[jcyrb]

Welcome to the forum, Kevin, I went through a very similar situation as you as I discovered the truths of the so-called rebellions in the late eighties. I am currently in my late twenties, and I am also in a similar situation as you as I am in a process of re-building my entire life from scratch. To your question, I think John Piper is very solid but I don’t know much about James White. John Piper belongs to the sector of Christianity known as reformed Christianity which has its lineage that includes John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards and others. One of my friends is part of the Presbyterian Church of America and I went to his church for about a year and then had to move away for work. In general I have very good impression of the reformed Christians, because they are very focused on study of the Bible and put much attention on living biblically. The downside to them is that many of them believe in cessationism which is the beliefs that spiritual gifts such as prophecy and speaking in tongue have ceased since the apostolic age, which I think is unbiblical. However, one of the good things about them is that they have clear rules and guidelines for everything in the church (sometimes to a fault because it can make their Sunday worship look robotic). That sounds very restrictive, but actually what that means is the church leadership acts with much accountability and therefore would prevent the gross abuse of power as we saw in the LC. Also, in their guidelines they even say you don’t have to agree with everything they say to remain a member in the church. They allow some freedom of discussion of scripture so even when I was there and the pastor knew I disagree with him on something, he still treated me just like anybody else. It is a very healthy system of checks and balance of church governance and I think you should check them out. It is a breath of fresh air compared to the soft dictatorship in LC. However, the reform church does not allow free-for-all prophesying in corporate worship and on Sunday it is the pastor preaching, but they have home gathering as well which affords members freedom to share their spiritual experience, so to me the good far outweighs the bad.

Aside from John Piper, other people in the reformed churches I would recommend are Paul Washer and R.C. Sproul. If you are looking to non-reformed but still solid preachers, I would recommend Leonard Ravenhill and Martyn Lloyd Jones. Both Ravenhill and Jones are deceased, but if you listen to their tape, both of them spoke with much anointing and conviction which I have rarely heard from any preacher. Also check out E.M Bounds books on prayer.