Interpreting the Present Time: History, the Bible, and the Church's Mission Today

A.J. Pell is the rector of Holy Trinity Cathedral, Diocese of New
Westminster, British Columbia.

For Anglicans in Canada and around the world, the 1990s are the
“Decade of Evangelism”; this has made it very apparent to all that
the church is deeply divided between “liberals” and
“conservatives.” Interpreting the Present Time exemplifies that
division from the liberal side.

The author operates from the twin premises that evangelism is as much
what Christians do as what they say, and that our contemporary Canadian
society operates in ways that cannot be easily reconciled with the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. Both liberals and conservatives could agree with
these premises. But Powles’s prescription for the methods and goal of
Christian evangelism is not just liberal, but intellectual elitist
liberal. He sees the transformation of the political and economic
structures of society as the goal of evangelism. For methods he
advocates such things as consumer resistance, pacifism, and civil
disobedience.

It would appear from this book that Powles is caught in an intellectual
time warp. The enemy is capitalism and the power of economic and
technological elites in capitalist society (the International Monetary
Fund, for example). Mao Zedong liberated China in 1949, a hard-to-defend
thesis in the light of his continuing of undemocratic systems in that
country. Christianity is somehow going to change the world without
changing individual persons. Because this book shows no fresh thinking
and little recognition of the changing realities in our world and in the
church, it does nothing to make liberal Christianity relevant and
attractive in the 1990s.