10 Minutes With … David Neff

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Christianity Today, the pre-eminent evangelical Christian magazine, marked its 50th anniversary with a special issue in October. Evangelist Billy Graham founded CT to be a rallying point for the nation’s evangelical Protestants, says David Neff, the magazine’s editor. Having worked for the magazine for 21 of its 50 years […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Christianity Today, the pre-eminent evangelical Christian magazine, marked its 50th anniversary with a special issue in October. Evangelist Billy Graham founded CT to be a rallying point for the nation’s evangelical Protestants, says David Neff, the magazine’s editor.

Having worked for the magazine for 21 of its 50 years in various editorial roles, Neff, 59, talked about how the magazine and evangelicalism in general have changed over the last five decades.


Q: Since you’ve worked at Christianity Today, what do you see as the most significant changes in the evangelical movement in the last couple of decades?

A: During the time period that I’ve been here we have seen evangelicalism … mobilized politically, politically demotivated and remobilized. … What amazes me is the way in which it was only in the 2004 election that the mainstream media really picked up on the importance of evangelical Protestants as a voting group and, of course, we’ve been watching that from the inside for a much longer time.

Q: Given the results of the 2006 elections, do you think there’s a need for evangelicals to work on a new agenda with Democrats?

A: I think some segments of the evangelical movement have been too closely aligned in their own heads with the Republican Party but, by and large, what the election shows me is that a large segment of evangelical voters really do vote on issues rather than on party affiliation. …

I don’t think it’s a matter of evangelicals learning to cooperate with Democrats … (but) the party learning to cooperate on some compromises and middle-ground solutions.

Q: Beyond politics, what other kinds of changes have there been in the last 50 years among evangelicals?

A: We’ve seen during that same period the rise of the megachurch movement … with Willow Creek (Community Church in South Barrington, Ill.) being sort of the standard bearer for that movement.


Q: What kind of long-term fallout for evangelicals do you think there will be from the revelations about and resignation of Rev. Ted Haggard as head of the National Association of Evangelicals?

A: Certainly this is a much bigger jolt to the mainstream evangelical community than revelations many years ago about, say, Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker. Those were media personalities who stood to one side of the mainstream. Ted was the pastor of the largest church in the Rocky Mountain region and the head of the National Association of Evangelicals. … NAE will go on. … Obviously, the biggest impact is going to be on New Life Church. People there are … heavily impacted by this.

Q: What have been some of the more recent changes you’ve seen in evangelicals beyond megachurches?

A: We saw more recently a younger generation of pastors come along for whom (the role of megachurch leader) was not new but that was the old guard. So we see both emergent and emerging church conversations going on … built around smaller more intimate kinds of approaches, built around a more explicitly Christian identity.

Q: In its 50 years, CT has become a key voice of evangelicalism in this country. To what do you attribute the magazine’s success?

A: The early editorial approach … was aimed almost entirely at pastors, and not just at pastors but at the better educated and more intellectual pastors. The magazine continued to have some financial woes for as long as that was the target audience.


One of the decisions (former President Harold Myra) made was to expand … from seminary-trained pastors to thinking or thoughtful lay leaders in the churches and that’s where the bulk of CT’s readership is today.

Q: Your magazine looked at what more than 100 evangelical leaders viewed as the priorities for the movement for the next 50 years. One issue that came up was pluralism. How do evangelicals grapple with their desire to spread the gospel in a world that has grown more pluralistic?

A: That, I think, will only make them more eager to do so, but … I think it is important to understand that evangelicals desire to witness to their faith because they want to share something good that has happened to them that they think can benefit their neighbors.

The vast majority of evangelicals are not about to try to impose a particular form of religion on the American public or even on their local communities. They are, however, enthusiastic about what they’ve got and so this gets, unfortunately, misunderstood at times.

Q: The editorial in CT’s November issue had some intriguing comments about whether America might be heading toward a theocracy or if we’re already in one. Can you explain the magazine’s stance on this controversial concept?

A: Most of the books that have come out in the past few months that use the word “theocracy” to talk about either what is happening or about what might happen because of evangelical engagement in our political life are just so far from reality and so far over the top as to be laughable.


In terms of what the magazine thinks about theocracy, of course, we understand that this is a country which is constitutionally committed to not imposing religion on its citizens even as it’s constitutionally committed to protect religion from inordinate government influence.

KRE/JL END BANKS

Editors: To obtain a photo of David Neff, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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