New York Times: Christianity Today, a Voice of Centrist Evangelicalism, Is in Turmoil, by Ruth Graham:

Last year, leaders of the evangelical publication Christianity Today summoned the entire staff to a hotel ballroom in the Chicago suburbs for a meeting about their future.

The publication’s chief operating officer, Nicole Massie Martin, opened her presentation with a Bible verse from the Old Testament about rejoicing even in dark times, “though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food.” Then Thomas Addington, the interim president, delivered a blunt message: Christianity Today’s reputation as a staid voice of intellectual centrist evangelicalism — embodied by its proximity to Wheaton College in Illinois — had to change.

Christianity Today needed to be less like Wheaton and more like TikTok, Mr. Addington told his staff, according to several people who attended the meeting. Warning that layoffs were coming, he ended his presentation with a prayer. A senior editor left the room in tears.

Fourteen months later, more than half of the 79 employees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, including an editor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured journalists.

In interviews, a number of employees who have departed since the meeting in 2025 said that the changes at Christianity Today seemed to be about more than stabilizing its finances. Its new leaders, they believe, are abandoning the publication’s longtime commitment to independent journalism, a record that includes investigating accounts of misconduct by high-profile evangelicals.

Bonnie Kristian, Christianity Today’s deputy editor until last week, described its new leaders as being driven “by fear, by the kind of anxiety about reputational and financial loss that makes bold, interesting, principled journalism very difficult.” …

The Trump years upended the landscape of Christian journalism, and revealed gaps between publishers and the pews.

Bonnie Kristian, Why I left Christianity Today:

Christianity Today is an irreplaceable institution in American evangelicalism
I mean that literally: You could not make CT from scratch in 2026. You could start an evangelical media outlet right now and get a bigger audience, bigger staff, and bigger budget and it still could not match the legacy and heft of Christianity Today. It’s just not possible to replicate the conditions of Billy Graham in 1956: his goodwill and cachet and the high religiosity and monoculture media environment that made a magazine of his founding such a heavyweight not only within the American church but in the wider discourse.

If CT goes away, we do not get it back. We do not get a new one.

It’s been an honor to have some small part in preserving that legacy. This is an institution that I and so many other people care about deeply, and that’s why I’ve spent the last ten months contending for its future within the organization.

Many of those conversations, particularly since March, focused on these matters of editorial independence. …

But they’ve also been about CT’s consciously evangelical identity. Nearly a year ago I was internally making the case that CT “should be the flagship media outlet of American evangelicalism, speaking to the broad middle swath of churchgoing evangelicals in the United States. They should be able to recognize us as their own: orthodox, normal, friendly, and interested in participating in the broader conversation of American public life with conviction, verve, and good humor.”

I left CT because it became apparent—in the latest layoffs and the selection of a new editor-in-chief with no apparent editorial experience—that the internal conversation had run its course.

But here’s the thing: CT is also a public institution. It operates in the public square, and it has many subscribers and donors who want to support top-quality evangelical journalism. I feel an obligation to the institution itself, to the legacy of Billy Graham and Carl Henry and prior generations of CT journalists, but also to those readers.

It’s an obligation not to leave people wondering: What happened to CT? And it’s an obligation not to cede the narrative to people who don’t care about Christianity Today or take active pleasure in its downfall, people who slander fellow Christians, spinning fantasies of political rot and theological distortion without bothering to determine whether any of it is true.

I’ve prayed and agonized over what is the right thing to do here. I don’t know if I’ve done it, and I expect many people will tell me I have not. They may be correct. I can only say that it is my sincere hope and ongoing prayer that Christianity Today will flourish, that its leaders will be wise and its journalists courageous, that it will be the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism for another 70 years to come.

Dispatch Faith: Christianity Today’s Freefall Is Bad News, by Alan Noble (Oklahoma Baptist):

I want to argue, in echoing Kristian’s words in her Substack, that we do need CT. That as an institution, the success and proper functioning of Christianity Today is important for evangelicals. …

I think it’s incriminating for all of us that the interim president of Christianity Today said that the magazine needed to be less like Wheaton College and more like TikTok. Because that suggests that at least he felt that was the state of evangelicalism. We can criticize that comment all we want, but publishers respond to demand, and my concern is that CT leadership is responding to a real demand they see: a demand for slop.

I want Christianity Today to succeed, but not in worldly terms. I don’t just want it to continue to exist as an organization. I want it to be a place where rigorous journalistic standards are practiced. Where ideas are debated within an orthodox evangelical perspective. Where Christians are encouraged and challenged and inspired. Where American evangelicals are exposed to the global perspective. Where books and culture are explored and critiqued and appreciated. I understand that is increasingly difficult to do after 2016, the rise of AI, and the decline in reading, but I think it’s possible, and we should ask for it.

Baptist News Global, Something is Fishy About the CT Story

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