What is an evangelical? And would you call yourself one? No matter how you would answer those two questions,

we would all acknowledge that they're important questions that many seem to be asking afresh right now.

In our interview today, I'm talking with Mike Reeves, President and Professor of Theology

at Union School of Theology in the UK, and the author of Gospel People, A Call for Evangelical Integrity from Crossway.

Reeves and I discuss the term evangelical and the different ways it's often used in our culture today.

His thoughts on how we should respond

to the cultural baggage often associated with the term and the crucial theological underpinnings

of a truly evangelical worldview. Let's get started. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining me

today on the Crossway podcast.

Absolutely pleasure to be with you, Matt.

It's good to talk with you again.

And I think this morning about a pretty important topic, this idea of who we are as evangelicals

and the value of that term going forward, at least to me, as I look out at the landscape around us,

maybe especially in the U.S., it seems like more and more Christians,

including many pastors and church leaders, are rejecting the label evangelical.

Yes.

And so I wonder just to kick us off here, if someone you didn't know after finding out

that you were a Christian asked you, but are you an evangelical, how would you respond to that

question?

Well, it is a difficult one we need to be sensitive to according to people's different situations.

So we need to be contextually sensitive. In some places and at some

times the word evangelical has unhelpful or negative or misleading connotations that were I simply

...