Reverend Says He Spurns Presidential Politics For Church Needs

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (AP) When a presidential campaign contacted the Reverend Leith Anderson to ask for a meeting recently, the president of the <a href="http://www.nae.net/" target="_blank">National Association

Wednesday, November 7th 2007, 3:07 pm

By: News On 6

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (AP) When a presidential campaign contacted the Reverend Leith Anderson to ask for a meeting recently, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals said he had a bigger priority that day.

"I had a wedding or a funeral, I can't remember which," Reverend Leith Anderson said, sitting in his book-lined office at the suburban Minneapolis mega church he's led for 31 years. "Anyway, I don't pre-empt a wedding or a funeral for a presidential candidate. Because I'm a pastor."

Indeed, the pastor still leads seven services a weekend at Wooddale Church. But the story of the spurned candidate, whom he declined to name, offers some insight into his vision for the National Association of Evangelicals - an organization that represents 45,000 churches and 30 million members.

"My life is not in Washington," the reverend said. "I am not a politician. What evangelists are about is primarily faith, and not politics."

Reverend Anderson, who moved from interim president to president of the National Association of Evangelicals in October, brings both his biblical focus and a wide-ranging set of concerns about the environment and human rights to the leadership of the National Association of Evangelicals at an unsettled time.

His predecessor, Ted Haggard, resigned last year in a sex-and-drugs scandal.

Meanwhile, evangelicals have been finding it difficult to settle on a Republican presidential candidate who is seen as viable and opposes both abortion and same-sex marriage.

The Reverend Anderson, 63, is among a group of evangelical leaders who are "just as orthodox in their theology" as leading conservative Christians but think that relating faith to culture is more complex than just a couple of issues, said George Brushaber, president of the evangelical Bethel College near St. Paul.

"He wants the church to be part of the conversation in the public square, and not be owned by any narrow base," said George Brushaber, who has known Anderson for several decades.

The National Association of Evangelicals has never had aims as explicitly political as other evangelical groups like the Christian Coalition. But it does have a presence on Capitol Hill and tries to set an agenda for the broader evangelical movement, issuing "Statements of Conscience" to guide the community activism of evangelical congregations around the country.

Prominent evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson became known for their dedication to passing laws cracking down on legalized abortion and same-sex marriage. By contrast, climate change is the policy issue most closely associated with Anderson.

In March, when Anderson was still interim president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a group of religious right leaders including Dobson, of Focus on the Family, and Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, wrote a letter to National Association of Evangelicals leaders demanding that the organization fire its chief Washington lobbyist, Richard Cizik, for waging what they called a "relentless campaign" against global warming. They said it detracted from more pressing moral concerns.