Evangelicals and Tradition

Recently I have been using Mark Broadway’s new devotional, Journeying with God in the Wilderness. I purchased it from the Faith Mission Bookshop in the House of VicRyn in Lisburn. It is a 40-day Lent Devotional through the book of Numbers. Immediately as I started this it got me thinking about evangelicals and tradition.

By tradition, I guess I mean ‘traditional’ tradition rather than any kind of tradition that modern evangelicals have themselves created. A classic example of this would be the period of Lent which this devotional focusses on.

Most of us will be familiar with the idea of giving things up for Lent. We pick something we love, but that we know is bad for us, and for the 40 days of Lent, we abstain from it. But that is not the traditional tradition. The tradition would be to have forty days of fasting, with the 6 Sundays across those 40 days being feast days. The aim of this tradition is to bring about the experience of being the wilderness. The aim is to cause Christians to see and feel their full dependence on God.

Tradition — Rejected!

Traditions like this are not really in favour amongst a lot of evangelical Christians. The logic for this is pretty sound in my view but it leaves me with a question that is just sort of … hanging. And unanswered.