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Phil Johnson blames MacArthur

Phil Johnson Blames John MacArthur For ShepCon Going Woke

The announcement of a woke lineup at Shepherd’s Conference in 2026, including John Piper, Al Mohler, Ligon Duncan, and Mark Dever has received a lot of backlash, especially in light of Phil Johnson and many of MacArthur’s disciples attacking the Clear Truth Conference for having Mark Driscoll. Phil Johnson has responded to the backlash by posting an audio clip where this came up during The Master’s Fellowship regional meeting in Denver.

I like all of those guys. Al Mohler is the most interesting conversationalist I’ve ever shared a meal with. And I like him. I don’t agree with him on everything, obviously. And that’s true of the other guys as well. Ligon Duncan is the most gracious and friendly. I mean, you can’t not love him if you know him. And Mark Dever has probably done more to disciple young guys than anybody else. And again, I don’t agree with all of his ideas, and I’m sorry he blended wokeness into what he was training as young men, I think that was a huge mistake. So I have disagreements with all those guys, but I love them.

People should know that the choice of having those men come back to this year’s Shepherds Conference was actually John MacArthur’s. It’s not like- you see in social media people saying, “well John died and now they’re bringing back all these guys that didn’t agree with John on things. So what are the elders thinking?”

It wasn’t like that at all. It was John. mean he brought back Piper last year. And Piper gave what I thought was the best eulogy on John MacArthur at his memorial service. So these guys are capable of delivering solid biblical stuff. That’s what they’ll do at the Shepherds Conference. They’re not gonna come in and peddle social justice or any of that. I’m not fearful of that, and I’m not opposed to having them.

Phil Johnson claims that the four men are friends and demeans the significance of their wokeness after acknowledging that all four, to varying degrees, went woke. MacArthur was willing to disinvite Alistair Begg over his wicked counsel to a grandmother, but it is true that MacArthur never disinvited someone for peddling Critical Race Theory.

However, with MacArthur now deceased, he is a convenient excuse for Phil Johnson.

They’re men who for years worked alongside John and agreed with him on many things. And this is their opportunity to express their agreements with John, and I think they’ll do that. None of them are going to… When the suggestion was made in an elders meeting, let’s bring these guys back and let them do a panel discussion where they talk about their memories of John MacArthur.

Some of them had done this, they had done this in some context with R.C. Sproul, where these men who had worked closely alongside him were giving their memories of Sproul, and it was a great hour of really edifying reminiscences about how effective Sproul was and why he was effective. They wanted to do that for John, you know, so let’s get the guys who he labored most closely with, who were his best friends, and these are those guys. The one exception would be Sproul, he’s already dead, so he can’t be part of the panel.

So they said, what if we do this? And in an elders meeting, they looked across at me and said…Phil, what do you think of this? And I said, I’m all in favor of it if you let me be the moderator of the discussion. And of course, everybody just laughed at that, like, that’s a bad idea. So I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I’m not discouraged by it. I think it’s a nice move. It shows that we can disagree with people without totally severing our fellowship with them.

Big names like Piper and Mohler are not being invited to a pastor’s conference to merely be on a panel. That’s not how these conferences work.

At the end of the day, Shepherd’s Conference is, and for a long time has been, a Big Eva conference, and without MacArthur, what’s going to draw pastors to attend? Thus, the people behind it invited the four woke headliners. Piper, Mohler, Dever, and Duncan can put butts in seats. ShepCon would alienate people with Doug Wilson. Otherwise, they need someone like Voddie Baucham who has also passed.

There aren’t that many big names in Reformed Evangelicalism and even fewer who aren’t or haven’t gone woke. Part of the reason for this is that there were no consequences for pastors who went woke. The aforementioned Alistair Begg is the only one to face any consequences.

The lack of accountability for wokeness is something that should bother Christians everywhere, even in MacArthur World.

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3 Responses

  1. Unreal. It’s not surprising. They’re all buddy buddy with each other and won’t dare hold each other accountable. GTY loses all credibility with this.

  2. Shepherd’s Conferece, or celebrity clergy conference, is part of celebrity culture. Specifically it celebrates those operatives who are deemed to be able to replace the Holy Spirit in the work of building the church by attracting audiences to megachurches. It grew out of the Evangelical culture created by the Second Great Awakening and its revival manipulation techniques.

  3. John Piper, Al Mohler, Ligon Duncan, and Mark Dever are the top Calvinists really. Calcibism is a woke odeology based on the same starting principle as LGBTQP+, “born that way, can’t do any better.” Both deny freewill and the ability o have any self-control. Both deny that race effecta behavior acting like its predestination instead. Yeah LGBTQP+ essentially has predestination too, some are predestined to be gay (elect) and some straight (reprobate). They are two versions of the same ideology.

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