Just as we made machines that can lift more than we can and move faster than we can, we have now designed machines that can know more and communicate more in a shorter period of time. If thinking is defined as memory, factual recall, and the ability to swiftly convert factual recall into written (or verbal) communication, then we have designed machines that can think better than we can.
We have always produced machines to reduce our labour. These machines are necessarily stronger than we are. The Industrial Revolution produced machines that could build bigger, better and faster than human hands could manage.
In the 20th century, we produced machines that could calculate more and faster than we could, machines that could store and remember more information than we could. We then produced machines that could combine this and beat us at chess. In other words, by one metric, even the computers of the 20th century were ‘smarter’ than us. Our software could reveal more in seconds than our library research could have produced after hours of page turning.
The last years represent another threshold. We have now produced machines that can mimic and understand language. Combined with massive storage, and a huge range of examples, we now have machines that can write faster, and sometimes, better than we can: essays, descriptions, instructions, poems, riddles, jokes, speeches, or sermons. Similarly AI can now code software better than we can, and perform visual design of graphics, websites, presentations and eventually, live-action movies, and simulations. Whereas we thought that creative activity would always be the domain of the human, we have now trained computers to mimic the creative process and perform it faster than we can.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a prayer by Charles Spurgeon. After about ten seconds, it had the following:
“O Lord, we would delight ourselves in You who are the chief of all delights. We thank You that of Your own good pleasure You bring salvation to sinful men. We confess that before You made us to differ, we were as others are, dead in trespasses and sins, having no hope and without God in the world. We bless You for the eternal covenant by which You foresaw us and chose us to be Your own, and for the precious blood of Christ by which we are redeemed. We pray that we may never lose sight of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, the infinite mercy of divine love, and the fullness of grace that dwells in Jesus. May the Holy Spirit who has begun the work of grace in us carry it onward to completion until we are complete in Christ, and find our joy and satisfaction in His service; for the Lord’s sake. Amen.”
Read More

During times of instability we naturally seek out allies to stand back to back with us as we feel attacked. Yet this ecumenism of the trenches can be quite dangerous. It causes us to abandon faithful brothers and sisters who we ought to persist in working with, as well as encouraging us to form quite dangerous and unstable coalitions with people who might align with us in some highly specific ways but are actually quite out of step with orthodoxy. As Gen X leaders failed or lost credibility and as older friendships broke down, these vital restraints on individual and movement behavior fell away. The thought leaders who need people leaders in their ear lost those relationships and vice versa. The outcome of all this is that our movements have become smaller, less effective, more prone to schism, and more angry (if right wing or progressive) or more anxious (if centrist). One of the tragedies of all this is that we now find ourselves in an enormously exciting time from an evangelistic point of view. 

While reading an ARC of Mike Cosper’s forthcoming book, I was caught up in how Cosper described the church planting scene of the mid 2000s, particularly as it existed around the then still embryonic Acts 29 network.
There was a blending of innocence and confidence and hopefulness that Cosper captures well. I wasn’t part of it directly, but I remember listening to Mark Driscoll sermons and then Matt Chandler sermons at the time and picking up something of the atmosphere from afar. (I was born in 1987, left the fundamentalist church I grew up in in 2005, spent 18 months in an attractional megachurch more in the Willow Creek stream than Mars Hill, and then found my way to RUF and the PCA in 2007, where I have been ever since.) From about 2005 until the early 2010s it seemed as if Acts 29 might represent the defining movement in the next wave of evangelicalism: They had found a way of blending the best insights of the attractional movement of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren with the theological and missiological acumen of Tim Keller and John Piper.
Moreover, because of their particular grunge-inflected aesthetic they naturally avoided some of the worst excesses of the attractional movement, which was a tendency toward the superficial and happy clappy. Their strength here wasn’t necessarily a product of any special virtue—Gen X tends toward the brooding and melancholic, after all, and virtually all their leadership were poster children for Gen X. But the resultant synthesis of their many influences was compelling.
Moreover, as their three defining leaders of that era became established, you could see how the three fit together and could, together, chart a path toward long-term health and success: Mark Driscoll represented the kind of alpha figure who could draw a crowd, win a following, and define the direction of the network through sheer charisma and force of will.
Darrin Patrick, meanwhile, represented a more cerebral and patient voice who was in many ways ahead of his time in his analysis of cultural issues as well as being more balanced in his approach than many of today’s commentators.
Matt Chandler was the more personable balance to Driscoll. Driscoll would deliver the “bodies behind the bus” type speeches and Chandler could then come in behind to help patch up whatever relational issues were created by Driscoll’s harsh style that frequently shaded into straightforward bullying, especially as he became more and more detached from external authority. Again, this sort of arrangement within leadership is not without parallel in church history: Melanchthon was the moderating force on Luther. Oecolampadius was the moderating presence with Zwingli. Bucer was a moderating influence on Calvin. Friendships of unlike personalities who balance one another out are a common occurrence in church history.
In a happier timeline, Driscoll, Patrick, and Chandler would still have another 15-20 years of effective ministry ahead of them as a team: Driscoll is still only 53, Patrick would be 53, and Chandler is 49. For context, Tim Keller was 58 when he published The Reason for God and John Piper was 42 when Desiring God was published and 54 when he spoke at Passion in 2000 and gave his “Don’t Waste Your Life” sermon. So if you think Piper’s Passion sermon and Keller’s Reason for God are their most consequential or influential personal works, that would mean that each of the Acts 29 triumvirate would still be several years away from the ages Piper and Keller were for their most far-reaching, influential works—and that is all to say nothing of all the things both men did after those two signature works. Keller published 29 books after he wrote The Reason for God, many of which I actually like better than Reason. Piper wrote or contributed to nearly 60 volumes after his Passion sermon many of which, likewise, surpassed the Passion sermon or, in my opinion, Desiring God.
Of course, that isn’t the timeline we’ve gotten. Driscoll’s story took a dark turn toward ever greater autonomy and away from real accountability, Mars Hill collapsed, and the magic of those early years never returned. Patrick tragically took his own life after a lengthy and by all accounts genuine process of repair and reconciliation with staff and church members at the church he planted. Chandler has remained in ministry and the Village has continued to do much good work, including particularizing their many campuses into standalone congregations—the same trajectory of the former Redeemer and Bethlehem campuses. But the continued ministry of The Village has not been enough, on its own, to sustain the old Acts 29 momentum. Additionally, Chandler himself took a leave of absence in 2022 after engaging in an inappropriate online relationship with a woman from the church.
Meanwhile, Acts 29 itself has struggled with pastors in the network breaking off in a variety of different cultural and theological directions with some going more progressive while others have taken a reactionary conservative turn.
The story of Acts 29’s trajectory will feel familiar to many of us outside of the network as well. Indeed it may serve as a small-scale model for much of the evangelical fracturing that began around 2015 and has continued through to the present. So it is worth considering why all this took place.
Technology
One pastor friend who serves in Acts 29 observed to me that many of the early Acts 29 leaders began ministry in the early 2000s. Sermon podcasting was only just beginning and many Acts 29 guys were early adopters, as Cosper documented in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. What this did is it allowed many early Acts 29 pastors to grow what today would be called a somewhat large digital platform and to do so at a relatively young age and very early in their pastoral ministry. That in itself is somewhat dangerous spiritually because, as others have observed (including Driscoll himself at one time), talent can become confused for maturity. So obviously talented men grew large platforms while still quite young and, often, they were not prepared for the spiritual weight of having such a sizable audience.
But there is one other factor to consider here: The mid 2000s was a very unusual time on the internet. Podcasting was established enough that you could grow, by the standards of the day, quite a large platform via sharing your sermons. And yet social media had not yet emerged as a tool for flattening hierarchies and bringing institutional leaders into more direct contact with their audiences. So the positive reenforcement one gets from possessing a large platform was there for these young pastors, who could generally have a decent idea of how many people their sermon podcasts were reaching. But the negative feedback and critique one can get from social media were not yet present.
So even by the standards of ministry in the digital era, a strong case can be made that no one labored in a more spiritually dangerous digital environment than Gen X pastors in the early 2000s. This might seem counter-intuitive given how destructive smartphones and social media have been and that neither of those things existed in the early 2000s and were not at all well established until the late 2000s. But if the danger in our current era is being malformed by negative attention, the danger of the former era was the easy optimism of digital tech with virtually no familiarity with its now very well known dangers. It was an era marked by a false hope that recognized the reach of digital media but did not perceive the spiritual dangers of it and was, technologically speaking, largely insulated from the negative feedback mechanisms that became unavoidable in later eras.
What this adds up to is a technological context that made it difficult to be obscure and that tended to inculcate pride and militate against humility. Certainly, one could simply not podcast one’s sermons or one could charge for them, as Keller did, which had the effect of minimizing his reach. But the entire tech optimist ethos of Acts 29 tended to militate against that sort of tech skeptic approach, I think. And so the network that had a chance to be the future of American evangelicalism writ large saw its leaders and young pastors formed in a deeply corrosive environment whose dangers were for the most part invisible and, often, were only discovered much later.
Leadership Failure
Perhaps the defining story of the past five years—and likely to be an ongoing story for the next five to ten years—has been the often disastrous leadership transitions in many evangelical organizations as Baby Boomers have retired and their Gen X successors have failed to hold the institution or movement together. Amongst the many reasons these failed transitions have been a problem is that effective movement leaders serve as a restraint within their institution. When the restraint fails, the movement fragments. You might say that effective leadership creates an environment in which the impact of Charles Taylor’s nova effect is somewhat muted. (The nova effect refers to the nova-like explosion of new identities and forms of expression that arise under modernity.)
To take two examples from outside Acts 29, Keller did this in the PCA by helping limit some of the battles that the missional wing of the denomination would sometimes try to fight. On at least one occasion he intervened to get a presbytery to withdraw an overture to GA that would have created enormous (and quite unnecessary) controversy and dissent within the church. Piper played a similar role in his circles: Piper was able to hold together a cultural critique that could say hard and necessary things about racial injustice while also maintaining a firm commitment to necessary right-coded political issues. This had the effect of restraining his institutions as a whole, keeping them back from both the hard left and hard right. His annual practice of preaching on racial injustice one week and then taking up abortion the following week is indicative of this synthesis. But in the aftermath of Piper’s retirement, the dam broke, as it were: The leaders attracted to the social justice aspects of Piper’s ministry flowed in one direction while those drawn to his more right-coded positions became similarly less restrained.
As Mars Hill collapsed and Driscoll fled ecclesial oversight and discipline, the leadership that had framed, guided, and directed the network began to fail. And as with any dam that breaks, the resulting flood can run in many different directions and behave unpredictably.
Read More
Related Posts:

It’s well understood that institutional presences like seminaries and colleges need to be protected; reputation is everything. But sometimes truth is another thing and we do need to be careful to maintain some unblinking history. The stories of the OPC and PCA are not well ordered or manicured; they were rough cut. Their men were not always angels and their institutions not always perfect.

There are a lot of secrets in the theological world. The secrets aren’t really being kept from you. They are esoteric secrets of the guild and priesthood because they are strange and hard to understand, in a different language and sit in institutional cultures. It’s not that different from the way we hire lawyers and doctors that know the procedures and a special language they’ve memorized. We would love have everyone understand but it takes a lot of work to get in on the game.
I’ve served in the OPC, the PCA and the ARP but first I was in the PCUSA. And that’s the way a life in the church often is; we are where we are because we don’t know any better at the time. We grow through different phases and end up in different places. Each church and denomination has its own theological culture but more than that its own social culture. You hear people say, “Why do the people at that church act that way?” When you know the denomination you know there are social traits of that group that are manifesting themselves in that individual church. The social culture is something you can’t learn in a book and there are unwritten rules against exposing the soft underbelly of presbyteries and synods. We understand in secret what must have been going on at those famous assemblies we read about in the histories. The meetings of the Westminster Divines. The Synod of Dort. The writing of the Nicene Creed must have been a hoot; so many intense personalities!
Coming into the OPC some 30 years ago I was introduced to a gathering of minsters and elders as, “He’s a Sproul guy…” There was immediate concern and one audible groan. That was the official inoculation at the Presbytery level against Sproul guys. I didn’t know what it meant or how deep that well went but it stuck. I didn’t understand the deep contrast between the PCA tradition and the OPC tradition and why they were often fire and water. As the years went by I found that it was true. I was indeed a Sproul guy… according to the unwritten rules that come along with being Presbyterian. And it came with invisible fences; you can’t have some free range Sproul guy walking around causing theology.
Sproul and Gerstner had recently published their celebrated, “Classical Apologetics” criticizing Van Til’s apologetic methodology. Sproul and Gerstner were mother’s milk for me; I loved them so much but I wasn’t from that hometown. As a kid I attended Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Hal Lindsey’s Tetelestai and John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church. Like many that grew up in eccentric theological environments I might have become an agnostic if not for an intervention. Mine was by Francis Schaeffer. I read his books and watched his videos “How Shall We Then Live” and felt that someone had meaningfully heard my serious questions about the Christian faith. Schaeffer and MacArthur led me to Sproul and that was my segue into the reformational world.
And it is a world to itself, a separate and distinct theological and cultural enclave. People tend to think they’re just joining a church but really they’re joining a church, a presbytery and a denomination that each have their own “personality”. Which presbytery and Synod or General Assembly you join will have an effect upon your spiritual well being and that of your family, so it’s good to take these things seriously. The individual church you join will not be able to shield you from the consequences of the institutional setting in which they exist.
In the reformed world there are birthright economies and deep traditions, a kind of a deep state of theological institutions and positions of influence. In the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, one is being Dutch. It’s not that you have to be Dutch to thrive but it doesn’t hurt. You have to go to the right schools, study under the right people, marry into the right families and approve of the right names. Van Til is so influential that he is written into the OPC Book of Church Order itself as presenting the uniquely OPC apologetic methodology.
But the big name in the OPC is Gresham Machen and all of us love Machen. Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism” was formative upon me from my theological youth. But in pretty obvious ways Machen was cut from a different cloth than the later development of the institutions he created. He was a man of the conservative Princeton wing and that’s not a controversial claim. He was trying to go backwards to get forward and the birth of the OPC and Westminster Philadelphia can’t be understood without him. He was a 1920s Presbyterian conservative in an era of theological liberalism looking back at the very best of the tradition and watching its disintegration.
In 1923 when things were going to pot Machen said:
“So it is with faith. Faith is so very useful, they tell us, that we must not scrutinize its basis in truth. But, the great trouble is, such an avoidance of scrutiny itself involves the destruction of faith. For faith is essentially dogmatic.
Despite all you can do, you cannot remove the element of intellectual assent from it…. Very different is the conception of faith which prevails in the liberal Church. According to modern liberalism, faith is essentially the  same as “making Christ Master” in one’s life; at least it is by making Christ Master in the life that the welfare of men is sought. But that simply means that salvation is thought to be obtained by our own obedience to the commands of Christ. Such teaching is just a sublimated form of legalism. Not the sacrifice of Christ, on this view, but our own obedience to God’s law, is the ground of hope.
In this way the whole achievement of the Reformation has been given up, and there has been a return to the religion of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, God raised up a man who began to read the Epistle to the Galatians with his own eyes. The result was the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. Upon that rediscovery has been based the whole of our evangelical freedom. As expounded by Luther and Calvin the Epistle to the Galatians became the “Magna Charta of Christian liberty.” Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Liberalism”.
We could go on with this in great detail but we can say this, for Machen and all of the theological conservatives of his era that faith was essentially about what you believe and that replacing that with ethics, morality and the lordship of God was the essence of liberalism.
The integration of legal obedience into our justification was exactly on point as the disease because when that shift takes place it will consume everything. Nothing of the Gospel will survive. Machen had the diagnosis but he was also aware that the golden age had passed. He looks back 100 years earlier when he says Western Civilization was still passively Christian and laments that in his day the culture was already dominated by paganism. He said this came first theologically then culturally. He started Westminster Theological Seminary to hold ground with an intent of retaking the castle.
In this of course, Sproul was part of this Machen lineage, not as being in the OPC but very self consciously from a similar perspective on the Bible as the word of God, faith as believing the Gospel and salvation as by grace alone through faith. Faith not being interpreted as good works or legal obedience to the moral law but faith taken as the condition of the covenant of grace, as distinguished and different from the nature and conditions of the covenant of works which requires perfect obedience to the law.
Keith Mathison, professor of systematic theology at Reformation Bible College writes this:
I recently watched a short video of a lecture by my mentor and former pastor Dr. R.C. Sproul… He said that the broad evangelical church has been “pervasively antinomian.”… One of the doctrinal issues that separates broadly evangelical theology from confessional Reformed theology is covenant theology… This is where Dr. Sproul’s charge of “pervasive antinomianism” arises. Reformed theology historically has a way of approaching ethical questions. This approach includes careful examination of God’s law as revealed in Scripture. It includes examination of biblical wisdom literature. It includes consideration of natural law. It includes examining how other Reformed pastors and theologians of the past dealt with similar issues. In other words, it looks at Scripture as understood within our Reformed theological and confessional heritage. As an example, if an ethical question not explicitly addressed by Scripture arises, the Reformed would first go to the biblical law and wisdom literature to find applicable biblical principles. Natural law issues would be taken into consideration. Then we would look at how our confessions address this issue. The questions and answers on the Ten Commandments in the Westminster Larger Catechism, for example, are a rich resource on ethical questions.”
Read More
Related Posts: