Protestia is perhaps the largest discernment ministry in the world, in terms of web traffic and mission. This places them roughly 4.8x the size of Evangelical Dark Web. This still pales in comparison to nefarious ministries like The Gospel Coalition and the liberal “Christian” media out there like Russell Moore’s Christianity Today. David Morrill the de facto publisher of Protestia joins Evangelical Dark Web for an interview discussing the behind the scenes of discernment ministries as well as how he applies discernment to worship music.
As mentioned, discernment ministries are tiny in comparison to well funded Big Eva institutions; however, their reach and influence outstretches the metrics. A remarkable facet about this is the cooperation. Conventional wisdom would suggest that all of these outlets would be competing to be the leading alternative voice, a mantle in the blogosphere held by Protestia. Yet most of the major players are highly cooperative with their direct competitors. I’ve always used competitors as a term of endearment. David Morrill adds that there are only 24 hours in a day, so one person or team can’t do all of the research and reporting. Protestia and others, like Christian Research Network, also do a lot of curating of other ministries’ posts because they like the reporting and have a theological alignment. Discernment ministries, the good ones, understand it’s about the information and glorifying God, not the personalities.
Update on JD Hall
2022 was a dynamic year for Protestia. It’s founder JD Hall was ousted from his church and subsequently Protestia. This was perhaps the saddest report I’ve had to write. David Morrill, once a volunteer for Pulpit and Pen, helmed the remote online ministry as it split from Hall’s church to become a registered LLC in Colorado where Morrill lives.
There are conflicting reports on whether JD Hall is accepting church discipline or not. Without getting too much into details, Morrill said that there are enough “red flags” to not accept this assertion at face value and therefore believes it wise to wait for more information to come out.
On Discerning Worship Music
David Morrill is a musician as one of his other hats. And he has a lot to say about Contemporary Christian Music or CCM. As of late, Morrill has written a few systematic reviews of contemporary worship songs. He has developed an innovative rubric to this end. When Evangelical Dark Web writes verdicts on prominent teachers, we have as objective a standard or metric as we can possibly have. So it’s interesting to see this applied to Christian music as well.
The livestream concludes with a meme review.
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