The New Evangelical Partnership announces a new program opportunity for your church or university. "Inheritance: Wounds in the hearts, minds, and landscape of the Holy Land" is a traveling photo exhibit that provides the perfect opportunity for a discussion of conflict, peace, and justice. NEP Executive Director Steven D. Martin brings photographs and stories about his time in Israeli and Palestinian cities and will bring a message of how deep wounds, not religious differences, create the context for the challenges of this part of the Middle East.

Though public support for both major political parties is very low, one group of voters is usually exempted from this malaise: evangelicals. It’s assumed that at least these “values voters” are getting what they want. But we should look more carefully.

A sizable portion of evangelicals have left the right, so to speak, in what the theologian Scot McKnight called “the biggest change in the evangelical movement,” nothing less than the emergence of “a new kind of Christian social conscience.” These new evangelicals focus on economic justice, environmental protection and immigration reform — not exactly Republican strong points. The religious right remains a potent political force, but where once there was the appearance of an evangelical movement that sang out in one voice, there is now a robust polyphony.

In numbers, that means Christians who don’t think of themselves as part of the religious right come to roughly 24 percent of the population, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Subtract the Catholic left and you’ve got some 19 percent of the population distributed among the ‘60s evangelical left; younger, emergent progressive churches; and red-letter Christians, who focus on Jesus’ words in scripture (printed in red) and who lean towards progressive activism. Others have quietly broadened the activism associated with the religious right.

Christians by definition are those who bear witness to our faith in Jesus Christ, including his identity, his teachings, and his mission in the world. We bear witness in many ways. One way is to offer proclamation and action concerning the moral will of God for human communities.

The Bible teaches that every human being is precious in God’s sight (Ps. 8). All are the beloved objects of God’s creating, sustaining, and redeeming grace. What happens to human beings matters immensely to a God who “so loved the world that he sent his only Son” (Jn. 3:16) to redeem it. Christians are called to embody and articulate God’s love for the world in all that we do. This is the heart of Christian evangelistic and moral witness, and is critical for our calling to proclaim the Gospel to all the world.

Much Christian moral witness takes place quietly in families, local congregations, and local communities, as Christians simply go about their daily lives and seek to live as faithful followers of Christ. This is the responsibility of all Christians.

But some Christian moral witness occurs at national and international levels, where many significant challenges to human well-being are often created and addressed. Christians have no choice but to engage religious, economic, cultural, and political institutions with our best efforts to articulate and embody the love and justice of Jesus Christ for the well-being of God’s world. These arenas will be the focus of the New Evangelical Partnership.

This is what we see, and what we want to see:

• We see Jesus Christ, our Lord and the world’s Savior, whom we love—he is the center of our lives.
• We want to see more Americans choose to believe in Jesus and live as his disciples.
• We see that the evangelistic and discipling work of American Christianity has been badly damaged by a generation of culture war-fighting—“some doubt” Jesus—because of Christians.
• We see the allegiance of America as a whole to Christian faith slipping a little bit more each year, partly as a consequence.
• We want to see a renewed Christian public witness in America for the sake of the Gospel.
• We want to see an engagement of Christians in American public life that is loving, rather than angry; holistic rather than narrowly focused; healing rather than divisive; and independent of partisanship and ideology rather than subservient to party or ideology.
• We see in many sectors a Christian public engagement that calls itself Christian while often damaging the work of Christ and violating the teachings of Christ.
• We see other excellent examples of Christian public engagement that need to be celebrated and encouraged.
• We want to see a Christian public witness that reflects the actual life, ministry, and teachings of the Jesus Christ we meet in Scripture and experience in the church at its best.
• We want to see the incarnation of the teachings and example of Christ, not just the articulating of those teachings in word alone.