If you are old enough (or, young enough) to get the reference, the title of this blog post is a line from a 1970 song . The next line is, "They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot." This is a post about things that we have as Evangelical Christians, but perhaps have failed to cherish and value. These are reasons to stay Evangelical - even if other Christian traditions might at times seem appealing, tempting even. Evangelical Christianity is the faith I have received, the form of Christianity I was born into spiritually, and which has been my home since 1991. At least in this post, my concern is not to question the legitimacy of other Christian traditions, such as Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, or the faith of those brought up in those traditions, so much as to value my own tradition, and to encourage my fellow evangelicals to "stick with it" and "dig deeper" rather than going elsewhere. This blog is dedicated to a couple of dear friends who i...