Breaking up is hard to do? Notable absences at next year’s Together for the Gospel

NASHVILLE (TN)
Baptist News Global

Sept. 6, 2019

By Bob Allen

A lineup of speakers for the 2020 Together for the Gospel conference announced Sept. 3 excludes a number of familiar faces from past gatherings, suggesting possible rifts in the Neo-Calvinist preaching club sometimes called the young, restless and Reformed.

The conference, scheduled April 14-16 in Louisville, Kentucky, has been held every other year since 2006. According to the T4G website, it attracts pastors and church leaders from more than 25 denominations in all 50 states as well as 62 foreign nations.

It all began as a friendship between four pastors with differing opinions on matters such as baptism and charismatic gifts but in agreement that the gospel was being “misrepresented, misunderstood and marginalized” in many churches advertising themselves as Christian.

Photo of notable absences at the 2020 Together for the Gospel confab posted on Twitter by blogger Todd Wilhelm, former member of a 9Marks church and longtime critic of T4G co-founder C.J. Mahaney.

Next year’s roster does include mainstays like author John Piper; T4G co-founders Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan and Albert Mohler, and David Platt, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board.

But conspicuously missing are past speakers such as Thabiti Anyabwile, Matt Chandler and John MacArthur, all names that recently appeared in media coverage of controversies regarding sexual abuse, the Social Gospel and a social science concept known as Critical Race Theory.

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