The young, restless, reformed movement of the late 2000s and 2010s was self-consciously an attempt to reclaim the evangelical center. This was something both Tim Keller and D. A. Carson were clear on from the earliest days of the Gospel Coalition.
The reason they had the opportunity to do this, however, is interesting and complicates the popular understanding of the young reformed movement of that era. Prior to the young reformed of the 2000s, there had been older figures in the evangelical world who popularized a kind of pop Calvinism amongst a pocket of American evangelicals. Some of these figures, like R. C. Sproul and J. I. Packer were actually reformed in their theology.
Others, primarily John MacArthur and those in his circles, affirmed four or five of the so-called "five points of Calvinism" (which are actually a deeply modern innovation that have relatively little to do with reformed theology historically), which set them at odds with Wesleyan evangelicals. Consequently, they often presented themselves as being somewhat adjacent to the reformed tradition, even if they weren't in any way reformed themselves. Crucially, they also helped to popularize the Banner of Truth Puritan paperback volumes, even while they remained Dispensational and credobaptist in their broader theology.
The outcome of all this was that the young, reformed movement that finally emerged in the 2000s and early 2010s was really a fusion of at least five distinct sub-groups that tended to organize around specific parachurch evangelical institutions. Those five groups were the MacArthurites (centered around Grace to You, the Shepherd's Conferences, Master's Seminary, etc.), Ligonier, Together for the Gospel, Desiring God, and the Gospel Coalition.
The fringes of that movement didn't cross-pollinate much, if at all: You would not find Tim Keller in MacArthurite spaces, for instance, nor would you find MacArthur or one of his proteges at TGC events.
But if you imagine the young reformed of that era as a kind of Venn Diagram, it looked something like this:
For example, if you look at the list of speakers at T4G for the entirety of their run from 2006 to 2022, the list will include John Piper, Carl Trueman, Russell Moore, Al Mohler, Thabiti Anyabwile, Jemar Tisby, Alastair Begg, Mika Edmondson, David Platt, and Owen Strachan.
Desiring God will provide a similarly eclectic list that is, if anything, even weirder, encompassing most of the men already named as well as several more that, from the vantage point of 2024, make for even stranger pairings. In the 2008 conference alone (one which I attended as a college student) they had Bob Kauflin, Mark Driscoll, and Paul David Tripp as speakers—the first two of whom are closely linked to ministries accused of serious abuse while the latter has been one of the loudest critics of abusive ministries within reformed evangelicalism.
Taken as a whole, the era from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s saw an evangelical center emerge, made up of the groups linked above and built off the platforms of a fairly disparate group of leaders, primarily MacArthur, Sproul, Piper, Carson, and Keller as well as Al Mohler, C. J. Mahaney, Ligon Duncan, and Mark Dever.
Then the six-way fracturing happened. And the resulting splits, which have largely vindicated Graham and Flower's descriptions of three future types of churches in the original essay, have obliterated that refashioned evangelical center of the early 21st century. The past 10 years have largely been a time in which that fracturing began, played itself out, and then resolved itself as new coalitions and relationships formed. Graham and Flowers anticipated the emergence of three types of churches:
You could reasonably argue that the Type A Churches described by Flowers and Graham broadly represent the blue and red circles in my above diagram while TGC and perhaps 9 Marks occupy the rather lonelier Type B category. The Type C churches, meanwhile, have become quite marginal within evangelical discourse for reasons John Mark Comer has described quite well.
Now as we enter a new moment, I think it might be helpful to define the nature of that split more precisely. We're now 3.5 years removed from the Graham and Flowers essay and so I think the dynamics they identified so powerfully have now had further time to work themselves out, which in turn gives us a clearer picture of where we are and where we're likely going.
Roughly speaking, a single movement or large institution can break apart in three ways.
The first way is through prolonged internal dispute and political fighting which is resolved when one faction definitively wins control of the institution or movement and carries it forward.
To take one example, this is what happened with the "conservative resurgence" in the Southern Baptist Convention. One power bloc within the institution gained supremacy and reshaped the institution as they thought necessary. Even with all the changes, however, the actual fracturing was relatively contained, fired seminary professors and denominational figures not withstanding. At the beginning of the conservative resurgence there was an ecclesial institution called the Southern Baptist Convention which had certain sub-entities operating out of it, such as a missions board, seminaries, and so on. When the fracturing ended, that ecclesial entity still existed as did those smaller institutions within it. All that changed was the leadership and that leadership's vision for the institution—which is significant, but also far less disruptive in many ways than the other possible forms of fragmentation.
So that's one form of fracturing: A single movement or institution has a period of internal fighting and at the end one clear winner emerges and the institution coalesces behind that winner. There can still be dramatic changes within the entity, of course, but on an institutional or movement level it's all the same institution beginning to end.
In another form of fracturing, a single entity splits into two as a result of irreconcilable differences between large enough sub-groups that the single entity cannot continue as it was.
This, to use another ecclesial example, is the story of the Presbyterian Church in America. At one point there was a single southern Presbyterian denomination, called the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Then there were internal disputes over a variety of theological, political, and cultural issues and at the end there were two groups: The Presbyterian Church in the United States and the Presbyterian Church in America.
In this type of fracture, the original entity continues to exist, but it is changed through the removal of a significant portion of its membership and a new entity also emerges as a competitor.
The emergence of the Anglican Church in North America is somewhat similar to this process, though more complex because the ACNA was a composite institution made up of churches that had once belonged to The Episcopal Church as well as a number of churches that had never been part of TEC but had rather been part of smaller Anglican mission networks, such as the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA).
To explain this final type of fracturing, it's actually easier to use political referents rather than ecclesial. Once upon a time there was a nation called Yugoslavia. And then there wasn't. After years of catastrophe and horror that make all our political disputes in America seem tame by comparison, the nation of Yugoslavia shattered and today we now have seven distinct nations on the land that was once uniformly part of Yugoslavia:
In this sort of fracturing, the entity that once existed dies and is replaced by wholly new communities or institutions. This is a far more painful sort of fracture—more of a collapse, really—because the institutional memory, succession plans, pooled resources (including money), and various other goods all dissolve into nothing as the entire community fails.
This, I think, is the type of fracturing which has played out in the past ten years of evangelicalism. Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore. Croatia does. Slovenia does. Montenegro does. But Yugoslavia is gone.
The mistake many people have made and, in a few cases, are still making is acting as if this hasn't happened and the old empire can still be held together. It can't. A related mistake I am seeing is failing to recognize the coalition one now belongs to (or failing to be honest about that) and instead attempting to be a bridge builder between irreconcilable groups. But the fracturing happened, regardless of how you feel about it.
What Christian leaders, academics, pastors, and the rest can do going forward is simply try to build better within their specific spheres of influence, and doing that will almost certainly involve recognizing the faultlines of the fracturing and the newly emerged groups that have come out of it.
What factions do we have now? In an older draft of this piece I tried to do something analytical here, breaking down the primary blocs that have emerged in the past several years. But on further thought I decided that wasn't what this piece needed to be. We've largely done that sort of analysis already, most of all in the six-way fracturing essay.
Rather, I want to briefly comment on why I think the Type A and C churches are unlikely to play a major role in the future of American Protestantism and then lay out a sketch of how the Type B churches could become the defining actors in the next chapter of American church history.
In other words, I'm less interested in talking about how to Yugoslavia (or "evangelicalism") and care far more about identifying the healthiest, most faithful body to come out of that conflict. Once that's done, we can start thinking strategically about how to build.
The elephant in the room whenever we talk about "evangelicalism" is the simple fact that "evangelicalism" presupposes virtually no theological content of any kind. You can quibble a bit with the survey design if you like, but there's no great way of spinning some of the rather alarming results in Ligonier's theology survey, for instance, which suggests that over half of self-described "evangelicals" are heretics.
"Evangelicalism" is almost entirely a sociological designator which references certain lifestyle choices, consumption patterns, and political commitments—which is why we now have Buddhist evangelicals, Muslim evangelicals, and even atheist evangelicals.
What this means is that movements which define themselves chiefly in negative terms—against "wokeness" for example or against Trumpism or "bigotry" will see their theological distinctiveness and commitments erode over time, being replaced by political commitments and other sociological markers that define various types of "evangelicals," or whatever the next term du jour will be.
This brings me to the first problem facing the Type A and C churches: Neither of them can sustain real theological diversity over time because neither are actually interested in theology; they're interested in political organizing and lifestyle propagation. This is why the low 2s that have closely associated with the 1s have, over time, basically become 1s themselves and why the same thing has happened with high 3s who associate closely with 4s. The Type A and C churches are political blocs defined by their most radical members (network effects are a driving factor here as well) and the theological beliefs that less extreme members have which trouble that alliance will have to be pushed so far into the margins that they are forgotten.
Type A churches have a further complicating factor: "Anti-wokeness" is not actually sufficient to define a political bloc. So the Type A churches are now devouring one another, as there are now at least three clear sub-groups amongst the Type A churches and each is spending much of their time on social media right now attacking each other. For these reasons, I would discourage people from pinning their hopes on either the Type A or Type C churches.
Rather, what I want to attempt here is to offer a constructive vision of what the Type B churches can become which makes them something more than simply a sometimes awkward coalition of mainstream evangelicals and neo-evangelicals.
What Graham and Flowers referred to as "Type B Churches" comprised of mainstream evangelicals and neo-evangelicals I now want to refer to as churches practicing a kind of evangelical catholicity. I recognize the term "evangelical catholic" is a loaded one with conflicting meanings. 20 years ago one sometimes would hear certain Roman Catholics described as "evangelicals," for example, and the late theologian Robert Jenson would sometimes be linked to a movement for "evangelical catholicism." Neither of these uses are what I have in mind.
Rather, I am using the term "catholic" in the way Herman Bavinck did in his essay on the topic. For Bavinck, "catholicity" referred to the universal church, as opposed to local congregations (though local congregations should regard themselves as being part of the universal catholic church), to the universality of the church, and to the universality of the church's message and experience:
"(the church) embraces the whole of human experience. It possesses perfectly all doctrines concerning either invisible and visible things that human beings need to know; it provides a cure for all kinds of sin, either of body or soul; it produces all virtues and good works, and partakes of all spiritual gifts."
So my use of "catholicity" here doesn't have anything to do with the Roman understanding of catholicity, but is rather an attempt to reclaim certain trans-temporal and universalizing impulses within Protestant thought which have been lost or neglected by American evangelicals, whose historical imaginations are horribly atrophied and who also routinely struggle with Bavinck's third criteria. (If you want a more contemporary reference point, I'm quite happy to commend the work of Kevin Vanhoozer to you, as well as the older book by Swain and Allen on "Reformed Catholicity.")
In short, I'm arguing for people who belong to Type B churches to begin regarding themselves as "evangelical catholics" of a sort who are building and doing something fundamentally different from the sociological evangelicalism of previous eras or the politically obsessed culture warring work of the other two blocs. Evangelical catholics recognize themselves as belonging to a universal church stretched across time and place, and recognize that all our spiritual needs are met and fulfilled in the life of the church, which equips us to then live maturely and wisely in the world, having been formed by the practices of the church and guided by the light of Scripture.
What can we gain from this sort of self-understanding of our work in the American church in the years to come? Three things immediately come to mind.
First, we can and should be people primarily devoted to the Scriptures and the practices of the church and we should be people whose intellectual habits and interests are obviously Christian in nature rather than being obviously partisan in nature.
To get more specific, I'll cite several individuals or institutions that I see devoting themselves to this sort of catholicity. To begin, consider three of the most obvious 2s in Graham and Flowers's framing who have remained far closer to the 3s in their work than they have the 1s. Indeed, all three of them have taken public actions that would antagonize and alienate many 1s.
First, consider Kevin DeYoung. DeYoung is a megachurch pastor in a booming southern city. He has plenty of resources at his disposal. What are some of the things he has done with those resources in recent years? Well, he served on his denomination's sexuality committee to draft a report on sex and gender issues. He has written for First Things about the goodness of large families. In terms of his larger writing projects, he mostly writes accessible texts aimed at a broad audience about theology, the story of the Bible, the Lord's Prayer, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Ten Commandments, and the Nicene Creed.
If DeYoung wanted to, he could almost certainly grow a far larger platform by being more explicitly and overtly political and dedicating more of his time to addressing culture war debates. But plainly what most interests him is simply being a Christian pastor who writes about Christian ideas for the building up of the church.
Similarly, one could observe the same patterns in two other prominent 2s—Carl Trueman and Peter Leithart. The overwhelming majority of Leithart's editorial output is either commenting on the Bible or commenting on specific parts of Christian practice and church life, particularly as they concern liturgy and the sacramental life of the church. Leithart also has a book on the ten commandments as well as a book on baptism and many Bible commentaries.
Trueman, meanwhile, devotes more time to cultural commentary than either DeYoung or Leithart, but also his most recent book is about the need for creeds and confessions, he is a deeply committed churchman, and in recent years has regularly made a point of speaking up for the ordinary duties of Christian piety against the utilitarian compromises made by many professing Christians on the political right.
What's interesting is that you can see a similar interest amongst the neo-evangelicals who belong to this group. Trevin Wax, for instance, has written a number of devotional texts taking readers through various biblical texts over 30 days. His most recent book is an attempt to reintroduce bored Christians to the freshness of orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Colorado pastor Brad Edwards has a forthcoming book from Zondervan making the case for why the institutional church still matters in an era of mass dechurching and "online church."
Finally, it is worth noting that many publishers whose audience includes these sorts of mainstream and neo-evangelicals are attempting to publish books that will fit this same sort of "back to basics" ethos. IVP has published a beautiful and immensely useful edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer along with an excellent volume on how to use the BCP written by the two editors of the 1662 edition. Lexham publishes their Christian Essentials books. Crossway publishes a number of beautiful books from Jonathan Gibson that offer structured daily prayer services with Scripture readings, including two organized around specific seasons in the Christian year.
Given the emptying out of the theological content of "evangelicalism" as a mass movement, this return to Christian basics amongst many different evangelicals figures and institutions is immensely encouraging and will, if given time, help to correct these long-standing problems that have plagued this sector of the American church.
Of course, there is a further point here that follows from the return to Christian basics: It is not only evangelicals who care about the Lord's Prayer or the Decalogue, for example, nor are they the only ones concerned with set routines of prayer and Scripture reading and fasting. These are all concerns shared by other branches of the Christian church. In the US context, you can find these same passions in many Roman Catholic parishes, many Mainline Protestant congregations, in radical Anabaptist communities, and in parts of the Black church.
This has always been the hopeful possibility on the far side of the evangelical fracturing. Have many relationships that were once strong prior to the fracturing been lost? Certainly. But also if we would look around a bit more, we'd also find that there are many new relationships to be made with other people outside the evangelical movement who share the same delights and passions that have kept the evangelical catholics faithful and healthy over the past decade. (I do not think it is a coincidence that all three of the mainstream evangelicals I mentioned above have good relationships with a predominately Catholic magazine like First Things, for example.)
The temptation for evangelicals, of course, will be to enter these relationships in a spirit of triumphalism and act as if the real goal of the friendship is simply that everyone would become evangelical. But this is unnecessary and dangerous. It reeks of the vicious pride that has too often defined many evangelicals. Rather than approaching in this way, we should be far more modest and simply seek for ways in which we can encourage and build up our brothers and sisters in Christ from other Christian streams. For ministry leaders, perhaps this could mean regular meetings for prayer and encouragement with faithful pastors from other traditions.
In other cases, it might mean simply making a point of finding smaller, simpler forms of cross-pollination within local Christian communities. My wife teaches dance alongside a Roman Catholic woman, for example, and their students come in about equal numbers from both the local diocese and various evangelical congregations. Or you might make a point of visiting a local Catholic bookstore or Catholic-owned coffeeshop, if your community has one, or looking for opportunities to volunteer with groups like Catholic Social Services or Lutheran Family Services.
Growing and healthy Christian movements, as Tim Keller reminds us, are always made up of more than one denomination or ecclesial tradition. So if we want to see broad Christian movements take root in our local places, we should look for ways to link arms as we can with other faithful ministries from other ecclesial traditions.
Finally, it is worth considering how a vibrant Christian movement might work on a mass scale in a city or metro area. I have written before about the idea of megachurches as a kind of cathedral church for their city.
But lingering behind that idea is something more basic. As most ecclesial denominations are shrinking and in decline, it is highly possible that we are heading into an era where geographic relationships will take on far greater importance for American congregations. There's something predictable about this, if only because geographic fellowships as a default organizer for Christian congregations is a very common pattern we see throughout church history. The affinity-based models of more recent eras are not really the norm for defining various Christian groups and communions.
To be sure, these geographically driven relationships should not replace the essential role that denominations play in healthy churches. Denominations provide real external oversight and accountability. They provide confessional norms that limit and define the theology of their churches. They can often provide a number of other institutional aids as well.
That said, current trajectories suggest that the power and influence of denominations is waning. If we want to avoid a scenario where each local congregation is essentially its own closed off group, we need to begin thinking about what local church relationships can be between congregations in the same city.
One piece is that megachurches or simply well-resourced congregations in a city might begin regarding themselves as a kind of resource hub for other local ministries and churches. "Well-resourced" could mean congregations with money, obviously. But it could also simply mean "congregations with a large building." There are countless things that congregations with a large building could do with that building throughout the week that would serve the Christian community outside their congregation, especially when one considers the boom in Christian schools right now in the US. Generous churches with plenty of space can make it far easier for school startups to launch and build momentum in their early years.
A second consideration here is that different streams of the church tend to have different strengths. Mere O contributor and Phoenix-area pastor Seth Troutt had an interesting thought along these lines after he attended a predominantly Baptist conference in which the keynote speaker was mostly quoting authors from the PCA.
The dynamic Seth is identifying extends beyond those three communions. For example, the best book I've ever read on pastoral care is by an LCMS Lutheran. And the pastor who I most enjoy talking to about that issue is... also an LCMS Lutheran. The Acts 29 pastors I've known tend to be energetic and entrepreneurial in ways that I find immensely helpful, encouraging, and challenging (in a good way) as a Presbyterian. Meanwhile, I think everyone could benefit from spending a bit of time with the Book of Common Prayer, even if only read as a tool to aid in private devotions.
Point being, there is a great deal to be gained from forging stronger regional relationships between churches, but if we are to do that we need to be thinking not about building up our own tribes or sociological blocs. Instead, we need to think about building up Christ's body as members of his church catholic and seeking to reach our particular city or region through that work. For many reasons, I think now is an enormously exciting time for the American church. But taking advantage of the opportunities in front of us will require certain changes in mindset amongst American Christians.