"Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists" by Collin Hansen

I discovered something potentially life-changing.

I love our library here in Columbia. It's an active face in the community. Most of the time I arrive at the library greeted by a 90% full parking lot. People here actually use the library, and the library has different events and tools to help the community. One is the online catalog. I knew you could search their catalog, find what you need, and then ask them to get it for you. They send you an email letting you know you can come to the front desk and pick up your book. No more scribbling down call numbers while you search through rows and rows of books (though I guess you can still do that, if you're into that sort of thing). Pretty cool, no?

On the website, I also noticed a button to "request a book". I first thought this referred to an inter-library loan system, but then found that it actually meant requesting that the library get a certain book for their circulation. I decided to give this a shot just to see how it worked. The page informed me that the book must have come out this year, since they aren't in the habit of buying old books, I suppose. I chose to request this book. After all, it's one of the last books I'd expect to find in our library. It's also new, and I wanted to read it. Much to my delight, a few weeks later, I got an email saying that they had approved the purchase and I can now come to the front desk and check out said book. The jaw may have dropped a little as I realized the implications. If there's a new book that comes out, and I want to read it, they will probably get it for me. Wow.

So, that story will probably be longer than my actual comments about the book, but I had to get it in there. Collin Hansen was a editor for Christianity Today. In 2006 they had published a cover article talking about the emergent church movement. Being the youngest of the group, Hansen figured he should be an expert on the subject, but what he saw in his peers was a different direction entirely. A lot of his peers were reading Piper and Spurgeon and getting excited about reformed theology. From the first chapter:

"Maybe that was just our little clique in Campus Crusade for Christ at Northwestern University. Or was it? I started thinking about leading seminaries in the United States and noticed a number of Calvinists in leadership positions. I considered millions of books sold by Piper and his yearly appearances at the popular Passion conference. Yale University Press had just released a major biography of Jonathan Edwards. Reformed theology had recently become a major point of contention in the nation's largest Protestant body, the Southern Baptist Convention. Maybe it wasn't just our group.

So I embarked on a nearly two-year journey to discover whether my experiences had been unique or a sign of something bigger. In locales as diverse as Birmingham, Alabama, and New Haven, Connecticut, I sought to find out what makes today's young evangelicals tick. The result should help us learn what tomorrow's church might look like when they become pastors or professors. Even today, common threads in their diverse testimonies will tell the story of God's work in this world. "

This book was incredibly interesting to me since, in a way, I have felt swept up into this "movement" or whatever you'd call it, but I've often felt like the only one, or at least one of a handful. It was encouraging to see that I was not the only one. Reading some of the stories of how others came to believe in the doctrines of grace after being in vehement opposition towards them, I often felt like I was reading about myself.

It was also very interesting to notice the diversity of the "new Calvinists". From the straight-laced types like Mohler to the brashness of Mark Driscoll to the charismatic energy of C.J. Mahaney, it definitely gave me a bigger view than before of today's reformed.

And even just the terms like "reformed" and what it means, what it doesn't mean, what it used to mean and what it means today.

It greatly encourages me not only that Calvinism is growing, but that there is a growing number of young folks out there who believe that theology matters greatly, whether you fall on the calvinist side or something else. The questions of who the Bible says God is and who we are, these are questions that our faith and our lives stand upon.

I'd definitely recommend this book to any of the reformed types, or if you know someone who is and you're curious as to what makes these folks tick.