Evangelical Preaching in North America in the Late Twentieth Century

The lecture is based almost exclusively on notes on services that I attended in the United States and Canada in the last decade of the twentieth century. It considers what characteristics of the sermons made them Evangelical in genre and then analyses them in terms of their settings, their preachers, their audiences and their themes. It goes on to examine the content, the rhetoric, the illustrations and the book citations, so establishing their general features, before scrutinizing three case-studies in more detail. Thus the lecture overall portrays the nature of the Evangelical sermon at a particular point in North American history.

An undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge (1968-71), David Bebbington began his doctoral studies there (1971-73) before becoming a research fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (1973-76). Since 1976 he has taught at the University of Stirling, where from 1999 he has been Professor of History. He has also taught at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, at Regent College, Vancouver, at Notre Dame University, Indiana, at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and at Baylor University, Texas. In 2016 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

His principal research interests are in the history of politics, religion, ideas and society in Britain from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and in the history of the global Evangelical movement.  His books and publications are many but his latest include Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (2012); Interfaces: Baptists and Others: International Baptist Studies (co-ed., 2013); Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the United Kingdom during the Twentieth Century (co-ed., 2013); and The Intellectual Attainments of Evangelical Nonconformity: A Nineteenth-Century Case-Study (2014).