Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 29:3 (Fall 2025)
Article: The Great Evangelical Fudge
Author: Ranald Macaulay

The Great Evangelical Fudge

Ranald Macaulay

Ranald Macaulay was born in South Africa. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1956 to do a law degree at Cambridge. At the end of his second year he met Francis and Edith Schaeffer. The Schaeffers had just recently started L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. He visited them at the end of 1959 and decided to join the work. He and Susan Schaeffer were married in April 1961. In 1964 they started the English L’Abri in London. There Ranald completed a BD Hons in theology, at King’s College, London. In January 1971 they moved to Hampshire to start a residential branch of L’Abri. In 1978 Ranald co-authored the book Being Human with Jerram Barrs (IVP Academic, 1998), on the nature of spiritual experience. A number of his articles have appeared in Evangelicals Now and other journals. When Francis Schaeffer died in 1984 the family returned to Switzerland for four years. In 1996 they moved to Cambridge where Ranald founded Christian Heritage at the Round Church (since renamed “The Foundation Trust”)—the second oldest building in the city built in 1130 AD. Since 2017 he and Susan have been back in Hampshire near the L’Abri house.

2024 was the 40th anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s final book, The Great Evangelical Disaster.1 When it came out in 1984, he had only months to live.

The title sounds alarming, but that was Schaeffer’s intention. The same theological drift he had witnessed as a young man was now threatening Evangelicalism. Churches which had once been faithful to the Bible were now in danger. He felt this deeply. In short, the book was the act of a dying and desperate man and should be read as such.

What interests me most about it, however, is not so much its content, crucial as that is, but its operating principle. By the 1980s the modern West, whose background and future Schaeffer had sketched so prophetically, was now promoting ideas about gender and sex inimical to the Bible. This was no surprise to him for he knew better than most that, given the culture’s rejection of Christianity, it had to happen.

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What he also knew was that the church could never compromise over its most basic principle, namely, the authority of the Word of God. It was what Schaeffer had stood for all his life— that human ideas must always be subject to the revelation of God in Scripture.

But why the urgency?

Few realize, I think, that early in 1984, specifically to mark the publication of The Great Evangelical Disaster, the publisher arranged a series of speaking-engagements at five or six of the leading Evangelical Colleges (universities) across the S...