The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is conspicuously silent on race

It came to be known as the body parts chapel.

In spring 2004, I was a junior at Moody Bible Institute, the Bible college in Chicago founded in 1886 by famed evangelist D. L. Moody. When I was there, the college’s culture was steeped in the “New Calvinism,” a fundamentalist expression of Reformed theology as popularized by, among others, John Piper, Wayne Grudem, and a controversial young pastor from Seattle named Mark Driscoll.

At Moody, students were subject to social shaming if they questioned New Calvinist tenets such as five-point Calvinism (the rejection of theologies inspired by 16th-century Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius) and complementarianism (the assignment of distinct gender roles, with an emphasis on male headship of the nuclear family). I therefore found it both surprising and exciting when the school scheduled a chapel ser­vice in which Jill and Stuart Briscoe, an egalitarian couple who led a teaching ministry called Telling the Truth, would debate Reformed pastor Tim Bayly and author Barbara Hughes, both outspoken complementarians.