Together No More: T4G's Last Word

Previously Unpublished Considerations on Evangelicalism and the Negative World

Sixteen years after its inception, the largest evangelical Calvinist pastor’s conference and SXSW of the Young, Restless and Reformed movement (hereafter YRR), is calling it quits. Together for the Gospel convened for a final session April 12-14 in Louisville, Kentucky. 

As founders Mark Dever and Ligon Duncan made clear, it was not for lack of participation. The nearly eleven thousand participants crowded all the restaurants for blocks around the Louisville International Convention Center. The conservatively dressed, male-heavy crowd were also identifiable by their t-shirts with New Testament Greek phrases or other Calvinistic slogans and second-commandment-approved images on them (the YRR version of a sports jersey). Most of the preachers donned coats, if not uniformly sporting ties, the preferred liturgical garb of Southern Baptists and Presbyterians. 

Officially a pastor’s conference, the average age of the attendee was probably 26 years old, too young for a senior pastor, but old enough to have grown up under the exponential growth of Calvinistic publishing and preaching over the last two decades. 

Although similar in appearance to other Evangelical conferences, a closer examination revealed the fingerprints of a lower overhead, less interest in wowing attendees, and more on the simple knowledge of Biblical truth. There was no schedule or bio of speakers distributed to tease attendees or allow them to plan their day around catching The Big Name headliners, and only a singular pianist accompanied  the passionately sung hymns.  Lacking typical conference entertainment or side shows, as well as any visuals to accompany the sermons, T4G’s bare bones approach would have made Oliver Cromwell and Richard Sibbes proud. 

Yet not unlike Cromwell’s reign, political and cultural clouds gathered over T4G, and it was announced a few months prior to the conference that April 19th to 21st would be its final run, precipitously titled, “Last Word.”

Although a comprehensive accounting of T4G’s influence awaits future evangelical historians, some observations can be made. Here are five things I observed at Together For the Gospel:

1. The Founders cared deeply about preaching the Gospel

The four founders, Al Mohler, CJ Mahaney, Mark Dever and Ligon Duncan, of which only the latter two remained this time around, created a conference by preachers, for preachers, on preaching. It was abundantly clear that most of the conference headliners were most comfortable behind the pulpit. John Piper entranced in his exhortation to holiness, Sinclair Ferguson authoritatively promised and assured, and Duncan even began to weep as he declared the covenant promises made to David. The attendees cheered and clapped as Shai Linne, a church planter and rap artist, began loudly reciting the attributes of Jesus. Many of the sermons were topical, which likely made several of the preachers uncomfortable, having spent their lives enumerating the benefits of expositional preaching. 

In the panels between sermons and hymn singing, much of the advice was on the importance of educated preparation for sermons, leading the church’s elders, as well as the importance of a teachable spirit. 

Yet the younger preachers were neither as celebrated nor as charismatic as the founding generation. It is primarily the preachers from the “Boomer” generation who have built successful ministries around their preaching capacities. Many of the Gen X men in the room were fine, but lacked the national ministries and organizations that the T4G founders did in 2006. Greg Gilbert is a popular author in certain circles, and H.B. Charles has written several books promoted on the “Big Eva” circuit, but neither of those men, nor Bobby Scott, also featured in Louisville, carried the weight, national influence, or significance of the Boomer generation and the New Calvinist movement. 

Inadvertently, the success of the recently deceased R.C. Sproul at Ligonier, John Piper at Desiring God, Mark Dever at IX Marks, Al Mohler at Southern Seminary or Ligon Duncan at Reformed Theological Seminary seems to have sucked the air out of the room for many of the younger pastors. Notably, while the founders were happy that T4G was closing and expressed no regret over the matter, Greg Gilbert admitted concern, acknowledging the twilight of the national Evangelical coalition built around soteriology and TULIP, suggesting that, at best, local conferences and gatherings would replace it. 

So to gain national prominence, it would appear that ambitious young pastors and theologians can no longer just preach the gospel, but have to find some niche that has not been filled by another Evangelical institution in order to gain media exposure or widespread recognition. As Joe Rigney commented during a more intimate panel discussion, the second generation of Evangelical Calvinists are highly susceptible to envy. Success is a fickle thing.  

2. T4G undoubtedly fortified Evangelicals against the cultural winds of the early 21st century

One of the great success stories of T4G is the academic professor and pastor, Kevin DeYoung. In 2006, as a young RCA pastor he was an attendee who had recently co-authored a book with the colorful Ted Kluck, Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be. This year, DeYoung delivered the opening sermon at the final T4G on justification and penal substitutionary atonement. He powerfully critiqued Critical Race Theory’s emphasis on guilt and complicity without atonement. But T4G’s wider success was undoubtedly in the former of the two issues tackled by DeYoung. Against the Evangelical movement’s early 2000’s emphasis on an emergent Christianity that was particularly sensitive to non-Christian concerns and wary of doctrine, T4G waged war on a de-emphasis of the Reformation within the PCA, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Sovereign Grace Ministries, as well as Bible and non-denominational churches. 

From its inception T4G gave out large numbers of free books for pastoral ministry, distributed discounted works from the Puritans and 19th century English and American Protestants like C.H. Spurgeon and J.C. Ryle. Particularly through Mark Dever’s 9 Marks of a Healthy Church ecclesiology became one of the core issues for young Calvinists. Church membership and discipline, Reformed hymnody, and preaching through books of the Bible instead of topically were, if not novel concepts, then at least neglected in much of Evangelicalism prior to T4G. 

3. The culture of T4G was a culture of celebrity pastors

This point might offend some T4G attendees more than it should. Institutions adopt the personalities of their founders, especially church-related institutions, and T4G was no different. The YRR movement was built on the ministries of several pastors: James Montgomery Boice, R.C. Sproul, John Piper, John MacArthur, and others. While negatively encapsulated and most well known recently from Christianity Today’s Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. It has been in the genes of American Evangelicalism going back to CT’s first editor and founder Carl F. H. Henry in the 1940s, if not earlier. 

Carl Trueman pointed out this trend at the 2012 T4G when he noted that “it’s disturbing the same dozen names turn up at every conference. Preaching the gospel is not rocket science, if it was, Paul would have said so.” The grumpy English Presbyterian has only appeared in print since, and through 2018, it seemed that the only name change of the “dozen” was CJ Mahaney. 

More than one speaker joked about how Dever only told them shortly beforehand who would preach next, a forewarning the spectators lacked until the elected pastor emerged upon the stage. Whenever sessions began, the bookstore closed, so that there was no overlap of activities to keep participants from the main event, regardless of the speaker. 

Despite a clear sermon on the necessity and bounds of good authority by Dever, he and Duncan seemed uncomfortable with their popularity and influence over T4G, and made a clear effort to diversify their preaching list with a record number of new and younger preachers; an endeavor eased by the recent departures of T4G regulars Mohler, MacArthur, Thabiti, Mahaney, and Chandler. Likely aware of this backdrop, both repeatedly echoed the word “friendship” to describe the theme and tenor of the conference over its nine iterations down to the present. 

To this, two objections should be lodged. First, do friends need to pay hundreds of dollars per ticket to hear each other preach, as well as buying food, and bringing their whole church staff to sit in chairs for three days? Most of the attendees were not friends of the conference celebrities, but significantly younger disciples. T4G cashed in on their cult of celebrity to turn out over 11,000 adoring fans who were raised on that celebrity preaching, teaching, books, and blogs. There is nothing immoral or suspect about older men teaching younger, but the unwillingness to acknowledge the clear hierarchy in the room seemed strange, at the very least. 

Secondly, while friendship and the gospel inspired the conference, those objects did not perpetuate it. When I asked Ligon Duncan at the Gospel Coalition in 2019 why he associated so closely with Southern Baptists instead of other Reformation traditions like Lutherans or Anglicans, he attributed it largely to the historic revivalist culture of the South and the natural alliance at the time. This explains T4G even more. The 18 Affirmations and Denials of T4G are something that almost any Anglican or Lutheran could support, yet virtually none do. If T4G was to build a wide coalition of churches around the gospel, it would seem plausible to invite the 1.5 million member Lutheran Church Missouri Synod or the ecumenical 1,000+ church Anglican Church in North America as well. Even the Orthodox Presbyterians and Dutch URCNA were remarkably absent. Clearly the conference, as much of YRR, was undergirded by Calvinistic Baptists with a few Southern Presbyterian allies.

While the Gospel was the telos of the movement, T4G did not seem interested in corralling a diverse set of allies that would seek that same theological goal, but instead aimed to build a coalition of Southern Baptists and Baptist adjacent pastors. This may have built a culture of homogeneity for the gospel, but it was not necessarily a culture of setting aside longstanding ecclesiastical or cultural boundaries that actually separated denominations in the United States. Even the issue of race, which has fractured the SBC and T4G, is an issue that has been the touch point of Southern Evangelicalism and culture more broadly. More directly, T4G was a rallying cry for Calvinistic Evangelicals to stick together despite rather secondary theological differences. In the grand scheme of the church catholic, no one at T4G was really that different. 

4. T4G was a successful neutral world institution

Aaron Renn’s positive, neutral, and negative world categories is very helpful for thinking about the influence of T4G. Centered in a mid-sized city on the edge of the south and the midwest, T4G included in their otherwise vanilla statement of theological propositions of unity an anodyne article on the importance of racial reconciliation. That article has caused more consternation than the rest of them combined, because the statement seems intended as pastoral and evangelistic advice, not as a political statement.

The balancing act of counseling pastors while refraining from political proscription was exemplified in the books promoted by the conference: the Puritan spiritual works.

Distributed by several publishers, the Puritan titles from the 17^th-19^th centuries available were strangely devoid of the often heated political controversies the actual British and American Reformed found themselves in. Many of the Reformed and Puritan works on pastoral ministry were present, but never accompanied by their political and cultural theologies or sermons. This partial-recovery serves the double task of reinforcing the theological leanings of conservative Calvinistic pastors without providing them a political philosophy that would critique the status quo or give theological precedence to any political position as a more “Christian” one.

One cannot help but notice the T4G leaders’ reticence to engage politically on topics that would hurt their status in the secular world, a key hallmark of the neutral world Christianity. Al Mohler personally refused to sign MacArthur’s statement on social justice, and being pressed on it at Shepherd Con stumbled through how he would not have chosen that exact wording, and then became defensive having been publicly asked about it. During that same conference, he also admitted that T4G needed and would make clarifications to their statements on social justice before stepping down from the leadership without comment, promised changes and clarifications never arriving.

Dever’s ministries have also remained conspicuously conflict averse, with him and IX Marks podcast co-host and publisher Jonathan Leeman publicly opposing MacArthur’s civil disobedience and lawsuit in California (before having to pursue legal action months later to meet in person in the District), as well as declining to offer vaccine exemptions to members with jobs on the potentially on the line, and their concurrent decision to send their interns to Reformed Theological Seminary in Northern Virginia over Al Mohler’s Southern Seminary (just as Mohler was positioning himself to run in the Southern Baptist Convention as a conservative candidate for president).

Ligon Duncan has not only avoided such conflicts, he has actively laid his hand on the scales of theological and cultural debates in support of the secularly-backed campaigns against conservatives in his own denomination. Duncan has further supported Ibram X. Kendi’s assistant and Grove City’s CRT guest apologist Jemar Tisby, hosting a panel with him at T4G in 2016 and writing the forward for Eric Mason’s confusing Woke Church, published in 2018. 

While well intentioned, T4G’s demure engagement on social issues, particularly those that would put them out of step with the predominant culture, left T4G without much of its early audience. It was too engaged in social and political matters for MacArthur, and not engaged enough for former regular T4G preachers Matt Chandler and Thabiti Anyabwile. In between, Dever tried to remain neutral while inevitably taking the route of least resistance to government, Duncan has allied closely with authors in favor of reparations while DeYoung has furiously denounced the idea. As with most neutral world institutions featured by Renn, T4G has fragmented and found themselves far less relevant to the conflicts of the negative world.

5. It’s a good thing T4G is ending

The conference’s aim to equip pastors in the basics of ministry against the “emergent” church and other the particular challenges of the early 21st century was a complete success. It simultaneously built on and furthered the energy of the YRR movement. It held fast to inerrancy of Scripture and defended the church against a new generation of scholars and secular critics. Yet institutions maintain the DNA of their first conflict for the remainder of their existence, and that has hindered subsequent T4Gs. Its fundamental model for victory was always large public gatherings, worship services and distribution of literature. While deeply effective in its initial goals, its bi-yearly gatherings were not able to build a unified culture across Reformation denominations, and it ended up a largely homogenous conference of Puritan admirers with a weak political disposition.

Reflecting on Jonathan Haidt’s recent piece, Russell Moore is almost prophetic, “After a while, the distinction between seeking unity and evading risk is lost. That seems to relieve tension for the moment, but it doesn’t create unity.” Continuing on, he writes that, “for the kind of unity [Evangelicals] need, we must be unified in doing what’s right and pleasing in the sight of God. Sometimes that means a future that looks nothing like the one we planned—seeking unity with people we never thought about.”

“And this he spake not of himself: but being the high priest that year, he prophesied…” 

-John 11:51

In T4G’s success, it became an interest group without a vision for Evangelical unity. Whenever its limited unity met deep divides on issues of race, government, and culture, it dissipated, highlighting the absence of the URCNA, OPC, ARP and other Reformation denominations on two accounts. Firstly, all the Christian organizations with an historic confession and definitions of justice and social engagement that could substantively guide the conversation were lacking. And secondly, none of the Presbyterian men that may have carried concerns with the pro-women’s ordination stances of the men such as the Rev. Irwyn Ince, prominently endorsing Reformed Theological Seminary in their three minute promotional video before the entire audience, were present at T4G. By failing to include these more confessional and conservative voices, T4G limited critical wisdom from those who are most familiar with the Reformed social tradition. The very concerns that led Dever to bar Mark Driscoll from speaking at T4G (his church’s lack of accountability), were manifested in the many other controversies (justice, reconciliation, missions, sexual abuse) that Dever did not have the capacity to control by “friendship.”

Credit is due to Dever and Duncan for deciding to bring the highly successful conference to a close instead of continuing in perpetuity. Many organizations drift for generations with fading influence. Dever, Mohler, Mahaney, and Duncan are still in agreement over the issues that forged T4G in 2006, but those issues are no longer central to the conflicts of Evangelicalism. 

The conference closed with a few hymns, among them Joy to the World, which encapsulated the wider incongruency of the event: Together For the Gospel’s Last Word was orthodox to the jot and tittle, but its season was over.