The religious portal patheos.com is running a deep series on the future of Evangelicalism. I have not previously heard of this site, which focuses on covering the basics of all religions, but the authors and thinkers enlisted in this series lends it a lot of credibility in my mind. Check out the whole series here (it’s continuing through August 13th). I will probably have more than one post coming from this, but the first article that caught my eye is the topic of this post.
Three guys who I have a lot of respect for – Justin Taylor, Kevin DeYoung,and Collin Hansen – teamed up to cover the Evangelical Reformed movement. They make some key observations about how this movement came about. Their brief description of the movement’s origin is simple and correct:
In the 1990s, in a relatively quiet and unassuming way, various churches and ministries began to expand in influence throughout the United States — all influenced in one way or another by the Reformed vision of a great and glorious God. In addition to the Reformed seminaries, there was Sovereign Grace Ministries (Gaithersburg, Maryland), 9Marks(Washington, D.C.), Desiring God (Minneapolis), Ligonier Ministries (Orlando), Grace to You (Sun Valley, California), and Acts29 (Seattle). Added to this was the Southern Baptist Convention’s flagship seminary, where president Albert Mohler led a conservative resurgence to recover the founders’ Reformational principles. Each ministry — valuable in its own right — operated independently from one another. But through intentional relational networking — as seen, for example, in Together for the Gospel (first conference, 2006) — there was newfound camaraderie as it seemed that a fresh work of God was underway.
More important than the ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘when’ of the movement’s initial growth is the ‘why’. They get this right – at least as how I see this movement firsthand:
Where some Christians fret over the loss of Christian consensus in America and the growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated, we see great opportunity. The demise of nominal Christianity opens new possibilities for genuine discipleship. If people nowadays are going to follow Christ, they want the strong stuff. They want robust theology, a big Christ, a deep gospel, and they aren’t afraid of serious demands.
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The meaty theology of Calvinism has other aspects that bode well for its future. For one, the intellectual nature of the Reformed faith means that it tends to exert a disproportionate influence on Christian thinking and institutions through writing, scholarship, and formal theologizing. Second, the accent on God’s providential care over all encourages Christians to count the cost of discipleship in an increasingly hostile culture and trust God for the outcome.
I think this bears repeating, “They want robust theology, a big Christ, a deep gospel, and they aren’t afraid of serious demands”. This to me, and the fellow travelers down this road that i speak with, is the real driving force behind the return to Reformed theology. In a world beyond post-modernism, the desire to recover solid, foundational truth is strong. This key desire is the engine behind the resurgence of Reformed Theology.
Tags: DeYoung, evangelicalism, Hansen, movements, Taylor, theology
