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

Today's podcast is a panel discussion that was recorded at our 2025 National Conference,

reflecting on God's faithfulness to TGC in this our 20th anniversary year.

Panelists were TGC President Mark Vrogop, Nancy Guthrie, Juan Sanchez, Colin Hansen, and Liggin Duncan.

It needs to be the center out of which we think about everything. Even our name is a hint in that direction. It's the gospel coalition. 2025, the gospel coalition celebrates its 20-year anniversary.

But before there was a coalition, there was a conversation.

2002, New York City, Don Carson and Tim Keller met in a Manhattan sidewalk cafe.

That conversation would help catalyze a significant global gospel

movement in the decades to come. In the rapidly secularizing West, Keller and Carson saw the need

for an Orthodox Christian movement, a space where biblically faithful Christians could engage

the culture and not withdraw or assimilate.

If the gospel is merely assumed, while relatively peripheral issues ignite our passion,

we will train a new generation to downplay the gospel and focus zeal on the periphery.

It is easy to sound prophetic from the margins. What is urgently needed

is to be prophetic from the center. Before the gospel coalition was a conference or a website that

reached the world, it was a small relational network of pastors from various denominational backgrounds.

The original reason was strictly the relationship. We had no idea whether we were going to be able to come together

theologically, whether we could do anything more organizationally.

But the reason why we all came back, there was like almost no attrition,

was we said, these are people I want to be friends with.

It still is, I think, the beauty and the key of it.

2007, the Gospel Coalition launched a website and hosted its first national conference.

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