This may seem odd but although the church I was raised in certainly fits within the usual understanding of “evangelical” I never heard the word used to describe us and never thought about it one way or the other.
Only after living in Latin America did I adopt the word, because there the assumption is that you are Catholic or “evangelico”.
I suppose it’s because the church of my youth did not see themselves as “part” of some broader body of Christ. Whereas in my adulthood I did come to see myself as exactly that, part of a broader body of Christ. Christians aren’t limited to any particular denomination, they are where you find them. You can’t go by the sign above the door.
I suppose it’s because the church of my youth did not see themselves as “part” of some broader body of Christ. Whereas in my adulthood I did come to see myself as exactly that, part of a broader body of Christ. Christians aren’t limited to any particular denomination, they are where you find them. You can’t go by the sign above the door.
I prefer to just refer to myself as “Christian”. That seems sufficient.
In a perfect world where there were no distinctions or divisions among Christians, that would be the ideal, but as your experience in Latin America shows, sometimes one needs to make the distinction to avoid confusion or misunderstanding. In discussing matters of the Faith I would speak differently to a Catholic than I would to a Methodist, than I would to a Baptist, etc., because even though we're all Christians, within our different faith traditions we sometimes have different understandings of things, ways of speaking about them, and even different definitions of words like grace, justification, sanctification, predestination, etc.