Timely

Carl Trueman on the YRR phenomenon.

Here's one gem from the back half of the essay:

Carrying on from this danger of personality cults, part of me also wonders if the excitement surrounding the movement is generated because people see that Reformed theology has intrinsic truth or because they see that it works, at least along the typical American lines of numbers of bodies on seats (in Britain, we'd say `bums on seats' but that phrase rather gains in translation). Now, I am no member of that theological party which sees the Lord's blessing in the fact that every year its churches are smaller, its sermons more arcane self-important and tedious, and its people less friendly and more sour. Look, if I wanted a pretentious and incomprehensibly abstract theology with an impeccable record of emptying churches, I'd convert to Barthianism, wouldn't I? Yet not reveling in smallness and irrelevance does not require that I necessarily regard increasing numerical and financial size as accurate gauges of fidelity and truth.

As they say in respectable places, read the whole thing.