I have a confession to make. I am an evangelical. In fact, not only am I an evangelical, I head an organisation called the Evangelical Alliance. I’m an evangelical with a capital E.

I hesitate to make such a confession for I am painfully aware of the baggage the label carries. Without wanting to blame Americans for all the problems of the world, it is, well, largely their fault. When Keith Allen makes a TV programme on a “Christian” family in America whose main message of the love of Christ appears to be – and I quote – “God hates fags”, then we are, of course, seeing “evangelical Christianity”. Or when a leading US evangelical leader’s “solution” to the fact that President Chávez of Venezuela is somewhat, shall we say, left of centre is to call for his assassination, we all know it is those loony evangelicals at it again.

Worryingly, some elements of this behaviour have crossed the Atlantic. When we were talking with the Government about the Sexual Orientation Regulations, civil servants told me they had received letters from “Christians” containing as much venom and bile as those from more militant and aggressive sections of the gay lobby. I would hazard a guess that such letter writers would refer to themselves as “evangelical”.

All of which is ironic because evangelical derives from a word meaning “good news” and for many years evangelicals had no problem persuading people of this.

Of course, 2007 is a particularly poignant year to be discussing this because it was evangelical Christians, along with the Quakers, who were largely behind calls for the abolition of the slave trade 200 years ago. This is not to play down the role of slaves themselves or of other agitators in the UK. It is merely to point out that it was Christian faith – and generally evangelical Christian faith – which drove campaigners such as Wilberforce and Equiano to argue that a slave was a human being made in the image of God, worthy of the dignity of freedom.

Not only that, evangelical Christianity inspired many of the social reforms of the Victorian era, in labour conditions, education, housing and the establishment of charities.

So where did it all go wrong? When did it cease to mean social transformer and become shorthand for a person as welcome at an Islington dinner party as an undertaker at a birthday party?

Well, I’ve managed to gatecrash a few of those dinner parties and once I have owned up to being an evangelical (with my job title it’s hard not to) the issue that normally comes up is sex. We are seen as being obsessed with it. Which is odd, because Jesus (whom we follow, incidentally, although he often struggles to get heard) said remarkably little about it. This is not to say it is unimportant. It is fundamental to both our humanity and spirituality. But it is not everything. If Jesus were walking the Earth today I can bet he would be talking as much about the obscenity of wealth inequalities and our treatment of asylum-seekers as he would be about Jerry Springer: The Opera.

So I am a man with a mission. I believe in Christ as good news for a world that needs social and spiritual transformation. And I believe his message is love. I am determined that this is what being evangelical can be about again. We may still mention sex, but when we do I want us to put a bit of love in our talk about “lurv”. But more than talking about sex you will see us holding the Government to account on the Millennium Development Goals through our Micah Challenge campaign, or talking about respect and what it really means among our inner-city youth. Or you will see us defending the family, not because we are a bunch of Victorian fuddy-duddies, but because we believe good strong families are good news for healthy societies.

So there we have it. I’m out. I’m an evangelical and I’m proud of it. It’s good news.

The Rev Joel Edwards is the general director of the Evangelical Alliance UK