My Favorite Ecumenical Evangelical

How Carl Lundquist found Christian unity in the contemplative life

More than once this fall, I’ve wished that I could just bring Carl Lundquist to class, to show students an evangelical who modeled the best of that Christian tradition. Alas, Bethel’s longest-serving president died in 1991, so the best I could do was have students read part of his 1969 report, which encouraged conservative constituents to identify themselves with the “valid emphases” of the Vietnam era youth movement “and to witness about the greatest revolutionist of all—Jesus Christ.”

But I’d love to assign my students to spend a couple hours in the Lundquist Papers at the Bethel Archives. That’s what I did earlier this week, when I read documents from the Evangelical Order of the Burning Heart, “an informal and unstructured non-organization” that Lundquist founded after retiring from Bethel in 1982. Through spiritual retreats he led with his wife Nancy and an occasional newsletter on spiritual formation that he sent to followers,¹ Lundquist hoped to “keep alive in our time the experience of Cleopas and his comrade on the road to Emmaus when they exclaimed after their walk with the risen Christ, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us when He talked with us on the way and when He opened the Scriptures to us?’ (Luke 24:32)”

In a nod to Bethel’s most famous Pietist, the cover of our 2011 book about that “impulse” features a “burning heart” carved by Bethel art professor Dale Johnson for the door of a library room housing Lundquist’s extensive collection of devotional literature

If my students saw this side of Lundquist, they would encounter a pietistic Baptist who wanted evangelicals not only to seek personal and ecclesial renewal through the contemplative life of practicing spiritual disciplines, but to experience genuine Christian unity in the process — even with Catholic followers of Jesus that evangelicals had historically viewed with suspicion or hostility.