I am a son of the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement. I love my brothers who shepherded me under the influence of Piper, Keller, and even Driscoll in the 2010s. Thankfully, they were also influenced by church history and receiving help from the magisterial reformed including Cramner, Luther, and Calvin. The Lord has blessed me greatly through his Church as it has presented Christ to me through Word and Sacrament.
There is a lot of reviling going around today. I’ve taken and given my fair share. I find myself longing for the old days when it seemed to me like everyone was so concerned about the spread of the gospel, excited to hear it preached, and full of zeal to grow in grace (even while being an antinomian). Now it seems like people are more caught up by the concerns of this world than those of the next. This I grieve.
This is why I’m glad to see an article in balanced praise of the movement. Not simply dunking on it. Yes, there were issues. Some were severe. But it’s not like no one was saying anything about it at the time.1 But many of us are truly thankful for how God used it in our lives. May God bless those with steadfastness who were burned by this movement, not to repent of sound doctrine, but to hold fast and repent of what is sinful and erroneous.
Here’s an excerpt from the above article which makes the point the “Anti YRR” movement (mostly made up of YRR Alumni) isn’t actually so different after all:
It’s not an accident that YRR was a creature of the mid 2000s, as the Internet and then the smartphone atomized American culture gave us an unusual amount of power over where we felt we belonged. This was the source of YRR’s biggest weakness and its biggest strength. The smartphone-shape of YRR meant that its foundation was inherently transient, downstream from current cultural trends rather than above them. Thus, the “anti-Big Eva” moment currently gaining strength is also a social media-drive group. Big tech giveth, big tech has taken away.
- John MacArthur, Phil Johnson, and Mark Dever together confronted Driscoll many times at the height of his popularity. This was almost entirely left out of the popular podcast “The Rise and Fall of Rise Hill” which pretended as if no one was mature or wise enough to see the vast ecclesiological issues at play in real time. Rick Phillips and other PCA Ministers formed a network of Pastors in 2012 (The Gospel Reformation Network) devoted to correcting the antinomianism that was running wild among those they called “the grace boys” following folks like Mark Driscoll and Tullian Tchividjian.
