AUDIENCE:
Hello, Pastor. Pastor John, my name is Peter Montgomery. Share with us your opinion of the Gospel Coalition. And should we platform those who are in it, especially in light of scriptures such as 2 Corinthians 6:17, Galatians 5:9, and 2 John 10 and 11? That last one, Phil Johnson recently preached on very well down in Florida.
JOHN:
Yeah. So there are some major organizations that have been around for the last, at least, ten years. One was The Gospel Coalition. Started out with noble intent to bring different people together—leaders, pastors, theologians—around the gospel. It was very much like T4G, Together for the Gospel, that had that conference. We had as many as ten thousand people. I was a part of that every year at these huge conventions, and it was Together for the Gospel. But both of those organizations—well, T4G is basically nonexistent. They bought into the deceptiveness of the woke movement and the racial baiting that was going on a couple of years ago, and it literally put them out of existence.
I was thinking the other day how interesting it was that the last panel discussion that I was on at a T4G event was to honor R. C. Sproul, who had died, and I spoke at his funeral. This was, I think, 2017 or 2018. So the T4G guys wanted to honor him with a panel. And we spent an hour, an hour and fifteen minutes, and it was just beautiful tributes to R. C. from all of us who knew him so very, very well. And the strange irony was a year later they did the same thing for Martin Luther King, who was not a Christian at all, whose life was immoral. I’m not saying he didn’t do some social good. And I’ve always been glad that he was a pacifist, or he could have started a real revolution. But you don’t honor a nonbeliever who misrepresented everything about Christ and the gospel in an organization alongside honoring somebody like R. C. Sproul. This was a symptom of the impact of the woke movement that basically displaced that whole organization. That was really—it was over after that. And some of the effects of those men who were leaders there are still going on. And it had a negative effect on their leadership and, I think, even the role they play in evangelicalism today.
Well, The Gospel Coalition kind of followed the same pattern. And today, The Gospel Coalition is propagating just about anything and everything—good, bad, and indifferent. So no, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with The Gospel Coalition.
Once, a few years ago, we tried to be friends, warm up with them, and they said they would like to have a conference at Grace Church, and so we said, “Well, that would be great.” They said, “We’ve associated with some of the wrong people, some of the compromising people, and we’d like to identify with you.” And so we said, “Well, we’ll certainly consider that. Send us the program that you would like to have here.” And I remember they sent us a program of speakers that we would never ever, ever have here, dealing with issues of gender and all that kind of thing.
So these amorphous evangelical organizations without diligent, fastidious, vigilant leadership to keep them faithful to the truth of Scripture just wander off into everything, and they become, I guess in a sense, useless as an entity. There would be people in all of these that are still good people and honor the Lord, but the inability to discern what was really going on broke them into pieces. The Gospel Coalition is like Christianity Today—it’s Christianity astray. OK.
From: Bible Questions and Answers, Part 80
The Gospel Coalition CAVES To The LGBT Movement?!
What seems to be a trend toward “socializing” the gospel, tying it to secular progressive concerns, is something The Gospel Coalition should be wary of. Likewise, it’s a point on which believers ought to be cautious when reading or passing along The Gospel Coalition materials.
The need for caution is not especially unique. Christians are obligated to be cautiously skeptical (Acts 17:11), and that applies no more or less to groups such as The Gospel Coalition (1 John 4:1).
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