Is Creating Alternatives To The Gospel Coalition Even Possible?

As the founder of a discernment ministry, I have become greatly familiar with organizations like The Gospel Coalition and their pernicious influence on the church. I am also keenly aware of their size as one of the largest faith-based ministries on the internet. There have been multiple concerted efforts to create competing ministries with them, but alas I did not start a direct competitor to The Gospel Coalition, and my reasoning is that it would not be the best use of my time or talents. I do not think The Gospel Coalition can be taken down by a direct competitor, but Christians are free to disagree, and I want to encourage them on how to do just that.

Clear Truth Media has emerged as the latest attempt to supplant The Gospel Coalition with overtly Christian content, and they have some excellent personnel involved. Their recent article, “Why It’s Time To Say Goodbye To The Gospel Coalition” attempts to wrest the mandate of heaven away from TGC’s hegemony in this niche. If anything, they undersell the case for why it’s untenable for Christians to support The Gospel Coalition.

Jamie Bambrick writes:

To be perfectly honest with you, this is not an article I have much desire to write. And that’s not just because I don’t want to immediately start a turf-war or because I’m averse to launching this site with something quite so negative, but rather because, like many others around my age, The Gospel Coalition (TGC) was integral to my spiritual and theological development. It corrected numerous imbalances, deepened both my understanding of and my hunger for God’s word, and introduced me to numerous thinkers both current and historical who have transformed my faith. Despite this piece’s title, I actually like the organization.

However the fact remains that one of the big reasons why we are embarking on this little adventure called ‘Clear Truth’ is that we are convinced that TGC is no longer fit for purpose.

Perhaps, The Gospel Coalition was helpful for him in the past, but I would contend it was doomed from the start. Tim Keller was always a theological liberal who pushed theistic evolution. He was not a pastor who “went woke.” He always was. Don “DA” Carson is a famous apologist. While I am unclear what his specialty was, Carson was one of the most significant figures in undermining biblical sexuality whereby he worked to advance the view that homosexual desires and identity are not sin and compatible with the Christian faith. He endorsed Greg Coles and Mark Yarhouse, and there most likely isn’t a Revoice Conference without Keller and Carson, The Gospel Coalition cofounders.

As Bambrick and company set out to compete using their core competency of being able to organize Christian talent, they lack the ingredients as of now to become a Big Eva size entity. The Gospel Coalition was founded with celebrities. With the democratization of media and influence, the golden age of celebrity pastors is on its way out. This is not to say that there will be no celebrity pastors, only that they won’t have the widespread name recognition as a Billy Graham. Meanwhile, Doug Wilson’s blog and MacArthur’s Grace To You already exist and are not near TGC’s size. So even the largest celebrities we can muster would not bring enough support to surpass TGC.

The Gospel Coalition has two key assets that make it a force of satan.

The most important asset of The Gospel Coalition is its email list. This is not a ministry that excels on social media presence. Rather they get ratio’d often enough by people like us. Likewise, in my vast research, I would not say that TGC is phenomenal in search engine optimization. Some categories yes, but in general their latest articles are not all that Google-friendly for those of us who do research. Rather, TGC relies on a massive email list for traffic. If they have, for instance, 200k emails and 10000 clicks a day from them (extremely low) they would still crush it on traffic compared to their various competitors.

The second is high-rolling legacy donors. The Gospel Coalition receives massive amounts in grants from various family foundations that fund a variety of prominent ministries. If these people do not know what they are funding by now, where would they yet be struck? I do believe that a competitor can stumble across high status donors, but the hope of peeling away donors for an upstart is unlikely.

The juxtaposition between these upstarts and The Gospel Coalition is necessary marketing; however, one can easily argue that TGC was never good, so setting out to replace them is far too low an ambition. Rather, these ministries should be what TGC never was and more.