There is a phrase that runs through free evangelical life like a watermark through paper. You find it in founding documents, in ecumenical agreements, in the constitutions of national church federations on four continents. In essentials, unity; in secondary matters, liberty; in all things, love. The Latin form — in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas — is older than any single identifiable author, and is most reliably traced to the Lutheran irenic theologian Rupertus Meldenius writing around 1626.1 What is clear is that the Evangelical Alliance, founded in London in 1846, gave the principle its first significant institutional expression. And what the Alliance did for the nineteenth century, the free evangelical tradition has been doing ever since.
The principle sounds simple. In practice it requires a discipline that most Christian communities find genuinely difficult: the ability to distinguish between doctrines that are non-negotiable and doctrines where faithful, Scripture-reading Christians have long and legitimately disagreed.
What the distinction actually involves
The primary category — the essentials — is shorter than many traditions assume. The free evangelical family holds together on the Trinity, the full deity and atoning work of Christ, the authority of Scripture, justification by faith, the necessity of personal conversion, the bodily resurrection, and the bodily return of Christ. These are the doctrines that define Christianity, and on them the tradition speaks with one voice.
The secondary category is everything else: baptism mode, the precise role of the Holy Spirit’s gifts, the timing of Christ’s return, the ordering of the end times, detailed questions of church governance, the relationship between the covenants, women in ministry. These are questions on which the church has been genuinely divided for centuries, where careful readers of the same biblical texts have reached different conclusions. The alliance approach does not pretend these questions are unimportant. It simply refuses to make them tests of fellowship.
This is the point most often missed by critics of the approach. Alliance thinking is not theological indifferentism — a shrug at doctrine, a preference for vague spirituality over hard thinking. It is a deliberate organisational architecture, built on a prior conviction that the primary doctrines and the secondary doctrines are genuinely different in kind, and that treating them identically does damage to both. Collapsing everything into the primary category produces a fractured Christianity where every disputed interpretation becomes a potential split. Collapsing everything into the secondary category produces a Christianity with no backbone. The alliance approach holds the distinction firm.2
Where it came from
For the full account of the three revivalist, holiness, and alliance streams that converged in the nineteenth century to produce the free evangelical tradition, see What is the free evangelical movement?. What matters here is the institutional logic those streams produced. The Evangelical Alliance of 1846 drew together Christians who disagreed on baptism, on polity, on eschatology — and who concluded that doctrinal squabbling over secondary questions was costing the gospel ground. The driving concern was not institutional peace but missionary effectiveness: a fractured church was a weakened witness. The alliance principle is what made cooperation possible without requiring uniformity — so that the energy spent defending denominational boundaries could be redirected toward evangelism, church planting, opposing slavery, and publishing Scripture.
The most significant global expression of the same logic came in 1974, when the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne produced the Lausanne Covenant.3 Shaped largely by Billy Graham and John Stott, the Covenant identified the Trinity, the full authority of Scripture, the gospel of Christ’s atoning work, and personal conversion as the essential common ground for cooperative mission — and treated ecclesiology, eschatology, polity, and sacramental practice as secondary matters. The Lausanne Movement is, in many respects, the alliance principle scaled to global mission. The free evangelical family has been a natural participant in Lausanne precisely because the logic is the same.
What it produces in practice
In a free evangelical church or federation, alliance thinking shows up in a few practical ways. Membership in a local congregation requires personal faith in Christ — not a correct position on baptism, not agreement with the pastor’s eschatology, not a particular view on the gifts of the Spirit. Secondary questions are addressed as they arise, in community, under Scripture, with the freedom to reach different conclusions and remain in fellowship.
At the movement level, alliance thinking makes cooperation possible across national and cultural lines. What holds the free evangelical family together across its many national expressions is the shared primary conviction and the shared alliance disposition — the agreement that the primary doctrines matter enough to unite on, and the secondary doctrines matter enough to think carefully about without fracturing over.
This is a fairly unusual posture in the wider Christian world. Many traditions either enforce broad doctrinal conformity (producing unity through uniformity) or define fellowship so loosely that little holds it together. The free evangelical approach attempts something harder: genuine theological seriousness about the essentials, genuine freedom about the secondaries, and the relational maturity to hold both at the same time. The principle does not enforce itself; whether it succeeds is a question answered locally, congregation by congregation, generation by generation.
See also: What is a free evangelical church? | What is the free evangelical movement? | Free evangelical and Alliance churches
- Rupertus Meldenius, Paraenesis votiva pro pace ecclesiae (c. 1626). For attribution and textual history, see Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7 (New York: Scribner, 1910), 650n. The attribution to Richard Baxter, common in popular sources, is not supported by the documentary evidence.↩︎
- For a systematic theological defence of the primary/secondary distinction as an organising principle for evangelical cooperation, see D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds., Scripture and Truth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), and more directly, John Stott, Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity and Faithfulness (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999).↩︎
- Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, The Lausanne Covenant (Lausanne, 1974). Full text at lausanne.org.↩︎