As a tender youth growing up in an evangelical Lutheran denomination, I watched the mainline Lutheran churches in their slide away from Biblical Christianity. This was not a new development. Indeed, my denomination’s birth was two years before my own, when the Lutheran Free Church merged with the liberal American Lutheran Church. Belief in the inerrancy of Scripture had been jettisoned. They were liberal, I was told. I’m sure I never understood the full meaning of that at the time. At first, I only saw the consequential effects: the ordination of women as pastors, to name a big one. Eventually, I came to recognize the absence of the Gospel among them. Later still, I saw that they did actually have some remnants of the gospel, but it was a gospel that no one needed. Of what use is the promise of salvation when no one is going to hell anyway? When people are sinners because of what they do (and then, only if it is sufficiently evil), who needs redemption?

This was the tail-end of the original liberal church movement, a movement that still lives but is dying a lingering death as it passionately embraces apostasy. I have just begun reading David Wells’s book The Courage to Be Protestant. He writes of a new liberal movement:

   The evangelical movement is now dividing into three rather distinct constituencies. Actually, it is dividing into many, many subconstituencies as well because this rather amazing empire of belief is fragmenting across the board. So my map with only three major constituencies portrays the land as it looks from afar, not up close. The important point here, though, is that two of these constituencies are new, and like large icebergs, they are separating from the others. They are, as I see it, transitional movements. They are the stepping stones away from the classical orthodoxy of the earlier evangelicals and, however unwittingly, toward a more liberalized Christianity. In due course the children of these evangelicals will become full-blown liberals, I suspect, just like those against whom the evangelical grandparents originally protested.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 2.