Between Two Worlds

Mark Galli, managing editor at CT, explains in the comments section of his personal blog some of the reasoning behind the selection of the Top 50 Books for CT's 50th anniversary issue:

When all was said and done with the original list, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity topped the list. This troubled me for two reasons. First, it was just so expected. It was a let down as I read the list (compiled by other editors with lots of input from people inside and outside the office). Second, I don’t happen to think Mere Christianity has shaped evangelicalism as much as other books have. We may wish that we were a movement characterized by Lewis’s calm, cogent rationalism. But we aren’t that.

As I thought about it, I felt that Rinker’s book really made a huge difference, as the comment notes. Today we pray conversationally, and can’t imagine any other way to pray. But this was not always the case with evangelicals. This changed in the sixties, and it has been such a profound change, no one today notices.

Ditto on Understanding Church Growth: today every church in America consciously decides to practice church growth principles or (actually very few) eschew them. There are no neutral parties in this respect. McGavarn’s ideas have so changed the way we think about the church, it’s nearly unimaginable that a church would not try to grow and grow.

The staff just had a fit when I moved these two up top. Some disagreed. Some were frankly embarrassed: they didn’t think these two books represented us at our best. But the point of the list was this: what books have indeed shaped us, not the books we wish would have shaped us.

There is a tendency among the evangelical educated elite to be ashamed of our populist nature. But that, in fact, is who we are. That populism has strengths and weaknesses, but it is who we are. And thus the inclusion of Left Behind, Evangelism Explosion, and Prayer, Conversing with God–and many others. Naturally, we have an intellectual side, as represented by Lewis, Schaeffer, and others. But it’s the populist element that makes up most of our DNA.

Mark