An evangelist is defined less by ordination to a fixed office than by a recognized calling and demonstrated gift for public preaching aimed specifically at conversion, a ministry the New Testament itself distinguishes from that of the pastor-teacher in passages such as Ephesians 4, and one that has historically operated both within established denominational structures and, especially in American revivalist Protestantism, through independent traveling ministries unattached to any single congregation. An evangelist's characteristic setting has historically been the mass gathering, the camp meeting, the tent revival, and, in the twentieth century, the stadium crusade, rather than the settled weekly preaching of a single congregation's own pastor, a difference of scale and format that has shaped both the evangelist's characteristic rhetorical style and the parachurch organizational structures, distinct from any single denomination, many prominent evangelists have built to support their work.
Some Christian traditions, particularly Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, also recognize evangelist as a formal, sometimes ordained ministry office within the local congregation or denomination, distinct from the itinerant revivalist sense of the term, reflecting these traditions' particular theological emphasis on the fivefold ministry gifts, apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher, drawn from the same Ephesians 4 passage.