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Home/Featured/No Longer Fashionable

No Longer Fashionable

My fellow Reformed folks, let’s get used to being unpopular again.

Written by Todd Pruitt | Thursday, November 6, 2014

My larger point here is that the passing of Driscoll and Mars Hill from their place of prominence means that the days of YRR as a popular movement are over. Mark Driscoll, once so cool and fresh is now just the opposite. Misbehavior that only a few years ago seemed to be a rather enviable function of youth and zeal now looks downright creepy. I am always amazed at how quickly the fashionable becomes unfashionable. And herein was the Achilles Heel of YRR: It was fashionable which necessarily meant that it had an expiration date from the very beginning.

 
There has been much handwringing lately over the fall of Mark Driscoll and demise of Mars Hill Inc. It is not my intention to pick on Driscoll or Mars Hill. But the Seattle mega-church and her charismatic pastor were the most public face of the Young, Restless, and Reformed (YRR) movement. How this happened is up for debate and certainly the factors contributing to this influence were many. But it did not happen because no one was sounding the alarm. There were quite a few raising concerns but they were dismissed, ignored, and even excoriated as haters. And while that may be so much water under the bridge I hope that lessons have been learned.

My larger point here is that the passing of Driscoll and Mars Hill from their place of prominence means that the days of YRR as a popular movement are over. Mark Driscoll, once so cool and fresh is now just the opposite. Misbehavior that only a few years ago seemed to be a rather enviable function of youth and zeal now looks downright creepy. I am always amazed at how quickly the fashionable becomes unfashionable. And herein was the Achilles Heel of YRR: It was fashionable which necessarily meant that it had an expiration date from the very beginning.

As Carl and I pointed out over a year ago in an early MOS podcast: Being Reformed is not cool. It never has been. It never will be.

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