On Wednesday, May 7th, a group of Evangelical leaders jointly released what is being called The Evangelical Manifesto. According to the website:
An Evangelical Manifesto is an open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for. It has been drafted and published by a representative group of Evangelical leaders who do not claim to speak for all Evangelicals, but who invite all other Evangelicals to stand with them and help clarify what Evangelical means in light of “confusions within and the consternation without” the movement. As the Manifesto states, the signers are not out to attack or exclude anyone, but to rally and to call for reform. You can access the short version of the Manifesto here.
I appreciate the spirit in which the Manifesto was conceived and is being put forward. And I can put this in a million different ways, but I think I'll go with this: There was a time for the martyrs. There was a time for the Contantinian settlement. There was a time for the Great Trinitarian Debates. There was a time for Christendom. There was a time for the Reformation. There was a time for Liberalism. There was a time for Neo-Orthodoxy. And there was a time for Evangelicalism, as popularly construed.
The damage, however, was done when these movements held on too long. At their best and brightest, these were all movements with gigantically important things to say, wrongs to right, and light to shine.
But then, each in its own time, something very dangerous happened.
They became enthralled by the success of their movement, by the righteousness of their protest. They became entrenched. They became stagnant. They slowly began to elevate, and then to equate, the rallying cries of their movement to the gospel message itself.
In the words of N.T. Wright, woe betide us if in our efforts to win yesterday's battles, we ignore today's and tomorrow's.
And so, with fear and trembling, I present here a suggestion for a Post-Evangelical Manifesto. You don't have to sign it to demonstrate your support. There will be no press releases. I simply pray that it reaches the ears, and hearts, of my brothers and sisters in Christ. And it reads as follows:
A Post-Evangelical Manifesto
Having first expressed the utmost gratitude to our Evangelical forebearers and brethren, we who today define ourselves, with pride and by necessity, as Post-Evangelicals, do so primarily as women and men who have heard the voice of Evangelicalism, learned from it, lived within it, and have now made the choice to move forward. We view our Evangelical traditions with reverence and respect, but we consider those traditions to have been stepping stones in the historical quest of the people of God, guided by the Spirit, for and in furtherance of a loftier and more glorious ideal, namely, and in shorthand terms, the Kingdom of God coming on earth as it is in heaven.
We who define ourselves, with pride and by necessity, as Post-Evangelicals, believe, as do our Evangelical brethren, in:
1. Jesus, fully divine and fully human, as the only full and complete revelation of God and therefore the only Savior.
2. The death of Jesus on the cross, in which he took the penalty for our sins and reconciled us to God.
3. Salvation as God’s gift grasped through faith. We contribute nothing to our salvation.
4. New life in the Holy Spirit, who brings us spiritual rebirth and power to live as Jesus did, reaching out to the poor, sick, and oppressed.
5. The Bible as God’s Word written, fully trustworthy as our final guide to faith and practice.
6. The future personal return of Jesus to establish the reign of God.
7. The importance of sharing these beliefs so that others may experience God’s salvation and may walk in Jesus’ way.
We believe in each of these doctrinal statements. Our primary concern lies not in the truth of these doctrinal statements, but in their very reduction to doctrinal statements. Our Evangelical forebearers and brethren courageously proclaimed the above truths in a context where the very truth of the matters asserted were being challenged, and the challengers were gaining footholds. Once again, we praise and honor them for that courage.
However, we have come recognize that these statements are, and were originally intended to be, packed shorthand expressions for richly complex historical narratives, and the theological implications gleaned from them. They were packed into doctrinal form for reasons not dissimilar to why we pack a suitcase to travel. The suitcase allows ease of travel. But to make full use of the process, one must unpack the suitcase once the destination has been reached. We Post-Evangelicals have come to recognize that these doctrinal statements, once packed, tended to remain packed. And the longer they remained packed, the more the rich, complex and varied truths remaining inside were forgotten.
 As Post-Evangelicals, we feel called by the Spirit of the God revealed in Jesus Christ to, at long last, re-open the suitcases of these doctrinal statements, to begin to re-examine the rich narratives that have, for so long, been gathering mold and dust. Sadly, we, too, have and shall continue to fail to live up to our high calling. But we stand in fervent prayer that such failures may be caused by our own fallen natures, and not by the defining qualities of the movement whose principals we proclaim.
We do not see the privatization of faith as an "equal and opposite error" to the politicization of faith. The faith to which Christ has called us has always been a public, political faith, and never a dualistic, gnostic, holy huddle. Our dispute lies in the nature by which that political faith is exercised.
We have grown weary of the notion of a religious tolerance in a pluralistic society, which we see as the position of of our forebearers and brethren, at their best. We do not seek tolerance. We seek love, as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, of which tolerance is a weak parody, at best.
Post-Evangelicals are people who also define themselves, their faith, and their lives according to the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth (euangelion). But, unlike the Manifesto of our brethren, we feel compelled to examine what specifically that good news is, for if left undefined, it has a tendency to become reduced to a purely internal spiritual transformation, which may be very powerful but is Christianly incomplete. In packaged shorthand form, we understand that the euangelion is that the crucified and risen Jesus was, and is, Israel's Messiah and thereby the world's true Lord who, having ushered in God's age-old plan to save all of creation, demands our allegiance, an allegiance colored by and consisting in faith.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, committed to plunge forward. We are a generation shaped by the postmodern critique, but by the grace of God we refuse to lapse into the nihilism which that critique may otherwise ensnare us. We see truth in narratives, are cautious of oppressive narratives, but see in the narrative of the God revealed in Christ no such hint of oppression.
We pledge that in a world of lies, hype and spin, we are called to live and speak and act and think and imagine and create and work and celebrate and worship and relate to one another in faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
The End
 Raffi Shahinian is a fledgling author, humbled father, blessed husband, wanna-be theologian, repentant attorney and stumbling disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. This article first appeared on his blog: http://www.parablesofaprodigalworld.com/.
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I could not agree to your proposed manifesto without careful consideration of all it entails.