The Gospel Coalition is “woke,” and Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a Christian at all, according to John MacArthur.
The influential pastor of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles and host of the “Grace to You” broadcast told members of his congregation Feb. 25 King was “a nonbeliever who misrepresented everything about Christ and the gospel.”
Similar charges have been laid against MacArthur by progressive Christians and even some evangelical Christians because he teaches a narrow view of God that emphasizes wrath over grace. As a leading Calvinist pastor, he leans into the teaching that God’s sternness constitutes “grace.”
John MacArthur
While MacArthur’s diatribe against King might not surprise anyone who has followed his preaching and teaching, his disdain for The Gospel Coalition might surprise others. The Gospel Coalition, known commonly as TGC, is an extremely conservative group founded by the late Tim Keller, a conservative Presbyterian pastor in New York City.
TGC describes itself as “a fellowship of evangelical churches in the Reformed tradition deeply committed to renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures.”
The group’s website content represents some of the most conservative elements of modern evangelicalism, including opposition to same-sex marriage and advocacy for complementarianism — the view that men and women are created by God with different roles.
By any external measure, TGC is a conservative group. But not to the 84-year-old MacArthur, who is the grandfather of today’s fundamentalist movement among Calvinists.
While MacArthur considers TGC “woke,” that organization devotes much of its resources to denouncing what it considers “woke.”
MacArthur said TGC and another group, Together for the Gospel, both started with good intentions but moved away from their conservative moorings.
“They sent us a program of speakers that we would never, ever, ever have here, dealing with issues of gender and all that kind of thing.”
As an example, he said a few years ago TGC wanted to hold a conference at his church but when he saw the list of speakers they intended to invite, he found them to be “incompatible” with the church’s mission.
“They sent us a program of speakers that we would never, ever, ever have here, dealing with issues of gender and all that kind of thing,” he said.
A review of TGC’s website shows content about sexuality and gender but not in the way of affirming homosexuality or transgender identity. What MacArthur found objectionable is not clear.
TGC and Together for the Gospel became “amorphous evangelical organizations without diligent, fastidious, vigilant leadership to keep them faithful to the truth of Scripture” and instead “wander(ed) off into everything” and became “useless as an entity,” MacArthur said, comparing them to the evangelical publication Christianity Today, which he called “Christianity Astray.”
TGC does not appear to have issued any public response to MacArthur’s criticism.
Together for the Gospel staged a series of conferences from 2006 to 2022. Like TGC, it billed itself as a very conservative group. It was formed, the website still states, because: “We are convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ has been misrepresented, misunderstood and marginalized in many churches and among many who claim the name of Christ. Compromise of the gospel has led to the preaching of false gospels, the seduction of many minds and movements, and the weakening of the church’s gospel witness.”
Its leaders included John Piper, Al Mohler and Mark Dever among other conservative Reformed theologians.
During a Q-and-A with his congregation, MacArthur said Together for the Gospel went from honoring a hero of conservatives, R.C. Sproul, to the next year honoring King, “who was not a Christian at all, whose life was immoral.”
“You don’t honor a non-believer who misrepresented Christ and everything about the gospel in an organization alongside honoring someone like R.C. Sproul.”
“I’m not saying (King) didn’t do some social good, and I’ve always been glad he was a pacifist or he could have started a real revolution,” MacArthur added. “But you don’t honor a non-believer who misrepresented Christ and everything about the gospel in an organization alongside honoring someone like R.C. Sproul.”
R.C. Sproul
Sproul was an American Reformed theologian and pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America. He was the founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries and had a daily radio broadcast called Renewing Your Mind.
Sproul was a conservative Calvinist; King was a progressive pastor in the Black church tradition.
Some white conservative evangelicals, like MacArthur, espouse a belief that King is held in too high a regard. Far-right political activist Charlie Kirk has criticized the “mythical sainthood” ascribed to the civil rights leader.
Previously, MacArthur has defended the “Curse of Ham” as a justification for American slavery and has said he doesn’t believe in religious freedom or democracy as biblical concepts. He fought in court to keep his church open during the COVID pandemic and relied upon now-discredited attorney Jenna Ellis to represent him and his church. In 2020, he declared that any “real Christian” would vote to reelect Donald Trump as president.
This is not MacArthur’s first controversial foray in discussing King either.
For several years, he told stories about being in Mississippi with a civil rights leader the night King was assassinated and then being at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis the next day. Other eyewitnesses have disputed MacArthur’s account, causing one of his associates to explain that the pastor “misremembers” some things.
MacArthur’s latest denunciation of King has drawn sharp retort from the Black community. Prominent Black pastor Charlie Dates, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, rebuked MacArthur for his statement about King.
“If you ain’t gonna raise a finger to help us get the right to vote, to live where we want to live, to go to school where we want to go, keep Martin King’s name out of your mouth,” Dates said.
Regarding both King and MacArthur, the pastor said: “The tree is known by the fruit it bears.”