To Be An Evangelical?

As I write this, I have just completed reading someone's blog series about evangelicalism. Needless to say, while it was a good series, a perusal of the comments on each post was less than encouraging. There seemed to be a general negativity out there about evangelicalism and evangelicals that I found, well, disturbing. While the majority of commenters (including the blog author) did not in the least seem to be evangelical, I was still disturbed. I couldn't just write this off as the ravings of non-evangelicals who are looking down their noses at us. Yet at the same time much I read in this series resonated with me; as a younger leader in the SBC I find myself oft in agreement with others of my generation that sometimes our convention just doesn't get it. So I have decided to undertake a series of my own: What is an Evangelical? I will attempt to answer this question and elaborate on what that means for a "modern" evangelical, meaning a leader of my own generation. Maybe this will become the framework of my own personal theology (which I have been developing for years without any real systematization outside of that taught in class). Praise be to God for his Holy Spirit of Truth, who illumines our minds.