A Global Shift in Missionary Christianity

Abstract

This chapter traces the development of a global network of mission-minded evangelicals in the 1970s. It identifies the International Congress on World Evangelization that Billy Graham organized in 1974 as a landmark event that touched off a new era in evangelical missionary work and cross-cultural cooperation. The chapter also delves deeply into the debates and new relationship that emerged from the congress and explains how the economic, political, and social changes of the 1970s led to a renewed sense of missionary urgency among evangelicals throughout the world. It demonstrates that active involvement in this new global Christian network cultivated an internationalist outlook among U.S. evangelicals. It also links the global expansion of evangelical Christianity with the concomitant rise in evangelical political influence in the United States.