Christianity Today expects to finish 2026 $3 million in the red. The Roys Report obtained the internal numbers. President Nicole Martin says the cuts have stabilized the budget and that the magazine is positioned to continue its 70-year legacy. That is the company line of an organization that spent the last decade selling its readers for grant money and is now out of both.
Last month we reported that CT was already in free fall. Six editors-in-chief in less than seven years. Two rounds of cuts in 2025 that eliminated roughly twenty jobs. Then, in October 2026, another cut of about 20 percent of staff and 40 percent of the editorial team, with Erik Petrik, a creative producer with a Dallas Theological Seminary degree and no presence on X, installed as incoming editor-in-chief. The new reporting does not contradict any of that. It explains the bill.
According to internal documents, CT expects a $3 million deficit this year. Subscription, advertising, and product revenue is running $80,000 to $90,000 a month below benchmark. Nicole Martin and chief operating officer Tom Addington told staff this summer they had to cut annual spending from $18 million, when Martin became president in 2025, to $14 million next year. The “balanced” 2027 budget still needs nearly $1 million more in donations and $1 million more in other revenue to work. Half of that $14 million, $7 million, is still supposed to come from contributions, the stream staff were told the magazine was trying to get off.
An internal audit warns of a “zero day” that could come as soon as next year. The one piece of good news staff were offered is a $4 million payment from Gloo due in March 2027. Addington told staff the adjustment of the economic model will take about three years. People who worked on the funding do not think CT lasts that long.
“They’re spiraling,” one former vice president told the Roys Report, “and grasping at straws to stay afloat.”
Martin’s answer: “The painful yet necessary work of reductions has stabilized our budget. CT’s mission has not changed in 70 years, and we are now positioned financially and operationally to continue that legacy into the future.”
Bad Business Runs Dry
Timothy Dalrymple took over as president in 2019, when advertising brought in $3.2 million, subscriptions $2.4 million, and curriculum and tax manuals another $2.4 million. Contributions and grants were about $1.3 million, a bit more than 14 percent of the budget. By 2023, total revenue had grown from $9.7 million to $18.3 million, and almost all of that increase was donations. Contributions and grants were more than half of revenue. Advertising fell 12.5 percent over the same stretch. Paid circulation dropped through a rate hike from $39 to $59. CT lost about 5,500 subscribers during COVID, another 3,500 from 2021 to 2022, and a few thousand more the year after. A botched subscription-system switch then burned more than 500 subscribers a month for two years and took paid circulation from 66,000 to about 43,000.
Dalrymple wrote the board that healthy philanthropic collections were “entirely appropriate” and that CT’s survival, while other outlets died, was something to be grateful to God for. Megan Basham called it what it was in Shepherds for Sale: a leftist agenda purchased with grant money. Inside the building, staff told Silliman they never felt the mission change. What they felt was a pile of money going to “cool new stuff.” A Global Issue with a $1.2 million grant budget and no ads. Translation projects found readers and almost no subscribers. Singapore is the only country in Asia with more than 200 of them. Their podcasts cost more than they brought in. One series, “This Great & Complicated Place,” ran about $250 a download. “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” the feminist hit Petrik executive-produced, pulled millions of downloads and did not move the subscription numbers. One employee called the model “balancing a chair on one leg forever.” These podcast numbers further highlight the poor decision of Petrik as EIC.
The donors pledged $26.5 million over the last three years, on top of a campaign Dalrymple said brought in $32 million. CT has been living on about 500 major donors and about a dozen grants. A “Billy Graham legacy fund” was announced and then dropped for lack of interest. The people who funded the drift are done funding it. Dalrymple himself left in June 2025 to run the John Templeton Foundation. He told the Roys Report his analysis was “fundamentally correct” and that CT remains “a vital institution.” He also left before the bill came due. In early 2025 he and Martin found about $850,000 in “missing expenses.” Eight people were laid off that month. Fourteen more went in September. About a dozen more went ahead of the 70th anniversary party in Washington this September. The senior vice president of marketing was cut last month. So was the person who sold two-thirds of the ads. The director of advertising quit the week Silliman’s story ran. Circulation has not risen in more than a decade, and they fired the people who sell the magazine.
Moore Cuts
CT was already treating its readers as the problem on race, immigration, and politics before he got the editor’s chair in 2022. He made the fraud louder, and he made it expensive. He left the ERLC in 2021 for CT’s Public Theology Project, took the top job in 2022, and slid to editor-at-large in 2025 so he could podcast and write. The Roys Report now says he has told CT he is leaving after Thanksgiving. His show is one of the few that made money. His articles are among the most read. The face of the grift is walking out while the deficit is still open.
Moore was never there to save Evangelicalism’s flagship. He was there to use it. The ERLC stopped being a useful platform, so he moved to the magazine that would print him and pay him to scold the people who used to subscribe. When the subscribers left, and the donors cooled, he informed them he would be gone after Thanksgiving. Nicole Martin can talk about a legacy that has not changed in 70 years. Russell Moore is not expecting to be found in the wreckage.
A $200,000 app brought in about 100 subscriptions. The 2027 plan still counts on donations for half the budget while executives tell staff they are weaning off donations. They spent other people’s money on a magazine Evangelicals stopped reading, hired supervisors until fourteen people made six figures, lost the credit-card data that renewed the subscribers, and called the result a mission.
The conservatives who wanted to call it Christianity Astray in 1956 were early. They were not wrong. The readers left because the magazine lied about them to the people writing the checks. The checks are slowing down. Moore is leaving. The zero day is on the calendar. May it be so.
