Reforming the church

National | Four years after Cambridge, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals soldiers on, but James Boice is very ill | Les Sillars

In April, 1996, 110 conservative, mainly Reformed, Christian leaders gathered near Harvard College, founded 360 years before as a school to train pastors ("God and Man at Cambridge," May 11/18, 1996). Harvard long ago had departed from Christianity, but the leaders, with urging from Philadelphia pastor James Montgomery Boice, expressed concern that evangelicalism was also heading down a slippery slope.

The diverse group of Presbyterians, Christian Reformed, Missouri Synod Lutherans, Southern Baptists, independents, and others produced a three-page Cambridge Declaration. It warned, in part, that "Therapeutic technique, marketing strategies, and the beat of the entertainment world often have far more to say about what the church wants, how it functions, and what it offers, than does the Word of God."