminian in his view of soteriology (i.e. faith/belief precedes regeneration) but still is welcoming, open and encouraging to those who hold a more Reformed view of salvation (i.e. regeneration precedes faith/belief). That leads to a wonderful dynamic in the church. But if a church has to so clearly define everything that it excludes warm-hearted, gospel-centered believers who fit our doctrinal statement, I think they’re missing out on the Church and the greater breadth of the kingdom of God. (And I’m not saying a pastor can’t preach what he believes.)

Greg: Let me say what the significance of silence is not. It doesn’t mean that we have to remain silent and inwardly die because we can’t even talk about a topic. No. We can talk about it passionately and robustly, but we won’t divide over it. The second misnomer is that we can’t hold a position strongly, so we must create a third amalgamation of both perspectives of a particular doctrine that doesn’t accurately represent anyone’s position. That’s not what we’re saying either.

Let me give an example. In our credentialing process, when individuals are defending their theological positions, we ask them to do three things. First, we want them to affirm strongly their position biblically, theologically and historically (what the church has believed through history). Second, we want them to understand accurately the arguments of the other position biblically, theologically and historically. We’re not saying they have to agree with it, but they have to understand it. They ought to understand this position as well as—if not better than—the proponent of it. Caricatures of the other position are not only inaccurate, but they are also hurtful to our shared ministry of the gospel in the EFCA. And finally, we ask whether they are willing to live with and minister joyfully with the person of the other position. That gets to the heart of the ethos of the EFCA.

How unusual is this ethos—the significance of silence—as compared with what might define other denominations?

Bill: I’m a member of the board of the National Association of Evangelicals (which is more than 50 denominations), and almost all the other denominations have a defining theological system that would fit within our Statement of Faith. But their system would eliminate many of our leaders from serving—probably even limit them from becoming members. So I think it is fairly unique. I’d like to say we’re very unique, but that’s because I think the Evangelical Free Church is the best there is!