Home Christian News Mark Dever and Ligon Duncan Announce 2022 Will Be Final T4G Conference

Mark Dever and Ligon Duncan Announce 2022 Will Be Final T4G Conference

T4G Together for the Gospel

Together for the Gospel (T4G) cofounders Mark Dever and Ligon Duncan announced last week that the April 2022 event will be the conference’s final gathering. In 2018, T4G had over 12,500 attend the conference in Lexington, Kentucky. In 2020, the conference was forced to go virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The conference started in 2006, after friends C.J. MahaneyAlbert MohlerLigon Duncan, and Mark Dever decided to host an event to encourage fellow pastors.

C.J Mahaney Controversy

In 2018, Mahaney stepped away from T4G amid accusations that Sovereign Grace Ministries, which he co-founded and oversaw, had covered up sexual abuse. Rachael Denhollander called it “one of the worst, if not the worst, instances of evangelical cover-up of sexual abuse.”

RELATED: Controversy Cited in C.J. Mahaney T4G Withdrawal

Al Mohler, close friend of Mahaney, told the Houston Chronicle in 2019 that he had “erred in being part of a statement supportive of (Mahaney) and rather dismissive of the charges. And I regret that action, which I think was taken without due regard to the claims made by the victims and survivors at the time, and frankly without an adequate knowledge on my part, for which I’m responsible.”

Mohler said he should have denounced Mahaney and insisted on a credible independent third-party investigation into the alleged abuse.

Al Mohler’s Absence Explained

Duncan and Dever also announced that this would be the first time that Mohler would not being speaking at T4G, due to other stewardships to which he is committed. As the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Mohler is concentrating on the needs of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), as the denomination is currently facing multiple issues, including being sued for covering up sexual abuse.

RELATED: Mohler Warns Dave Chappelle Controversy Is ‘A Religious Liberty Matter’

How T4G is Different From Other Conferences

Explaining the purpose behind T4G, Duncan said, “Our goal was to encourage pastors and praise the Lord. We did not want to become a ministry. We did not to become and organization.”

T4G purposely aimed its vision “very narrowly,” as Dever put it, in order to encourage just pastors. To their surprise, they had over 2000 people attend the first conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

One of the reasons the conference only took place every two years was to not interfere with pastors’ busy schedules, and to not intrude on other pastor conferences that take place every year. “We weren’t out to compete, nor replace other conferences,” Duncan shared.

What set T4G apart from other conferences was that it seemed to bring people together who otherwise wouldn’t be at other conferences together, they both explained.

“In evangelicalism in the 20th century, there had been the view that the only way we can get everybody together is to minimize the theology, dumb the theology down [and] really focus on mission,” Duncan said. “We set out to prove that wrong by ramping up the theology and celebrate our common affirmation of a robust theological presentation of the gospel.”