Sometimes people use these terms as synonyms. They’re not, and we shouldn’t.

Both words have their origin in the Greek word “evangel”, which means “good news”, which in the Bible and the Christian faith refers to the gospel: the message of free salvation for sinners by grace through faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ (the greatest good news ever).

Evangelical, in its most proper sense, means “characterized by the gospel” — and even the most mature of believers need to regularly hear, rely on, and be cleansed and empowered by the gospel, because sin is always in their lives and in the world. A sermon that is evangelical carries the good news of Christ, a church that is evangelical focuses its teaching and works on the gospel, a conversation that is evangelical is one that conveys grace and forgiveness (not judgment and recrimination). (There’s another meaning evangelical has gained which we’ll get to below.)

Evangelistic, on the other hand, is an adjective derived from the noun evangelism, which refers to the work of spreading or the act of sharing the gospel with people who are not yet believers (or who simply have never heard the message), with the intention of saving them. So a sermon or presentation is evangelistic if it has a focus on communicating the message of sin and grace to unbelievers, a church is evangelistic if it is characterized by an emphasis on reaching the lost for Jesus, a conversation is evangelistic if a Christian is using it to present the gospel to someone who has yet to put his or her faith in Christ.

Ideally, any believer and any church that is evangelical is evangelistic, and vice versa — if you care about the gospel, you want it to characterize you and you want to share it with those who need it. Within a strictly Christian context, then, confusing this term usually isn’t a very big deal. 

A context in which it gains significance, however, is politics. 

I won’t go deep into the details here, but in the middle of the 20^th century, evangelical became a term that referred generally to Protestant Christians and churches that held to the inerrancy of Scripture and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation. In the later part of the century, as American Christians (and churches) began getting more involved in politics and seeking to influence laws and policies, evangelical was adopted (by the media and academy and eventually more generally) as a catch-all term for people who were Protestant, theologically conservative, socially conservative, and increasingly voting as a bloc.  Unfortunately, this meant that the original and proper meaning of evangelical was slowly becoming less understood and more overlooked, even within Christian circles where it should have mattered more. This political sense of evangelical is probably applied both to others and to oneself more today than any theological one.

This matters for two main reasons. The first is that increasingly the people identified as evangelical are not particularly religious and often not particularly Christian — they don’t hold to and often don’t even understand the basics of the faith, of scriptural teaching, or the importance of the gospel for … everything. This is not good, especially because it can mean that such people are confident that they must be in good standing with God — because, you know, they’re evangelicals — but may, in fact, still be unsaved and in desperate need of seeing their sin and putting their trust in Christ.

The second reason this distinction of terms matters is because there are now well-intentioned (and, I suppose, not-so-well-intentioned) believers who have so absorbed the political messaging that says “Evangelicals vote this way” or “Evangelicals support this candidate” that they are convinced they are doing gospel work with their votes and support. They probably can’t articulate it, but they believe — or at least speak and act as though they believe — that somehow their political activities are evangelistic, helping to bring the lost to Christ and save them.

But only the gospel can save, and the gospel is only the message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ. Improved morality, stronger families, healthier churches, a less sin-soaked culture, and similar goals are all things that Christians want, want to see come about, and can work for, but they are not the gospel, and thus cannot bring any sinner to salvation. 

Confusing being politically evangelical and doing evangelism actually can and often does work against sharing the gospel, making it anti-evangelistic.

• If you’re blurring the distinction between Christianity and politics with your words and actions, you’re giving anyone who’s paying attention the idea that whatever your particular politics are is what Christianity is about, which means that they’re not getting a clear, let alone saving, message about Jesus. Even if your positions and preferences are the most God-pleasing ever, you might be obscuring the gospel rather than bringing it to light. 
• Certain people, you might have noticed, get really into their politics and lose the inhibitions that should keep them from language and actions that give unnecessary offense or cross lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Take that inclination toward extremes and add a conviction that you’re doing the Lord’s work and saving souls by “owning” your opponents on the internet, destroying the reputations of your adversaries, or using unholy or immoral means to achieve your political ends, and bad things happen. You’re using the idea of the evangel to excuse your excesses. You end up burning bridges, creating enemies, and otherwise making people hostile to the gospel, even though there’s nothing about the true gospel in what you’re presenting. 
• And even if someone’s not caught up in these extremes and is only being his or her most winsome and peaceable self in conversations and on social media, thinking that political engagement is the same thing as evangelism can easily lead to not doing actual evangelism. Because if you think you are already doing it (and are probably feeling virtuous for doing so), you might not feel much need to share the gospel with friends, family, classmates, coworkers, or even strangers that you meet. You might perhaps not even support the evangelism work of your church.

Simply put, if you think that because you’re an evangelical that your political activities are evangelistic, you should realize this: you’re not actually saving anyone because you’re not actually presenting anyone with the only thing that can save anyone, the gospel message of Christ’s cross.

So it’s not just a pedant’s terminological bugaboo to insist on the distinction between evangelical and evangelistic. There are unhappy and unchristian consequences when the things these terms refer to get confused, especially when they intersect with politics. 

Note: To put a finer theological point on this: being truly evangelistic is about justification, but to the extent that anyone is voting or working politically with Christian values or goals in mind, that is about sanctification. They are both important things in a believer’s life, but it’s important not to confuse them — they are very different.

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