Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

Today's podcast is the first of a two-part episode on challenges facing the Protestant Church. We begin with

three brief talks by Jared Wilson, Gavin Ortland, and Brad Edwards. Next week's episode is a panel

discussion with the three speakers moderated by Brett McCracken. Welcome, everyone. I'm glad you're here. Hope you're enjoying the conference so far. My name is Brett McCracken. I'm a senior editor at the Gospel Coalition. You're here for Foundations of Faith navigating today's challenges. First of all, I want to mention that this is hosted by Zondervin Reflective. So thank you Zondervin Reflective for hosting

this wonderful evening. We are going to talk to three authors of Zondervin Reflective books tonight,

which is exciting. We're going to look at challenges facing Protestantism, the Protestant church.

How do we navigate that, kind of different angles to big challenges, new challenges

that are facing the church, old challenges that are maybe newly aggravated by cultural issues

going on. Personally, I've been thinking a lot about technology as like a big category of new

challenges facing the church. Of course, there's also opportunities

that come with technology. We were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Gospel Coalition

today. I was thinking, like, this wouldn't exist. We would literally not be here, were it not

for the way the internet, and that technology brought

people together, kind of like-minded people who were able to form this coalition. And so we have

this new technology to think for that opportunity, but at the same time, we all know technology

poses massive challenges. And just as easily as technology can bring people together, form a coalition, we know that

coalitions everywhere are dissolving and there's fragmentation and online tribalism and all manner

of division that the internet and social media is fostering.

Some of us might be talking about that a little bit.

I know Jared, you talk about

that kind of in your book. So there are big challenges we're facing, and I could go on and on,

and it's sobering to think about all that the church in the 21st century is facing. But thanks be to

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