Consider what’s changed in the last 20 years. Consider how you’ve changed in the last 20 years. And consider what never changes—the good news about Jesus Christ.
The 20th anniversary year for The Gospel Coalition has been about reaffirming our foundations. Looking back to our cofounder Don Carson, we welcomed six inaugural fellows and two senior fellows at The Carson Center for Theological Renewal. Looking ahead, we anticipate how their collaboration will help us plumb the depths of God’s Word in cohorts, courses, commentaries, and beyond.
As TGC celebrated what motivated our founders 20 years ago, the winning entry from our song and video contest uses stop-motion for a fresh take on the timeless basics: God, Sin, Jesus, Belief.
Gospel people are singing people, in good times and bad, as we hear from seven gifted artists in our new anniversary EP, The Gospel Is. You’ll hear this consistent message of hope even in hardship from new TGC president Mark Vroegop, longtime pastor and author of the best-selling book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy. As he often reminds our staff, TGC has always sought to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel. We never try to replace the church. We try to support the church, as you’ll see in this annual list of TGC’s best essays, interviews, conference talks, and podcasts.
Stay tuned for additional exciting projects in 2026, starting with the Making Sense of Us small-group curriculum, now available for preorder. It’s designed for evangelism and discipleship among young adults, featuring teaching from various sites around New York City by fellows of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics:
Thank you for reading, listening, watching, and sharing in 2025. With God’s blessing, and if Jesus tarries, we’ll be supporting the church for another 20 years. Your generosity makes reaffirming our foundations, every podcast, every new book possible. Thank you for considering a year-end gift as we tell the same old gospel story in newly engaging ways.
No Chance of Survival: How a Deadly Plane Crash Yielded a Growing Spiritual Harvest
By Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
You may never hear a more dramatic near-death experience, direct from the source. Or be more encouraged by how God can still work great good from unthinkable tragedy.
Can You Have Too Much Therapy?
By Paula Rinehart
Among some Christians, the pendulum has swung from stigmatizing therapy to stigmatizing friends who don’t stay in therapy. Rinehart gives two reasons you can stop going to therapy and explains why “trauma” has become overused.
Advice for Apologetics
Interview by Ligon Duncan, Collin Hansen, and Matt Smethurst with Wes Huff
I can see why Wes Huff could hang with Joe Rogan for more than three hours. We didn’t even talk for 90 minutes on The Everyday Pastor podcast and Huff never slowed, even as Matt Smethurst hit him with rapid-fire questions about the most difficult topics in apologetics.
Find Joy in the Dish Room
By Garrett Fish
This year, TGC increased the number of Gen Z writers we published, even beyond the winner of our 2025 essay contest for young adults. Be encouraged by how God is moving in this generation as he demonstrates the gospel’s power even in the mundane duties of life.
Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age
Edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa
It’s a good sign this timely book has found an enthusiastic audience. Your Sunday school or small group could benefit by learning more from Neil Postman on the 40th anniversary of his seminal book’s publication and seeing how various Christians today apply his analysis of television to the internet. The chapter by Read Mercer Schuchardt still comes to my mind often.
Have We Ever Been Woke?
Review by Andrew Wilson
We have enough distance from 2020 to look back on some of what made that year so difficult and historic. Wilson, one of the best reviewers, looked at two books together: Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse and Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi delivered one of my most memorable reads in 2025.
Can You Rely on AI for Theology?
By Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
Michael Graham’s AI Christian Benchmark delivered some of the biggest news of 2025 by revealing how Meta and X have aligned theological answers against orthodoxy. While good prompts can deliver better results from generative AI, how many users will know they need to lead with their confessional presuppositions? As Zylstra explores in this long-form podcast, we need to train AI on more reliable datasets.
Flawed Youth Ministry Wasn’t the End of My Faith
By Alen Andrews
Not many of us stay in the same church, or even the same denomination, where we grew up. Sometimes that move is a sign of maturity, and it’s tempting as we come of age to resent authorities from our youth. Andrews offers a mature alternative, where we appreciate what we can while growing in discernment.
Covetousness: The Sin Behind the Sin
Interview by Melissa Kruger and Courtney Doctor with Jackie Hill Perry
It’s a sign of spiritual health when your season’s most popular podcast episode covers sin. Doctor and Kruger have a gift for applying the Word to everyday life. Perry joined them on The Deep Dish podcast for a reunion of some of the Let’s Talk hosts.
The Pastor and the Pundit
By Trevin Wax
Pundits don’t usually make for good pastors, and preachers don’t usually make for good politicians. Both groups thrive when they pursue their own calling without veering into the other one. As Wax observes, pastors strengthen their biblical authority and mandate when they realize their congregations don’t need to know what they think on every issue.
AI’s Usefulness and Its Dangers for Preachers
By Clayton Chancey
AI could change a lot—or it could change almost everything. Just two years ago, I wasn’t worried about AI when teaching seminary classes. Now it’s a syllabus conversation about why preachers shouldn’t let AI generate their sermons. Chancey’s extensive guide helps preachers see why the process matters as much, if not more, than the outcome.
When Kierkegaard Goes to an Oasis Concert
By James Eglinton
Only Eglinton could listen from his Edinburgh home as reunited Oasis plays an outdoor concert, and connect this nostalgia to Kierkegaard’s three stages of aesthetic, ethical, and religious life. “From Noel Gallagher to Greta Thunberg, from vibe shift to vibe shift,” Eglinton writes, Jesus shows us a “new way to live in a world shot through with despair.”
Secular Eschatologies Need to Grapple with Sin
Review by Chris Watkin
The November 2025 elections revealed affordability as a top public concern, especially for younger generations. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance helped drive that conversation and set a potential agenda for the left. As Watkin observes, however, their secular eschatology lacks a doctrine of sin, which makes sense of our world that inevitably disappoints.
John Piper Asked ChatGPT to Write a Prayer
By John Piper
The room at TGC’s 2025 National Conference had no idea where Piper was going when he concluded by saying he wrote a prayer in Don Carson’s voice with the help of ChatGPT. Of course, the prayer was perfectly good, even moving. “Computers do words better than you!” Piper said. But can AI-powered probabilities praise God? No. Because as Jonathan Edwards (and Piper) has reminded us from Scripture, true religion consists in holy affections.
Why Being Late to Church Matters
By Joe Carter
Do you notice it’s often the visitors to your church who arrive early and on time? Church, we can do better. We don’t show up just looking for what we can get out of a service. As Carter explains, corporate worship is something we do together as the body of Christ.
Why Everything Never Feels Like Enough
Interview by Collin Hansen with Bobby Jamieson
Jamieson wrote one of my favorite books of 2025, and he gives just as good an interview. All Scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching. But somehow the ancient book of Ecclesiastes feels especially timely today. Jamieson brings contemporary writers into conversation with Qohelet about the contentment of limits, the joys of resonance, and happiness you can’t lose.
A Theological Vision for Discipling the Next Generation
By Bob Thune
Dorothy Sayers’s 1948 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” can help you plan an education curriculum for your church, as Thune explains in this article derived from his teaching for a TGC cohort. May this vision inspire other churches to develop their discipleship from cradle to graduation and set up their youth for lifelong endurance in the faith.
The Gospel According to Mephibosheth
By Justin Dillehay
He’s easily overlooked, but Mephibosheth gives us one of the more beautiful stories in the whole Bible. He “was simply an unworthy and unfortunate sinner now reaping the blessings of a covenant love he had nothing to do with,” writes Dillehay, who has a gift for writing clear and compelling prose for theology and exegesis. We’re not worthy of God’s love. We didn’t go looking for him. But the King welcomed us into his household!
What Herman Bavinck Taught Me About Modern Medicine
By Joel Cho
Not every day does a 30-year physician apply the doctrine of God from Bavinck’s Wonderful Works of God in how he treats patients. “Dealing with arrogance and cynicism, repeated exposure to untimely deaths, the pressure to produce profit, and even the threat of liability disillusioned many health-care workers,” says Cho, as he explains how theology brings hope and trust in God’s sovereignty.
‘Third Way’ Is Far Deeper Than Politics. It’s About Mythology.
By Glen Scrivener
You won’t read a better overview of this cultural moment at a crossroads. Some may think the third way is dead, but neither post-woke reaction nor post-Christian progressivism can lead Western civilization through our “painful future,” Scrivener explains. “When the storm hits, the foundations are revealed and many, on left and right, are recognizing the sinking sand beneath.” Praise God that he showed us the way to build on the solid rock, Jesus Christ.
The Gospel Coalition