Evangelist

The evangelist is one who preaches the gospel to those outside the church, an office named in the New Testament and revived with particular force in the modern period.

Preaching to the outsider

The evangelist is listed in the letter to the Ephesians alongside apostles, prophets, pastors and teachers as one of the gifts given to the church, and the distinguishing mark of the office is direction outward: where the pastor tends an existing congregation, the evangelist carries the message to those who do not yet believe. The same word names the four traditional authors of the Gospels, the writers of the good news, so the term holds together the writing of the gospel and the proclaiming of it.

An office revived

Though the office is ancient, it took on a prominent and distinctive form in the modern era, especially within Protestantism, where the travelling evangelist, the revival preacher and, later, the broadcast preacher became familiar figures, some of them building large followings and organisations around the work of mass evangelism. Entry to the work is less by formal ordination than by recognised gift and, often, by the sponsorship of a church or a mission body, and its exercise ranges from the local to the international. The evangelist thus stands at the outward edge of the church ministry, and the modern flourishing of the office, with its crusades and its media, is one of the marks of Protestant Christianity in particular.

The modern shape of the evangelist grew out of successive waves of Protestant revival: the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, associated with preachers such as George Whitefield, credited with popularising open air preaching to crowds far larger than any church building could hold, and the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, whose camp meetings and professionalised revival techniques under figures like Charles Finney set the template later evangelists refined.

Radio and then television gave the office a reach earlier revivalists could not have imagined, and the mid to late twentieth century produced both the stadium crusades of Billy Graham, whose events drew millions over decades, and a series of televised ministries whose financial and personal scandals in the 1980s did lasting damage to public trust in the title, particularly in the United States. Stadium-scale crusade evangelism has declined sharply in North America and Europe since, while the office continues to grow in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, where large open-air and televised campaigns remain a significant feature of expanding Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, often led by evangelists whose reach now runs through satellite television and social media rather than a physical crusade.