The answer is certainly yes. We have both Lutheran and Anglican representation on the new Alliance Council (as we did on the old Council). While we have a definite Reformed flavor about us, we delight to make common cause with all those who share our mission and vision. As a coalition of Christian leaders from various denominations, we are committed to promoting and producing resources for a modern reformation of the churches in doctrine, worship, and life, according to Scripture. Our mission is to proclaim and defend the central evangelical affirmations of the Protestant Reformation (often called the “solas”) today – the final authority of the Bible, salvation by grace alone, through Christ alone, received by faith alone, and all things to the glory of God – and to help foster a twenty-first century reformation of the Church, whereby Christians resist worldly methods and rely on the sufficient revelation of God in Holy Scripture, so that the Church recovers clarity and conviction about the great evangelical truths of the gospel, and then lives and proclaims these truths powerfully in our contemporary context.

Since 1994, the Alliance has been an association of evangelical pastors, teachers and leaders (Baptist, Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, etc.), committed to the great evangelical consensus arising from the Protestant Reformation, working together for the recovery of the biblical, apostolic witness of the church. It fosters a collaborative movement of confessional and Reformed evangelical Christians, to promote robust, biblical, historic, Christianity through radio, conferences, publications, electronic media, and more. The Alliance has encouraged the church to evaluate its message and methods, according to Scripture. It has warned the church against false doctrine. It has advocated for sound doctrine, warm piety, catechetical instruction, biblical worship, faithful cultural engagement and Scriptural methods of evangelism and church growth.

The Alliance’s history stretches back more than a half century. The Alliance began as Evangelical Ministries, which broadcasted The Bible Study Hour and published Eternity magazine. Evangelical Ministries played a strategic role in the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy and in the promotion of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology. Evangelical Ministries began a new era in 1994, when Dr. James Boice invited a number of Christian leaders to meet in Philadelphia. Concerned that North American Christianity had yielded to the spirit of the age, especially in terms of Christianity’s consumerism, pragmatism, politicization, and disregard for theological clarity, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals was formed to bring to bear a biblical response to these trends within the wider Christian community. More recently, the Alliance has been at the center of the biblical response to serious doctrinal erosions within evangelicalism such as open theism, the new perspectives on Paul and justification, and the redefinition of marriage and the family. The Alliance currently sponsors three national radio programs, an aggressive publication agenda, a peer-reviewed web resource, and continues to bring together some of the leading Reformed and evangelical pastor-theologians of our time to combine our energies in promoting the health of the local churches and to present a unified front within evangelicalism and to the world. Consistent with our heritage, we aim to represent a ministry of Gospel proclamation and godly piety.

While most of the Council is generically Reformed or Calvinistic in heritage and commitments, we attempt to hold those commitments graciously, and to work broadly, positively and cooperatively with other conservative, confessional, Christians. Our Lutheran friends, I think, have not found us to be a bad lot to hang around with.

Rev. Ligon Duncan is president of the Alliance and senior minister of First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, MI.