David Bebbington (University of Stirling) is the foremost historian of British evangelicalism, and for years has occasionally come to Baylor as a visiting professor. He is best known for his “Bebbington quadrilateral,” the four-point definition of evangelicalism, including activism, crucicentrism, biblicism, and conversionism.
Bebbington has also compiled what I suppose is the most comprehensive collection of notes on church services over the past half-century in the English-speaking world. When you attend a church service with David, he takes meticulous notes, not just on the sermon, but also on details such as the number and names of hymns, the exact length of the sermon, the position of flags (if any) in the sanctuary. He’s been doing this at multiple services a week since the 1960s.
Friends and colleagues have been encouraging David to synthesize and analyze these notes for some time, and he has begun to do so. He gave a recent talk at Baylor in which he unpacked his observations on sermons in North America in the 1990s. David’s observations give remarkable texture to the substance and style of evangelical preaching in those years, and for many, his recollections will seem like a trip down memory lane.
