It is now over a decade since Collin Hansen coined the term “young, restless, and Reformed” (YRR) to characterize a rising generation of Christians who had rediscovered the vitality of the central doctrines of the Reformation: Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, and so on. What Hansen (then a journalist with Christianity Today) had noticed was that while much of the trendy Christian media attention focused on the emerging/emergent church, there was another vibrant strand of evangelical Christianity gaining momentum in the United States and beyond. While the emergent gurus, such as Brian McLaren and Tony Jones, were moving in a more non- and even perhaps anti-doctrinal direction, other church leaders—John Piper, Tim Keller, and so forth—were doing the opposite. They were offering their churches solid, historic, doctrinal teaching, and (perhaps counterintuitively given the dominant relativist ethos of the times) they were gaining large audiences and having influence well beyond the walls of their own churches.
Over a decade later, there is no doubt which movement had the greater chronological stamina. The emergent/emerging phenomenon—described with staggering hyperbole and self-importance by one of its leading lights as the most important church happening since the Reformation—has all but vanished. Meanwhile, many of the personalities, institutions, organizations, and churches that were involved in the Reformed resurgence remain and have arguably stabilized. Now, therefore, seems to be a good time to assess the movement with at least some of the historical distance from its origins and early exuberance.
The Disparate Origins of Coalitional Christianity
There is no single point of origin for the Reformed resurgence. Perhaps ironically, Presbyterianism and the historic Reformed churches are probably the least important factor in the narrative. Hansen’s book did highlight the role of the Presbyterian Church in America’s remarkable Reformed University Fellowship—a network of college campus ministries run by ordained ministers—in fostering Reformed churchmanship and spirituality among students. There were other Presbyterians and Reformed who also played a role. R. C. Sproul had been popularizing solid Reformed theology for decades and had a huge impact within broadly Reformed circles through his books and Ligonier Conferences. Michael Horton and White Horse Inn have been working hard to make thoughtful Reformed theology accessible and, more importantly, interesting to a new generation. Tullian Tchividjian, Billy Graham’s grandson and successor to D. James Kennedy’s pulpit in Fort Lauderdale, found a wide audience through the immediate profile that his family connections brought him and through his accessible and attractive presentation of a gospel of unconditional forgiveness. But the most significant figure from this traditional Reformed church context has been undoubtedly Tim Keller, the PCA pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan, whose preaching ministry, conference speaking, and writings have had unparalleled cross-over appeal to those outside of the immediate Reformed/Presbyterian world.
If Keller was the cross-over giant that Presbyterianism gave to the wider evangelical world, then there were others who also pressed home the importance of traditional Calvinist doctrine from outside the bounds of normal Reformed church life. John MacArthur spent years preaching a form of dispensational Calvinism from his pulpit and inculcating it in the pastoral students at the Master’s Seminary. The conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention, while in no way a specifically Calvinist movement, served to revitalize Southern Seminary which, under the leadership of R. Albert Mohler Jr., took on a distinctively Calvinist theological ethos in the 1990s. Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, eschewed the megachurch model; and as his own congregation in Washington grew to fill its worship space, he refused to go to multiple services or engage in dramatic building expansion. Instead, he chose to adopt a strategy of church revitalization by sending good men to pastor vacant and sometimes dying churches, and thus spread Calvinistic theology through the medium of the local church. Then there were the Sovereign Grace Churches whose mothership was the congregation in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where the outgoing and cheerful C. J. Mahaney was pastor, succeeded some years later by the young and talented Joshua Harris. John Piper, long-term pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis with his own very influential Desiring God ministry, has also been a key figure. And then there was the controversial church leader and erstwhile emergent insider Mark Driscoll, whose communication skills, media savvy, and larger-than-life personality served to make his ministry at Mars Hill Church in Seattle one of the most fascinating and controversial phenomenon in a notoriously secular city. He also oversaw Acts 29, a church planting network now led by Matt Chandler.
What brought these various people and churches together was the formation of a number of important parachurch and transdenominational organizations facilitated by the rise and influence of social media. While a number of these men had their own ministry organizations, it was as they came together that the Reformed resurgence gained strength and national profile. Reformed coalition parachurches had existed before: the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, for example, had formed in response to the Evangelical and Catholics Together agreements of the 1990s, but it was and is a relatively small operation, focused on modestly sized conferences hosted by local churches. While many of the figures associated later with the Reformed resurgence served at one time on the Alliance council, they almost all migrated to the Gospel Coalition and left the Alliance behind. The Alliance simply did not have wide enough appeal to carry the movement forward in terms of the expansive ambition the leadership desired.
The two most significant organizations in this regard were The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and Together for the Gospel (T4G). TGC was and is undoubtedly the flagship organization of the movement and remains the most visible and influential forum for the resurgence. Led by Tim Keller and D. A. Carson, a New Testament professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, along with a council consisting mainly of pastors, it hosts a biennial conference and over the years has developed a significant social media presence via its attractive website and its ability to recruit many talented writers and speakers. With its listing of affiliated churches and the organizational loyalty it inspired among its followers, it has many of the trappings of a denomination. Many of the key figures in the churches and organizations mentioned above—such as Mark Dever, Mark Driscoll, Albert Mohler, and C. J. Mahaney—served on the council alongside other younger men of rising prominence, such as Kevin DeYoung and Josh Harris. Tullian Tchividjian, while never a council member, wrote a popular blog hosted on TGC’s webpage.
T4G, by contrast, was a more modest enterprise. It too ran a biennial conference, on the TGC off year, but this was aimed specifically at pastors. Indeed, encouraging pastors was essentially all the organization was intended to do. Again, many of the names associated with T4G are also TGC stalwarts: the “four” are Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, C. J. Mahaney, and Albert Mohler; and Kevin DeYoung, Matt Chandler, and Thabiti Anyabwile are regular plenary speakers, all of whom serve on the TGC council.
If TGC and T4G provided dynamic leadership and some focus to the various disparate Reformed churches, ministries, and personalities, then there was one other important organization that helped galvanize the movement: Crossway Publishers. There had been publishers of Reformed literature before—Banner of Truth did sterling work in reprinting Puritan volumes and publishing the sermons of men such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, but it had a somewhat staid and dusty reputation. Eerdmans and Baker had at one time been synonymous with solid Reformed publications but had intentionally broadened their catalogue over the years and lost the automatic confidence of many traditional pastors and churches. Presbyterian and Reformed (P&R) published good material but was a small family firm with limited resources. Crossway (originally Good News Publishers), based in Wheaton, Illinois, stepped into the gap. Under the innovative leadership of Al Fisher, who had previously worked for both Baker and P&R, Crossway soon became the central publishing house for the literature of the Reformed resurgence, something that gained even more momentum through the work of Justin Taylor, a former associate of John Piper, who also wrote an influential TGC blog.
The remarkable success of the English Standard Version Bible, along with many attractively produced volumes, helped make Crossway the publishing success of the Reformed resurgence. It produced and promoted works by the movement’s key leaders, recruited new talent, and thereby provided thoughtful literature to Christians who wanted sound theology in an accessible form. If TGC was the institutional powerhouse of the movement, then Crossway was its most important publisher.
So What Were the Problems?
Looking back on the history of the Reformed resurgence, it is clear that many of the problems it experienced over the years were there in seed form in its origins. Perhaps the most obvious of these was the matter of authority. The movement was a broad coalition, a network; but as with all networks, a hierarchy rapidly emerged because some members of the network were better connected than others. Attach that hierarchy to powerful organizations, such as TGC, and there is the clear potential of quasi-ecclesiastical power and influence being exerted on the church lacking biblical warrant and structures of accountability.
Central to this problem were the larger-than-life personalities who were the movement’s public face. Celebrity authority is, of course, a large part of the wider culture in America, as evidenced by product endorsements and the media’s endless appetite for commentary from Hollywood stars on all manner of topics on which they are clueless. The Young, Restless, and Reformed (YRR) movement produced its own analogous subculture of micro-celebrity. Thus the same faces tended to show up on all of the high-profile stages, thereby developing a kind of charisma that extended and fortified their influence well beyond any congregation or denomination to which they belonged. Twitter accounts served to foster the faux intimacy on which celebrity authority depends, and—given that the conferences associated with the movement were not modest local church affairs but took place in sports arenas and conference centers—the celebrity aspect of the movement both made positive sense and constituted a real problem.
It made sense because it really did help to create an atmosphere of can-do optimism and encourage local church members to believe they were part of a much bigger phenomenon. When your local congregation is less than a hundred souls on a Sunday, it is immensely encouraging to be at a conference and sing hymns and hear preaching with five thousand other believers. But there was a problem: when your movement books such places, and presumably does so years in advance, it needs to make sure it can fill the seats when the conference time actually comes around. And that requires big-name speakers, of whom there is only a limited supply. It also means one cannot afford to lose the goodwill of said big names. To this we might also add that ambition thing: when your ambition is to be the biggest show in town, you need the biggest names in town.
In retrospect, it is arguable that the dependence on big names meant that too little discernment was used in the way certain figures were given central roles. Mark Driscoll was perhaps the classic case in point. Without a clear grasp of the doctrine of the Trinity, and with a carefully cultivated crude “frat boy” image and frankly disturbing views of guidance (which even involved him having visions of congregants engaging in illicit sexual activity), he was clearly an unwholesome maverick from the very start, ill-qualified to provide the movement with theological direction or ecclesiastical leadership. Yet he was still given a platform and influence by those who should have known better. To TGC’s credit, he did leave the organization after the T. D. Jakes/Trinity debacle, along with the equally problematic James MacDonald; but the problems had been evident long before then, and he also continued to influence the broader movement until he finally left Mars Hill in the wake of bullying accusations. That the church closed within weeks of his departure is ample testimony to the fact that it was built almost exclusively on the power of his personality and nothing deeper.
Tullian Tchividjian was similarly problematic. Another figure given great prominence within the movement, in retrospect, his fall now seems to have been almost inevitable. Many had warned of the dangerous antinomian tendencies of his theology long before he left TGC, but such critics were either ignored or excoriated as legalists. Yet his thinking had always seemed superficial and trite, and had he not been Billy Graham’s grandson, he would probably not have received the attention he did or been given the authority he enjoyed through conference platforms and his blog. The later sexual sin seemed to confirm what some had suspected all along: his grasp of theology and his commitment to biblical teaching on holiness were tenuous at best, and what he had really done was nurture a cult of personality.
Institutionally, the story has had its problems too. The Sovereign Grace Churches became engulfed in a scandal about child sexual abuse and alleged cover-ups. This led to a public outcry and to some significant self-examination among its own leaders regarding polity and the authoritarian ethos of the denomination. The leadership structure of Sovereign Grace had been hierarchical and top-down, a fact that served to make the allegations of a cover-up at least plausible in the public mind, whether actually true or not. And TGC itself often gave the appearance of dealing with criticism simply by ignoring it and by marginalizing or maligning the critics.
In addition to the celebrity factor, there were also more subtle but no less significant problems. The ambition of the movement as a whole to be the dominant force in conservative evangelicalism in the United States also created its own distinctive issues. For example, this would clearly require a dominant social media and print presence, which meant there was a need for constantly recreating the literary market of the Reformed resurgence. Publishers and websites need a constant supply of new books and new material to generate the money and the traffic to keep themselves in business. They do not simply respond to market demands; they actually help to create those same demands. That places pressure on editorial policy, pushing toward a preference for the light and the popular that will sell quickly and just as quickly cease to be relevant, and even creates the temptation to be less discerning in the material that is published. The same applies to websites. When copy needs to be generated on a daily basis, it seems one has two choices: a team that takes turns and produces perhaps one or two quality pieces a day; or a mass of material that will inevitably vary markedly in quality and press toward an overall dumbing down of discourse. When authors become brands, with their names more important than the content they produce, many blogs became trite or repetitive or superfluous, and some leading figures were damaged by plagiarism and rumors of using ghostwriters.
To these problems we should add perhaps the most significant one of all: a national (and now international) movement with big ambitions ultimately required a highly eclectic theological basis. To characterize figures—as disparate as John Piper, Mark Driscoll, and Tim Keller—as “Reformed” is to indicate that the word is really being used equivocally with regard to its historical and typical ecclesiastical meaning, referring to those churches that subscribe to one or more of the historic Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is not to denigrate its use in the context of the YRR, but simply to say that we should not allow the term to imply a deeper theological coherence than actually exists among the constituent members.
In practice, “Reformed” in the context of the YRR basically meant (and still means) “broadly Calvinist” in the sense that its adherents hold to some form of anti-Pelagian, predestinarian soteriology. Everything else appears to be up for grabs—baptism, the Lord’s Supper, cessationism, polity, and eschatology. That made the rather denominational-looking ambitions of a group such as TGC somewhat worrisome to those for whom agreement on these matters was not of the same order of importance as, say, the incarnation, but was still vital if the church was to teach the whole counsel of God to congregations.
Of course, parachurches are always going to be somewhat complicated in terms of theological confession. The key to whether this is a serious problem or not lies not so much in the organization’s confession as in the organization’s mission. Thus it does not really matter if a Christian anti-abortion society takes no position on baptism, because baptism is irrelevant to its fundamental mission. But the situation becomes more complicated the closer the organization’s mission is to that of the church. The point at which a parachurch becomes a quasi-church may not be obvious, but once it starts to supplant the local church or denomination in the imaginations of those involved, the danger is obvious. And when a quasi-church movement is built around coalitions and parachurch ministries, the problem of theological identity and the temptation to relativize those things that might strain the coalition but cannot be relativized without ecclesiastical cost can be great indeed. Evangelical coalitions always tend toward lowest-common-denominator theology and, in practice, congregational polity and a credobaptist view of baptism. In short, Baptists surrender little or nothing in being wholeheartedly involved in such groups, while Presbyterians and Anglicans need to surrender everything that makes them distinctive.
Future Problems and Possibilities
Looking back, a number of points seem obvious. Did the movement benefit from being the latest cool thing at the time it emerged? Undoubtedly. Was it overconfident and perhaps even somewhat arrogant about its success and overall importance? Arguably. Did it promote individuals who should never have been allowed into a pulpit? Definitely. But as failings go, these are not unique to the Reformed resurgence. They afflict all populist movements riding high on a wave of early excitement and enthusiasm. The big questions are not “Were mistakes made?” but “Has the movement learned from its mistakes and become better as a result?” and “Has it strengthened not itself and its own brands but the local churches that it claims to serve?”
For the first question—learning from mistakes—it seems (at least from my somewhat outsider perspective) that the main problem of the celebrity cults that the early Reformed resurgence fostered has ameliorated somewhat. The scandals involving the superstars seemed to have sobered the leadership and many (if not perhaps all) of the ground troops on this issue. That is a good thing. If the focus now moves away from the conference-headlining figures to the serious content of theology and to the local churches that provide the movement with its only really legitimate reason for existence, then the future is brighter.
Yet even as the cults of celebrity seem to have abated somewhat, the problem of theological eclecticism and diversity looks set to emerge in ways that might well fracture and even shatter the movement. There is evidence to suggest that the charismatic issue may well return to the foreground of discussion—and in a way that puts strain on alliances. Yet far more difficult, however, is the emerging tension within the ranks over matters of “social justice”—a term many people seem to use as if its meaning were a given and yet few have taken time to define with any nuance.
The YRR was never unified on matters of the church’s role in cultural engagement. The 9Marks men, along with figures such as Kevin DeYoung and traditional Presbyterians, tended to emphasize the church’s primary task in the proclamation of the gospel of the forgiveness of sins, locating the center of the church’s life in the Sunday worship services and the preaching of the word. If the world was to be transformed, then it would come about through the transformation of individual believers via the ordinary means of grace: believers who went about their worldly business in a manner shaped by their Christian character. Yet there were always elements within the movement pushing for a more comprehensive notion of the church’s role, involving not simply the typical diaconal mercy ministries but also the transformation of wider society through direct intervention. Such is, of course, a position with a considerable pedigree even within the more traditional Reformed churches, with Abraham Kuyper often being regarded as the most significant intellectual figure in this regard. Often the two streams can live peacefully together, but at moments when the stakes seem high, the rhetorical temperature can quickly rise.
We live in such a time. In recent years, as the United States has become engulfed in another of its periodic seasons of soul-searching on matters of race—exacerbated this time by the rise of the politics of sexual identity and the divisive presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and, of course, Donald J. Trump—this fissure within the YRR over cultural and political issues has rapidly widened to become a visible and potentially unbridgeable gulf. Whether a group such as The Gospel Coalition can survive in its current form, given the way in which social justice issues are beginning to define the evangelical landscape, remains to be seen. The battle within the movement—and even within its flagship organization, TGC—is unlikely to be a traditional struggle over matters of doctrine, but rather one over how those doctrines relate (or not) to changing the world politically here and now. Having said that, a group such as The Gospel Coalition has thus far proved very capable of maintaining itself as a unified body, despite the fact that it contained serious theological disagreements from its very inception. Whether it can do so in the heightened political atmosphere and polarized discourse of today’s America remains to be seen. I am not personally optimistic on that score.
As to the second question—has the movement strengthened the local church?—this is difficult to quantify. In my own experience, most of the congregants at the church where I pastor are too busy doing their regular jobs to have a lot of time for reading blogs and attending conferences. Yet among the seminary students whom I teach, enthusiasm for TGC and T4G seems to be holding strong. That a proportion of the literature produced by the movement is poor in quality does not detract from the fact that there is today probably more good Christian literature addressing a wider range of subjects than at any previous point in history. Groups such as 9Marks have produced much excellent material for guiding local church pastors, elders, deacons, and members with regard to their respective duties and responsibilities.
What will strengthen the movement in this regard will be a self-conscious acknowledgment on the part of the big organizations and the big personalities of the power they wield and a consequent effort to make sure this is kept within legitimate bounds. One cannot truly serve the church while functionally supplanting the church either directly, through making conferences and the online community a substitute for local congregational life, or indirectly by providing literature and teaching in such a way that the significance of local teachers and elders is subverted.
This is not a new problem. From the moment the printing press was invented, it became increasingly easy to detach teaching from real human relationships. With the Internet, this has reached unprecedented levels. The problem facing groups such as TGC is therefore not unique to them. How they manage it—if indeed they can—will reveal to what extent they can make good on their ambition of being the handmaiden, rather than the master, of the local church. Perhaps more emphasis on small, local conferences, the promotion of the work of pastors and elders in congregations of modest—and thus more typical—size, and a conscious rejection of the need to produce material on whatever is currently trending in pop culture in favor of the tried and true classical loci of Christian theology and pastoral concern might help.
Conclusion
Ten years on, only the most cynical of commentators would argue that the YRR has done no good. For all its faults, the excitement it generated for good theology was—and remains—most welcome at the very point in time when it seemed that a postmodern relativism was set to dissolve the church into the wider culture. The emergent church has gone the way of the pigs in Animal Farm—as corrupt and worldly as the American megachurch evangelicalism it originally sought to critique. The YRR is still here and, for all of the past problems and present strains, it could yet have a decent future. It is now middle-aged and more sedate than restless. But that is hopefully merely a part of the process of growing up. The key to the movement’s success will ultimately be the ability of its leaders to realize when its constituent organizations have served their purpose and can be allowed to disband and disappear.
Carl Trueman is the author of Grace Alone: Salvation as a Gift of God (Zondervan, 2017) and Luther on the Christian Life (Crossway, 2015), and cohost of the podcast Mortification of Spin. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two sons.
