The next decade is going to be a challenging time, as we face continued cultural pressure, and as the cadre of Gen-X leaders approach retirement and will need replacing. We need to learn the lessons of mistakes made in the past, but also to continue to sustain and develop our strengths. 

I enjoyed listening to Kevin DeYoung, Justin Taylor and Colin Hansen reflecting on the Young, Restless and Reformed movement on Kevin’s podcast (you can find it here). They did not just have a ring-side seat watching the events that they discuss but were key participants. They set out to explain what the movement was, what it achieved, why it has fragmented and to assess the current context in the US. Although YRR was a US phenomenon, it has had a significant impact in the UK, and there are parallels with our own evangelical context.
In large measure they are positive. They regard the YRR movement as a period of revival which became institutionalised over time, as all revivals in history have done. I was especially struck by the comment that the Great Awakening only lasted 3-4 years. They point to the recovery of Calvinistic theology and a lasting publishing legacy of good books, especially by Crossway.
They acknowledge a number of weaknesses, including the fact that some leaders rose to prominence too quickly, or were accepted on the basis that they seemed to be on the right trajectory – although they also point out that the key leaders (eg Piper & Keller) were in their 50s before they came to greater prominence.
They make several astute observations, including identifying YRR as a Gen-X movement, that reacted against the Boomer-led ‘Seeker Sensitive’ movement. Some of the fragmentation has occurred as new generations (Millennials, Gen-Z) have emerged.
They also note the key role played by digital technology. YRR gained momentum because the internet has enabled sermons and resources to be widely shared, but before social media had taken centre stage. They rightly chart the subsequent difficulty of leadership in a social media age and the way in which any leader or movement that gains success is likely to be attacked and critiqued by its detractors. This has led to a growing reluctance of the younger generation to become leaders because they fear the toxic environment they will inhabit.
The YRR movement fostered a wide unity amongst reformed evangelicals from numerous streams and managed at points to maintain a broad tent, stretching from a John Macarthur to a Mark Driscoll. The unity was rooted in a Calvinistic soteriology and a commitment to complementarianism, which were perhaps key issues in the evangelical sub-culture at the time. The movement also addressed the reality of suffering, for example, in the way that it responded to Matt Chandler’s cancer diagnosis. People joined together on platforms at T4G and TGC.
There is no doubt that there has been significant fragmentation, and this is in part because of the difficulties the YRR movement has faced in dealing with new cultural and political challenges. They date the fragmentation as starting from 2015, and key issues that have caused it are the rise of Trump, race issues, Wokeism, COVID, the hyper-speed social change on eg LBGT issues and evangelical leadership scandals and implosions.
Kevin DeYoung makes the interesting observation that there was a presumption within the YRR that they were not just conservative in theology but also politically conservative and that this presumption has been shown to be false as the political divides in the US have become more sharply polarised. He refers to the way that black leaders were drawn into the YRR movement and its institutions, but did not fit because they had different political views on, for example, race. I found that incredibly sad, as it amounts to saying that the gospel unity was only superficial and that what really brought people together was an assumed political congruence. The lack of unity on culture and politics has been exposed by events.
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The Binghams stayed in Hawaii for twenty years and founded the Kawaiahaʻo Church. They also helped to develop a written Hawaiian alphabet. Besides the school, Sybil also started a weekly prayer meeting, attended by more than a thousand Hawaiian women.

Sybil’s admission to the mission field reminds me of a scene of a movie. She was asking for directions to her accommodations when a young man offered to take her there. The man, Hiram Bingham, was preparing to leave as a missionary to the Hawaiian Islands. He just had one problem: the mission board was reluctant to send unmarried people, and his fiancée had just broken off their engagement.
Sybil was a school teacher dreaming of joining a mission. It was common then for young Christian women to seek “higher” service to God by marrying a minister, going to a mission field, or both.
And there they were, in the same vehicle, both thinking of far-off fields. “I had taken cold by a night’s ride over the mountains,” Hiram explained, “and I wrapped a handkerchief about my neck, chin, and mouth, that cold evening, and this awakened ready sympathy in the sensitive heart of the young lady.”[1]
Hiram had heard of a young girl described as “a most amiable and thoroughly qualified companion for a missionary.” During the ride, Hiram’s “mind was intently querying whether this could be the very same.”[2]
When they arrived at their destination, they spoke for a while by the fire. “I measured the lines of her face and the expression of her features with more than an artist’s carefulness,”[3] Hiram wrote.
After discussing the matter with other men, Hiram asked a friend to contact Sybil and ask for an audience. The friend explained the matter to Sybil, leaving her with a verse meant to make a rejection rather difficult: “Rebecca said, ‘I will go” (Genesis 24:58).
But Sybil had no intention of rejecting Hiram’s proposal. She had been waiting for such an opportunity. And there was also a spark of romance. “Since that memorable evening when I was introduced to him, I find that he has secured my love,” Sybil wrote her sister. “God did indeed choose for me.”[4]
She and Hiram married less than two weeks later. On October 23, 1819, they sailed with seven other missionary couples on the Thaddeus, bound for Hawaii.
An Unfamiliar World
The 18,000-mile voyage was difficult, with the missionaries cramped in a small space, most suffering from seasickness – which might have been worse for Sybil and three other women who got pregnant during the trip. She also felt “like a pilgrim and a stranger” with “no abiding place,”[5] while everything she had loved on this earth moved further away.
The ship landed at Kailua-Kona, Big Island, on April 4, 1820. Before Sybil could even leave the boat, however, she had a first inkling that missionary life was not going to be what she had imagined. Before her departure, the secretary of the American Board of Foreign Missions (ABFM) had laid out the missionaries’ great commission.

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Written by Adeline A. Allen |
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Christians understand marriage to be an institution for a man and a woman, united to each other for better or worse and for the procreation and the raising of children. Marriage is also a covenant that signifies the mystical union between Christ and His Church. When fewer of our neighbors and fellow citizens enter into marriage, fewer of them get to partake of the blessing of the intrinsic good that is marriage.

Who voted for which party in the recent midterm elections? Turns out 59 percent of married men and 56 percent of married women went with the Republicans, as well as 52 percent of unmarried men. But, for unmarried women: A whopping 68 percent of them went for the Democrats. It seems that, increasingly, men and married women are Republicans, but unmarried women are Democrats.
The wide gulf between sex and marital status is important. If there are enough differences between men and women as well as between married and unmarried people—habits, presuppositions, inclinations, outlooks, goals—now add to the mix the polarization of political opposition.
Let’s take a look at the group so concentrated on the left, the unmarried women. If marriage is what brings men and women together, politically and otherwise—more on that latter point below—what might marriage in the horizon for the currently single women look like? Already, marriage is a vanishing phenomenon these days—it’s increasingly happening only for a select portion of Americans: the affluent and the religious. For everyone else, not so much.
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