When Christian History Disappears
There are certain things that become so much a part of the Christian landscape that we simply assume they will always be there.
A radio program. A Christian bookstore. A publishing house. A magazine. A familiar voice teaching the Bible every day. An institution that has been there for so long that we can hardly imagine the Christian world without it.
And then one day, it isn’t there anymore.
Sometimes it disappears quietly. Sometimes it undergoes so many changes that what remains bears little resemblance to what we once knew. Sometimes we discover that something we assumed would always be available has vanished, taking decades of Christian history with it.
On Thursday evening, November 12, 2026, I came across a report that made me wonder whether we are about to witness the end of another significant chapter of Christian history.
The Roys Report published an investigation by Daniel Silliman entitled:
Christianity Today.
Seventy years of history.
And now, a serious question about its future.
This Is Not Just Another Christian Magazine
To understand the significance of this story, we have to go back to 1956.
Billy Graham helped establish Christianity Today with Carl F. H. Henry serving as its founding editor. The publication was part of a much larger vision for American evangelical Christianity.
Evangelicalism needed a voice.
It needed a publication that could engage theology, scholarship, culture, politics, and the intellectual questions confronting Christianity. It needed a place where Christians could discuss ideas, debate important issues, and engage the world around them.
Christianity Today was intended to provide a serious evangelical alternative to the more theologically liberal Christian Century. It emerged during a period when evangelicals were attempting to establish an identity distinct from both theological liberalism and the more separatist expressions of fundamentalism.
This was not simply about publishing another magazine filled with inspirational stories.
It was about the intellectual and theological identity of a movement.
Whether you agree with that movement, its theological positions, its political involvement, or the direction Christianity Today has taken over the decades, its historical significance cannot be dismissed.
Consider what has happened since that first issue appeared in October 1956.
The civil rights movement. The Jesus Movement. The rise of contemporary Christian music. The charismatic movement. The emergence of the Religious Right. The battles over biblical inerrancy. The rise of the megachurch. The seeker-sensitive movement. The emerging church. The resurgence of Calvinism. The growing political polarization of evangelical Christianity. The scandals and institutional failures that have forced the church to confront some deeply uncomfortable realities.
Christianity Today was there.
It reported on these developments. It published arguments about them. It gave a platform to people who helped shape them. At times, it was itself part of the controversy.
Its pages represent an ongoing record of American evangelical Christianity attempting to understand itself.
And that record now spans seventy years.
The Financial Crisis
According to the investigation published by The Roys Report, internal financial documents project that Christianity Today will finish 2026 with a $3 million deficit.
The report describes a number of serious challenges:
- Revenue from subscriptions, advertising, and product sales falling $80,000 to $90,000 short of monthly targets.
- A planned reduction in annual spending from $18 million to $14 million.
- A smartphone app costing more than $200,000 to develop and reportedly attracting approximately 100 new subscriptions.
- A proposed 2027 budget that depends on $7 million in contributions.
- More than a decade without circulation growth.
The investigation also describes significant staff reductions, the loss of key advertising and marketing personnel, and the anticipated departure of theologian Russell Moore.
These are not insignificant problems.
The report draws on internal documents and interviews with approximately two dozen current and former employees. Silliman himself served as Christianity Today’s news editor from 2019 to 2025, a connection disclosed in the article.
However, it is important to be accurate about what we know.
Christianity Today has not announced that it is closing.
Its president, Nicole Martin, told The Roys Report that the organization has made difficult but necessary financial decisions and that she believes it is now in a stronger position to continue its mission.
The investigation presents a troubling picture, but a projected deficit is not the same thing as bankruptcy, and financial difficulties do not necessarily mean the end of an institution.
Christianity Today could recover. It could restructure. It could find new financial support. It could continue for decades.
But the report raises legitimate questions about whether the institution can sustain itself and what it might look like if it does.
The Podcast That Reached Millions but Didn’t Make Money
One of the most fascinating aspects of the investigation involves something very close to my own world: podcasting.
In 2021, Christianity Today released The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, hosted by Mike Cosper.
The series explored the history and collapse of Mars Hill Church in Seattle and the ministry of Mark Driscoll. It became a remarkable success, reaching an audience far beyond the traditional readership of Christianity Today.
The first seven episodes generated more than 2.5 million downloads.
Think about that number.
Millions of people listening to a Christian podcast examining church leadership, institutional failure, spiritual abuse, and the consequences of a particular approach to ministry.
It was the kind of success that Christian media organizations dream about.
And yet, according to The Roys Report, the podcast did not make money.
The investigation describes difficulties with advertising, scheduling, and converting listeners into paying subscribers. Another Christianity Today podcast, This Great & Complicated Place, reportedly cost approximately $250 for every download it received.
That is an extraordinary contrast.
One podcast reached millions of people without generating a profit. Another reportedly consumed an enormous amount of money relative to the size of its audience.
As someone who has spent years producing the Theology Central podcast, I find this particularly interesting.
Theology Central has produced thousands of episodes and reached more than a million downloads and streams. There is no massive production team. There is no elaborate studio operation with a staff of producers, editors, and marketing specialists.
Much of it is simply me, a microphone, a Bible, some books, and a willingness to turn on the microphone and wrestle with whatever I am studying, hearing, or thinking about.
I am not suggesting that an independent theology podcast and an investigative journalism organization have comparable expenses or responsibilities. They do not.
Investigative journalism requires resources. Good reporting costs money. Professional editors, researchers, journalists, and producers deserve to be paid for their work.
But the comparison does raise some important questions.
Have Christian media organizations sometimes confused expensive production with meaningful content?
Have they confused audience size with financial sustainability?
Have they confused expanding an institution with fulfilling its mission?
And have they built organizations that require so much money to maintain that the infrastructure itself eventually threatens the very work it was created to support?
A podcast can reach millions of people and still fail financially. An article can reach readers around the world without generating enough revenue to pay the people who produced it.
Popularity is not sustainability.
And a successful fundraising campaign is not necessarily a sustainable financial model.
What Happens When Christian Media Becomes an Industry?
The financial history described in the investigation is worth considering.
Christianity Today, like many traditional publications, faced significant economic pressure following the financial crisis of 2008. Advertising and subscription revenue declined, and the organization increasingly turned to donations and grants.
Under subsequent leadership, fundraising helped finance an expansion into new projects, international initiatives, digital products, and other forms of media.
Some of those projects reached new audiences. Some produced valuable content. Others struggled to establish a viable financial model.
There is nothing inherently wrong with donations, grants, innovation, or expansion.
Christian journalism may require philanthropic support precisely because some important work will never be commercially profitable.
But there is a difference between receiving financial support to accomplish a mission and building an institution whose growing expenses require a continual influx of new financial support.
The latter can become a dangerous cycle.
More funding creates more opportunities. More opportunities create more projects. More projects create more positions and expenses. Eventually, the organization needs more funding simply to maintain what it has become.
What happens when the money stops growing?
What happens when the donors become less enthusiastic?
What happens when the new audience does not become a paying audience?
What happens when the expensive new technology fails to produce the expected results?
Perhaps one of the lessons Christian media needs to consider is that bigger is not always better.
A larger staff, a more sophisticated production, a new app, a more impressive website, and an expanding list of projects may all have legitimate value.
But none of them guarantees that an organization is fulfilling its mission more effectively.
And none of them guarantees that the organization will survive.
We Have Seen This Before
Recently, I found myself thinking about another institution from Christian history: Back to the Bible.
For many years, Back to the Bible was a familiar part of the Christian radio landscape. Founded by Theodore Epp in 1939, the ministry eventually featured Bible teachers including Warren Wiersbe and Woodrow Kroll.
For generations of listeners, it was simply part of life.
You turned on the radio. You heard a familiar voice. Someone opened the Bible and taught it.
It was not necessarily flashy. It was not designed around the latest trend. It was a regular part of the daily soundtrack of Christian life.
Back to the Bible still exists today, but its contemporary ministry looks considerably different from the daily radio program many of us remember.
And I cannot help but think about all those years of Bible teaching.
Where are all the broadcasts? How much has been preserved? How much is readily available to a new generation? How many people today could discover those messages through the podcast apps they use every day?
I am not claiming that those recordings have all been lost. Some material remains available through various sources. But the question of whether the full historical archive has been preserved and made easily accessible is worth asking.
If the truth being taught was valuable to a previous generation, why would we not want it to reach the current generation?
Why should decades of Christian teaching become difficult to find simply because the technology, the leadership, or the institutional strategy changed?
That same question becomes even more important when we consider Christianity Today.
Seventy Years of Christian History
Imagine being able to sit down and read through Christianity Today from 1956 to 2026.
Imagine following the development of American evangelicalism through its editorials, articles, interviews, reviews, and debates.
You would encounter ideas that once seemed revolutionary and now seem commonplace.
You would encounter theological controversies that consumed an entire generation but are barely remembered today.
You would discover Christians struggling with cultural changes, political questions, biblical interpretation, and the relationship between Christianity and the world.
You would see predictions that proved accurate and predictions that proved disastrously wrong.
You would see moments of theological clarity and moments of profound theological confusion.
You would see people trying to defend Christianity, reform Christianity, explain Christianity, and sometimes reshape Christianity in ways that deserve serious criticism.
What an extraordinary historical resource.
And that is precisely why the future of Christianity Today matters even to those of us who have significant disagreements with the publication.
Historical preservation does not require theological agreement.
I do not need to agree with every article Christianity Today has published to recognize the value of preserving those articles.
I do not need to agree with its editorial direction to recognize its historical importance.
I do not need to endorse its politics to understand that future generations should have access to the debates, decisions, and developments that helped shape the Christianity they inherited.
History is not valuable only when it confirms what we already believe.
Sometimes its greatest value is found in exposing our mistakes.
The Political Temptation
I suspect some Christians will read the report about Christianity Today’s financial troubles and immediately interpret it through their political commitments.
Some will celebrate, believing the magazine became too liberal.
Others will argue that the publication has not been progressive enough.
Some will view the financial crisis as evidence that Christianity Today abandoned its original mission. Others will argue that it has been unfairly targeted for attempting to confront problems within evangelicalism.
There are legitimate conversations to be had about the magazine’s theology, editorial decisions, and political involvement.
But I am not interested in reducing seventy years of Christian history to another battle between the political left and the political right.
The Roys Report itself describes longstanding disagreements about the magazine’s direction, while presenting financial and operational decisions as central to its current predicament.
We should be careful about turning a complicated financial story into a simplistic political or theological morality tale.
A Christian institution’s financial success does not prove that God approves of everything it does.
And its financial failure does not prove that God has rejected it.
Perhaps one of the great tragedies of contemporary American Christianity is that we have become so accustomed to interpreting everything politically that we can no longer recognize the historical significance of something without first determining which political team it belongs to.
Christianity Today is more than its most recent editorial.
It is more than its current leadership.
It is more than its position on the latest political controversy.
It represents seventy years of Christian history.
More Christian Content Than Ever Before
Here is the great irony.
We live in an age of almost unimaginable access to Christian content.
Open a podcast app. Thousands of Christian podcasts are available.
Open YouTube. You can find sermons, theological discussions, debates, Bible studies, and Christian commentary from around the world.
Visit SermonAudio. You can explore an enormous collection of sermons from churches, conferences, seminaries, and ministries.
We have digital libraries, Bible software, searchable archives, and tools that allow us to discover material that would have been almost impossible to access a generation ago.
And yet, in the midst of all this abundance, some of the institutions that helped create the modern Christian media landscape are struggling to survive.
The Christian bookstores that once introduced people to theology and Christian literature have disappeared from many communities.
Christian radio has changed.
Traditional publishing has changed.
Magazines have disappeared or moved online.
Christian media has become increasingly dependent on platforms, algorithms, personalities, and digital distribution systems.
There is much to celebrate in these developments. Independent voices can reach audiences that once would have been inaccessible. A person with a microphone can participate in theological conversations without needing the approval of a major institution.
I know that reality firsthand.
But there is also something we need to consider.
Are we producing more Christian content while becoming less capable of preserving Christian history?
A podcast feed can disappear.
A YouTube channel can be deleted.
A website can shut down.
A digital archive can become inaccessible.
An entire collection of material can vanish because someone stops paying a hosting bill, an organization changes direction, or a platform ceases to exist.
The ability to publish something today is not the same thing as ensuring that someone will be able to find it fifty years from now.
We are creating an extraordinary amount of Christian content.
But who is preserving it?
Who Will Remember?
I keep coming back to that question.
Who will remember?
Who will remember the theological debates that shaped American evangelicalism in the twentieth century?
Who will remember the sermons that influenced entire congregations?
Who will remember the Christian radio programs that accompanied people through their daily lives?
Who will remember the magazines, the articles, the books, and the conversations that once seemed so important?
Who will preserve the evidence of what Christians believed, what they argued about, what they got right, and what they got terribly wrong?
There is something deeply troubling about the possibility that a generation of Christians could inherit the consequences of our theological and institutional decisions without having access to the history of how those decisions were made.
We cannot understand the present if we are continually losing access to the past.
And perhaps one of the most important things Christian media organizations can do right now is not launch another new product.
Perhaps it is to preserve what they have already created.
Digitize the old issues. Preserve the original recordings. Maintain accessible archives. Establish arrangements with libraries, universities, and historical institutions. Make sure the material can survive even if the organization that produced it does not.
Do not assume that because something exists online today, it will exist online tomorrow.
The history of Christianity deserves more than that.
The End of an Era?
I do not know what will happen to Christianity Today.
I hope it finds a way forward. I hope the people who have devoted years of their lives to its work are able to continue doing meaningful work. I hope the institution can preserve its historical legacy regardless of what its future looks like.
And I hope that if the organization must change, those changes will not result in the loss of the extraordinary historical record it has accumulated.
This is not a call to preserve every Christian institution forever.
Institutions are not eternal. Organizations are not the gospel. The survival of a magazine is not the survival of Christianity.
Christianity existed long before Christianity Today, and Christianity will continue even if Christianity Today disappears.
But that does not mean its disappearance would be insignificant.
Something can be historically valuable without being indispensable.
Something can deserve preservation without deserving our unquestioning loyalty.
Something can be deeply flawed and still represent an important part of our collective history.
Seventy years ago, a group of Christians believed American evangelicalism needed a serious publication through which it could engage theology, culture, and the world.
For seventy years, that publication has been part of the story of American Christianity.
Tonight, we are confronted with a report that raises questions about whether it can continue.
Perhaps it will survive. Perhaps it will emerge from this crisis stronger. Perhaps it will become something radically different. Perhaps we are witnessing the beginning of the end.
We do not know.
But we should be paying attention.
Because one day, we may look back and realize that while we were busy creating more Christian content than any generation in history, we were also watching important pieces of Christian history disappear.
And we barely noticed.
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