The board of The Gospel & Culture Project voted on June 11 to suspend operations. This means that initiatives such as gospelandculture.org and our Forays will cease for the foreseeable future.
As you may have noticed, the website has not been updated since late April. We would have liked to have notified you sooner, but the project’s status was only decided within the last few weeks. Suspension is a step before shutting down. We hope that we might raise money to continue, but in this economic climate, this appears unlikely. If nothing changes, the site will be taken down by September.
Apart from the financial aspect, the project has been very successful in achieving its aims. Gospelandculture.org has had almost 60,000 page views from 18,000 visitors from 127 countries in just five months, all by word of mouth. More than 800 sites reposted our content. We gained media attention from denominational publications and newspapers at Christian colleges. Our Forays were well attended.
In the end, it all came down to money. We launched this phase of the GCP in July 2008. At that time we anticipated significant donor financing in the short term. Our plan had been to use donor money to seed the project, then eventually have it become largely self-sufficient. When the economic crisis hit in September 2008, donor financing disappeared.
The vision that empowered the project continues to thrive. It became apparent to us that an organization like the GCP could not survive independently. While it appears likely that the GCP will not continue in its present form, a number of us are seeking ways to continue its work in partnership with other organizations and institutions.
We’re very proud of what the Lord has done through the GCP, and especially through gospelandculture.org. The GCP was borne out of a desire to re-introduce Christians to the fact that the Gospel is not some narrow formula for how to be saved. We’ve demonstrated in a host of ways how the Gospel reframes and illuminates key contemporary issues. Through the articles posted here, through our Forays and many other events, we have shown that empowering believers to apply their faith in specific, skilled ways can bring significant, Christ-glorifying change to our world.
We are grateful for all the interest so many of you have shown through attending the Forays, and through your comments and other ways of participating in the website. We would appreciate your prayers as we seek to pay off our remaining debts and as we contemplate our future. May we all glorify him until he returns.
