We all love to be part of a movement, don’t we? There is a kind of exhilaration that comes with being part of something that has energy and excitement. There is a kind of spiritual thrill that comes with being part of something that is premised upon sound doctrine and fixated on the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what compelled so many to associate themselves with what was varyingly labeled “New Calvinism,” “Young, Restless, Reformed,” or the “Gospel-Centered Movement.”

Lest We Drift

It is a bit strange, only twenty years after it all began, to read what is already a kind of post-mortem of the movement. Yet that is a part of what Jared Wilson offers in his new book Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel. In its pages he asks: What went wrong with this movement? How did it gain such momentum, then lose it again? What mistakes were made and how can we avoid them in the future?

Let me pause for a moment to address the matter of nomenclature. I have never been a fan of the term “gospel-centered.” I generally eschew it because I find it novel (new to the Christian lexicon) and abstract (difficult to understand and apply). Nevertheless, it is the term Wilson uses for the movement and he defines it this way: “Gospel-centrality as a concept is essentially a summation of historic Reformed theology and Protestant spirituality that adherents would argue are as old as the Bible. … in its paradigmatic sense, gospel-centrality is shorthand for a Reformed understanding of biblical spirituality, bringing with it distinct truth claims that give the ideology substantial implications for life and ministry.” At some point, a movement based on Reformed theology was challenged to become a movement based on gospel-centrality. In my estimation, it never quite took and never quite worked. But let’s press on.

Wilson begins with a short biography of himself that could easily be the biography of so many people who had come to faith in seeker-friendly churches but then began to long for something more—a faith that had more content and more substance. Through the new technology of the internet, they encountered John Piper, R.C. Sproul, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, or some of the other prominent preachers or teachers. Before long they had embraced Reformed theology and, in many cases, the idea of gospel-centeredness. But that was then and this is now.

More and more leaders my age who once seemed so committed to the ministry philosophy of gospel-centrality now seem to have moved on. And they haven’t all migrated to the same place. The balkanization of the young, restless, and Reformed tribe has resulted in silos and splinters, some more substantial than others. They run the gamut from social gospel–style progressivism and Christian “wokeness” to right-wing political syncretism and legalistic fundamentalism. Even among the numbers who still hold to the doctrinal claims of Reformed theology and its implications for gospel ministry, there are now a number of factions and divisions along political and cultural lines. I thought we were “together for the gospel.”

Didn’t we all, at least for a time? Wilson’s particular concern is the idea and doctrine he has championed and defended for all this time: gospel-centrality.

Gospel-centrality really is God’s way for the Christian life and church. Gospel-centrality really is biblical. But part of doggedly committing to the centrality of Christ’s finished work in all things is being sober-minded—aware of our own inclinations to add to, subtract from, or otherwise attempt to enhance or augment the powerful work of the Holy Spirit through the message of grace in Christ. It’s not enough to be aware of how Mark Driscoll and others drifted. It’s our own drift that calls for our attention.

This drift is the concern at the heart of his book. Understanding what happened is the theme of the first couple of chapters and understanding the consequences is the theme of the next five.

So what happened?

For this particular armchair coroner, the primary cause of death was that the influencers and authorities of gospel-centrality failed to rise to the occasion of quickly changing cultural challenges and threats to theological orthodoxy. The movement’s thought leaders were assimilated into the pacifying (and compromising) swamps of “Big Eva” and thus lost their reformational fire—and their reformational credibility.

If you were along for the ride, you’ll appreciate his history of the movement’s rise and fall, and perhaps sometimes cringe as you remember some of its defining moments.

But more important than this is his warning about five different kinds of drift, which are not drifts from a movement but drifts from the gospel. Hence, whether or not you are “gospel-centered,” you will benefit from reading and considering them.

He begins with a drift into victimhood and explains that if we root our identity in anything other than Christ, we effectively place ourselves at the center and can soon become convinced we are victims of society or circumstances. “The cross does not secure your body from victimization,” he says. “But it does secure your identity from victimhood.” He then discusses the all-too-common drift into dryness in which Christ no longer thrills our souls and we go casting about for different kinds of delight. This will always lead to spiritual dryness and drift. “Religiosity cannot ultimately keep us from apostasy. If anything, it might expedite it, as we find it harder and harder to keep up the religious efforts without a renewed heart. The machinery of ‘spirituality’ cannot move for long without the oil of spiritual vitality. And this spiritual vitality can come only from friendship with Jesus.”

Wilson warns as well about the kind of superficiality that weds Christianity to a consumerist culture and the kind of pragmatism that replaces trust in Scripture with confidence in whatever methods appear to be effective. A chapter that may take some by surprise in a movement characterized by its commitment to the gospel is one about the temptation of legalism, for “the leaven of legalism is subtler than we realize.” We may think our focus on the gospel inoculates us against legalism, but legalism can take on new and deceptive forms. “We see the new legalism at work in evangelicalism today when we conflate secondary and even tertiary doctrines with primary ones. We see it at work when we prioritize cultural conformity over gospel unity and insist on extrabiblical litmus tests for orthodoxy that are more in line with tribal affiliations than with Christian communion.” A concluding chapter pleads with Christians to be aware of the tendency and temptation to drift—to leave behind the gospel and center the Christian life and the Christian church on anything else, anything less.

I have read most of Wilson’s books over the years and appreciate this one as much as any of them. His telling of history is both interesting and illuminating (though I think there could have been more said about the role of women in popularizing the movement such as writers like Gloria Furman, Emily Jensen, and Laura Wifler who rose with the movement and carried it to their demographic of young moms). Of more importance is his focused and timely warnings about both the tendency to drift and the specific ways in which each of us is prone to drift. No matter what movement we are part of or what label we prefer to wear, as long as we are “Christian,” these chapters are pure gold.

Happy Victoria Day to my fellow Canadians. I hope you enjoy your day off!

Today’s Kindle deals include a list of titles from Crossway.
(Yesterday on the blog: Vultures Are Always the First to Smell Carrion)
After Roe: What’s Our Job Now?
Here’s George Grant in Tabletalk: “Circumstances change. Laws, courts, and administrations come and go. Elections raise up and cast down the mighty. Popular opinion waxes and wanes. But through it all, the callings and responsibilities of Christians in this poor, fallen world remain the same.”
The Sermon That Divided America
It has been 100 years since Fosdick preached his most famous sermon. Obbie Tyler Todd gives the background on it here. “To say that Harry Emerson Fosdick’s sermon ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (1922) ignited the fundamentalist-modernist controversy requires a bit of qualification. In truth, the lines had been drawn for at least a decade.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick and the Spirit of American Liberalism
Kevin DeYoung has a good article on it as well. It’s hard to overstate just how important a sermon it was. “On May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick took to the pulpit of Old First—the historic First Presbyterian Church (est. 1716) located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan—to deliver what would be his most famous sermon.”
A Letter to Special Needs Mothers
I expect someone out there could use this encouragement.
My Relationship Status with My Emotions? It’s Complicated.
“Recently I woke up in the night feeling terrible, like I had sinned in some great way. Over the course of my life I’m sure I’ve had this experience dozens of times, maybe hundreds. How do I make sense of that? Where did that emotion, that feeling come from?”
Died: Fred Carter, Little-Known Black Artist Behind Chick Tracts
CT has a fascinating obituary for Fred Carter, the artist behind many of the Chick tracts. “Carter—an African American artist who drew gospel tracts, evangelical comic books, and Black Sunday school curricula—died on May 9 at the age of 83. He was the close collaborator of Jack Chick, pioneer of the popular evangelistic cartoons known as Chick Tracts. According to Christian Comics International, more than half of Chick Tracts were drawn by Carter.”
Flashback: Embrace Your Purpose
God saves you to sanctify you, to restore you to the life he intended for you before you gave yourself to sin.

No one who murmurs under God’s chastening hand, is ever made better by it. —J.R. Miller

We can sometimes get dismayed as we think about the church. We can sometimes get frustrated or even embittered. And sometimes our dismay is fair, for the church is made up of people who, though they love the Lord, still sin against God and still harm one another. Though it is a blessing to belong to the church, it can also be a challenge and even a trial.

Yet in God’s eyes, the church is beautiful. It is lovely. It is precious. The unique wonder of the church is the subject of Dustin Benge’s book The Loveliest Place. “This book is about the beauty and loveliness of the church,” he says. “It’s for all those who sometimes struggle to see those qualities in her. If you tirelessly serve within her ministries while dismayed by her apparent failures, or have rare, unsustainable glimpses of her beauty, this book is for you. The singular goal is to awaken your affections. Not affections for form, methodology, structure, organization, or programs, but affections for who she is and why she exists.”
At a time when many people are perplexed by the nature or definition of the church, and at a time when many are considering walking away from the church altogether, this book means “to set before you a thoroughly biblical portrait of the church that derives its life from the sweet fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit, creating a community of love, worship, fellowship, and mission, all animated by the gospel and empowered by the word of God.” It means to show that the church is not just a lovely place, but the loveliest place of all.
Through fourteen relatively brief chapters Benge highlights different aspects of the church as we read of them in Scripture. Beginning with Song of Solomon he shows the church to be beautiful in the eyes of God—Christ’s very own bride. “We consider what the church can give us and do for us, how she can serve us, and even what’s in it for us, but rarely do we enjoy the eye-opening and soul-stirring truth that she is beautiful and lovely in just being who she is.”
He looks to the church as the household of God, then shows how the Trinity relates to the church: God as Father and friend, Christ as Savior and head, Spirit as helper and beautifier. He considers the church as the pillar and buttress of the truth, he looks at the need for shepherding and feeding the flock, he describes the church’s responsibility to evangelize, and he tells how the church ought to expect to face persecution. “Every faithful believer must expect persecution. Not that every believer will be tortured, imprisoned, asked to recant, or even burned at a stake—but you will experience, at one point or another, opposition from the world. What does this mean for the church? It means that the church is composed of those whom the world despises. There may be a facade of friendliness and desire for cooperation, but in the recesses of the heart of the ungodly, there is a vehement hatred for the things of God and the good news of the gospel.”
He wraps up with an examination of the oneness of the church—the unity that we share and the unity that serves as a powerful testimony of the gospel. ”The church’s growing oneness is what defines the church as having an otherness. Why would the world be supernaturally drawn to an institution filled with conflict, cliques, hostility, fighting, and division?” It’s a valid question and a very good reason to pursue actually the unity God says we have positionally.
At a time—and maybe it is always such a time—when even Christians seem intent on disparaging the church, we need a reminder of the beauty, the loveliness, and the sheer wonder of what God has done in setting his love on a people who are his own. To that end, The Loveliest Place will help you marvel at the church, love the church, and further commit yourself to it. For you will deepen your convictions that “the church isn’t just about organization, leadership, function, and vision. There’s something much more beautiful and lovely to recognize. The church is about people being rescued, redeemed, and renewed. The church is about savoring, rejoicing, and service. The church is about proclaiming, enduring, and walking. The church is about being the bride adorned, beautiful, and lovely.”

Buy from Amazon