Evangelicalism has always been a ‘surprising work’ which evangelicals themselves have ascribed to God. It seemed to emerge from nowhere and quickly spread to everywhere. It was a movement of diverse origins – a confluence of transatlantic diasporas (English, Irish, Scottish, German and Dutch, to name a few of the nationalities involved in its beginnings) with sources in Europe, but meeting and blending into new forms in America. Taking a longer view, just as the original founders of the Massachusetts Bay community considered themselves to be pilgrims on the way to the city of God, it might be said that from the beginning, evangelicals saw themselves as citizens of an emerging global kingdom. Evangelicalism was part of a long-term process of dissociation from national frameworks. In the days before sophisticated telecommunications and modern health care, evangelical spirituality warmed the heart and provided a bedrock for the soul in the midst of the social turbulence of the Old World, the tossing waves of the wild Atlantic and the trackless forests of the New World. Western historians have tended to tell the story of evangelicalism, where it has been remembered at all, as if it were a minority interest in the midst of great state churches. Such a view, organised around national frameworks, misses the dynamism of the movement, its emergence as a people ‘in-between’: in between classes, in between countries, in between continents, languages and cultures. There has also been a great deal of work tracing the course of evangelicalism as if it were primarily a theological construct, or an economic influence or a form of political or social capital. This work has been valuable. Most, however, is concentrated on the West, and thus isolated from the movement's largest present-day communities, or focused by disciplinary perspectives in ways which detach it from what evangelicalism functionally is.