This book is the fruit of twenty years of friendship and collaboration in the study of global evangelicalism. As young scholars in the early 1990s, we came together in an informal network with others from all five continents who shared a common awareness of the need to see the contemporary upsurge of evangelicalism both in a worldwide comparative perspective and in a long-term historical one. The resulting conversations, especially at conferences hosted by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois and the Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity (CSAC) in Sydney, proved to be exhilarating and formative ones. They bore immediate fruit in the publication by CSAC in 1998 of A Global Faith: Essays on Evangelicalism and Globalization.

Since then, with the manifold distractions of busy professional and personal lives, we have had ample cause to ponder the wisdom of Matthew Arnold's lines:

Nevertheless, the field has advanced substantially in the intervening years, through much distinguished individual work and two major collaborations funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts: Currents in World Christianity (which incorporated the Evangelicalism and Globalization project) and Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South. It therefore seemed timely in 2008 when Donald Lewis of Regent College in Vancouver and Andy Beck of Cambridge University Press suggested that we jointly undertake the synthesis offered in the present book.