Evangelist

An evangelist is defined less by ordination to a fixed office than by a recognized calling and demonstrated gift for public preaching aimed specifically at conversion, a ministry the New Testament itself distinguishes from that of the pastor-teacher in passages such as Ephesians 4, and one that has historically operated both within established denominational structures and, especially in American revivalist Protestantism, through independent traveling ministries unattached to any single congregation. An evangelist's characteristic setting has historically been the mass gathering, the camp meeting, the tent revival, and, in the twentieth century, the stadium crusade, rather than the settled weekly preaching of a single congregation's own pastor, a difference of scale and format that has shaped both the evangelist's characteristic rhetorical style and the parachurch organizational structures, distinct from any single denomination, many prominent evangelists have built to support their work.

Some Christian traditions, particularly Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, also recognize evangelist as a formal, sometimes ordained ministry office within the local congregation or denomination, distinct from the itinerant revivalist sense of the term, reflecting these traditions' particular theological emphasis on the fivefold ministry gifts, apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher, drawn from the same Ephesians 4 passage.

The evangelist's characteristic itinerant, mass-preaching ministry rose to particular prominence during a series of religious revivals in Britain and colonial and later independent America known as the Great Awakenings, beginning with the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, associated with preachers such as George Whitefield, whose open-air preaching tours drew crowds far larger than any single church building could hold, and Jonathan Edwards, whose sermons and theological writing gave the movement intellectual depth alongside its emotional intensity. Subsequent waves of revival, including the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century and various twentieth-century revival movements, produced further generations of prominent evangelists, Charles Finney, Dwight Moody and, in the twentieth century, Billy Graham, whose decades of stadium crusades and early, extensive use of radio and television broadcasting made him one of the most widely recognized American religious figures of his era.

Modern mass evangelism has increasingly moved from the physical stadium crusade toward broadcast and, more recently, online and social media formats, a shift that has considerably lowered the practical barriers to reaching large audiences while also raising new questions, discussed extensively within evangelical circles, about how the evangelist's traditionally personal, in-person call to conversion translates into a mediated, screen-based encounter with an audience the preacher never meets directly.