But in the words of Jim Daly, the man who replaced Dobson as head of Focus on the Family, a new evangelical leadership is emerging. And while they share much of the old guard’s theology, they scarcely resemble the evangelicals we have gotten to know over decades of culture war. Meet six “new evangelical” leaders who embody aspects of the change under way in evangelical America, and whose work is clearing out a larger space for the common good.

For many progressives and/or seculars, there’s a certain five-syllable word that often triggers irritation: “evangelical.” This is understandable. Many of the evangelicals we have gotten to “know” from politics and media say and do a great deal that offends progressive values and sensibilities (not to mention common sense and simple decency). Think Robertson. Think Bachmann. Think Palin. Think Dobson.

But in the words of Jim Daly, the man who replaced Dobson as head of Focus on the Family, a new evangelical leadership is emerging. And while they share much of the old guard’s theology, they scarcely resemble the evangelicals we have gotten to know over decades of culture war. Meet six “new evangelical” leaders who embody aspects of the change under way in evangelical America, and whose work is clearing out a larger space for the common good.

Kevin Palau
The son of Luis Palau, one of the Americas’ world’s best-known evangelists, Kevin Palau is leading a wave of innovation among evangelicals keen on finding new and attractive ways to bring the gospel forward in a culture that is increasingly pluralistic, secular, and “post-modern”– disinclined, in other words, to be swayed by evangelism of the type exemplified by Billy Graham or the televangelists you’ve happened upon while channel-surfing.

Concerned that his family’s U.S. evangelistic campaigns were preaching mainly to the converted, Kevin Palau started searching for ways to connect beyond the walls of evangelical subculture. The way to do it, Palau has found, is service–service with no strings (i.e. overt Jesus pitches) attached. For five years running in the Portland, Ore., area that the Palaus call home, a united front of church people have been serving the homeless, volunteering in public schools, running free medical and dental clinics, and the like. Think of it as evangelism 2.0 – the kind that relies on believers’ hands and feet more than their mouths.

Not that proclamation-style evangelism is dead in the Palau family. Luis Palau is still proclaiming the gospel from evangelism stages, and Palau’s younger brother, Andrew, has taken up their father’s preacher mantel. “We don’t try to hide our desire to see people’s lives changed by Christ, ” Kevin Palau says. “And we are wildly enthusiastic about loving and serving the city with no strings attached.”

Gabe Lyons
While many of his older evangelical compatriots were busy arguing with liberals about whether the United States is a “Christian nation,” Gabe Lyons has been doing something more reflective and constructive: researching evangelicals’ negative reputation and modeling a more credible way to be Christian in an increasingly diverse and skeptical culture.

Despite growing up in Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., and getting his higher education at Falwell’s Liberty University, Gabe Lyons is no right-wing culture warrior. Rather than fighting non-evangelicals, Lyons is in the habit of listening to them. With his friend David Kinnaman of the Barna Group, Lyons initiated a public-opinion study of non-church people’s perception of Christians. Judgmental, arrogant, antigay, pushy–these were the ideas about Christians that emerged from the research; Lyons and Kinnaman summed it all up in the arresting title of their influential book: Unchristian.

Since the release of the book in 2007, Lyons has launched what is now one of the signature annual events for post-culture-wars evangelicals: the Q gathering. (Think of it as an evangelical version of the Ted Talks.) Through his second book, The Next Christians, and the relocation of his family from Atlanta to New York City, Lyons is showing his Jesus-loving fellows how to be calmly and credibly evangelical in an environment where Christianity no longer calls the shots as it once did.
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