We receive many questions at our conferences and events. One of my favorites is “What’s a We receive many questions at our conferences and events. One of my favorites is “What’s a Ligonier?” That one is fairly easy to answer, and it’s my joy to recount how God has used Dr. R.C. Sproul and this ministry for more than fifty years.
The short answer is that the ministry began as a study center near a small town called Ligonier in Western Pennsylvania. Dr. Sproul was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area, so it was natural for him to begin his public ministry there. Focus groups or marketing consultants surely did not pick “Ligonier” as the name for a Christian discipleship organization with a global sphere of service. No one can accuse us of being seeker-sensitive when it comes to picking a name for this ministry.
Born in a Time of Turmoil
A longer answer to “What’s a Ligonier?” comes when we look back at Dr. Sproul’s purpose for the ministry’s founding in 1971 as the Ligonier Valley Study Center. Remember that the zeitgeist of the late 1960s had popularized rampant relativism even as social upheaval brought massive conflict, in effect accelerating the secularization of culture and liberalism in the church. Thus, Ligonier’s study center was born as a place to equip Christians to be articulate and effective in defending classical Christianity in obedience to the Great Commission. For thirteen years, hundreds of students came to live and learn among the Sprouls and other teachers. It was there that the messages of The Holiness of God teaching series were first delivered, Dr. Sproul’s first book was written, and a newsletter called Tabletalk was born.
I’d call that Ligonier 1.0, because it quickly became apparent that the Lord had more in mind for the teaching fellowship founded by Dr. Sproul. As he taught, new forms of media and communication were rapidly developing. While the ministry’s use of radio was still several years away, the rise of portable technologies such as audio cassettes and VHS presented the ministry with a whole new audience beyond the confines of the study center.
Students studied resources delivered by the mail, and the growth was explosive. Churches began using video teaching series from Ligonier in their Christian education programs. The distance-learning aspect of Ligonier quickly eclipsed the small study center effort, so in the early 1980s, Ligonier relocated to Orlando, Florida, to accommodate the ministry’s expansion. Dr. Sproul continued to write and to pour his academic life into students through service at the seminary level. In 1985, The Holiness of God was published, followed by Chosen by God in 1986. In 1988, Ligonier saw its first national Reformed theology conference. And by God’s grace, the pace of growth kept going throughout the 1990s into the present.
In 1994, we began our international radio broadcast, Renewing Your Mind. In 1995, the Reformation Study Bible was first published, originally as the New Geneva Study Bible. Ligonier’s publishing efforts formally began in 2006 to maintain our focus on serving learners with trustworthy Christian content from contemporary and classic authors. Over the years, we continued to record new teaching series covering five categories: biblical studies, theology, church history, worldview and culture, and Christian living. In the 2000s, Ligonier.org, the Ligonier app, podcasts, and our YouTube channel helped extend the ministry’s reach to Christians everywhere.
In 2011, we began to make many of these series available as interactive video courses on Ligonier Connect. Also in 2011, we returned to our study-center roots by establishing Reformation Bible College on a new campus in Sanford, Florida, providing in-person teaching and discipleship for the next generation. In 2012, we launched RefNet, which streams trustworthy biblical preaching and teaching, Scripture reading, audiobooks, music, and more twenty-four hours a day. And in 2014, The State of Theology project began to give the church in the United States a quantitative assessment of people’s core theological beliefs, revealing whether they were faithful to the historic Christian faith.
Ligonier Today
Much of our activity today focuses on strengthening and expanding the outreach of our core teaching ministries while harnessing new communication technology. The whole world needs the whole counsel of God, and therefore our vision encompasses a global context with informed, strategic service to the church across different regions and to diverse people groups. Specifically, we are building the largest library of Reformed Bible teaching in the world’s top 20 languages. With God’s blessing, our worldwide outreach continues to expand and bear much fruit with unique outreaches serving Christians in North America, Latin America, the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and many other parts of the world. We are thankful that millions of people are reached every year, but with more than eight billion souls on this planet, there is a lot of work to do.
Today, we are hosting conferences and events online and throughout the world. No matter where you are, we want to be there with clear and faithful Bible teaching to help as many people as possible understand God and His holiness. Our core discipleship resources are also more accessible now than ever before.
Ligonier’s app offers thousands of articles, podcasts, video teaching series, and other resources to help growing Christians engage with God’s Word anywhere. Serving as our premier discipleship platform, the app has undergone continuous improvements to bring Ligonier’s library of trusted Bible teaching to even more people worldwide.
We’re now reaching millions of people every month with teaching on Renewing Your Mind and our podcast library. We’ve also expanded the reach of Renewing Your Mind by launching a Spanish-language edition, Renovando Tu Mente. With even more media outreach in development, we seek to serve people in every age and stage of the Christian life.
Through Always Ready youth apologetics conferences, we’re equipping students ages 12–18 to know, live, and defend the Christian life in a changing world. We’re also coming alongside parents and churches to disciple the next generation with Growing in God’s Word. This K–5 curriculum provides an overview of the Bible, helping children discover their place in God’s story of salvation. To counteract the false and distracting content online that shapes many teens and young adults, we’re flooding TikTok and other online platforms with short-form teaching videos to provide trusted answers to eternal questions.
Tabletalk magazine offers online-exclusive content, and the print edition reaches hundreds of thousands of readers in dozens of countries each month. The Reformation Study Bible saw a substantial revision in 2015, and in 2017 we released the Condensed Edition for Bible study on the go. The long-anticipated Student Edition later arrived in 2022, uniquely designed to serve the next generation of young adults. The Reformation Study Bible continues to be translated into key languages, unlocking its unparalleled study notes to readers around the world.
Through our translation projects and military and prison chaplain outreaches, we’re ensuring these resources reach the people who need them most. And through Study Bibles for the World, we’re striving to equip 500,000 pastors around the world with the Reformation Study Bible.
What’s Next
To steward the truth and ensure that we continue teaching the historic Christian faith to as many people as possible, Dr. Sproul and the board formally established the Teaching Fellows in 2010. Two additional Teaching Fellows were appointed in 2026. Together, these men help advise the ministry, inform our future outreach, and produce new discipleship resources to equip growing Christians. In addition to our Teaching Fellows, we are also working with many more pastors and scholars to produce new books and teaching series and expand our translation efforts.
Just as in the early days at the Ligonier Valley Study Center, we are continuing to pour into tomorrow’s leaders at Reformation Bible College. The college has an accelerated degree program for students pursuing a Masters of Divinity as well as an accelerated track to counseling. In addition to an ever-growing on-campus student body, many additional students participate in online classes. We welcome international students on campus, and our students have even more opportunities to apply their theological studies on a day-to-day basis through mutual discipleship in our on-campus residence hall. And now, incarcerated individuals are pursuing their Bachelor of Arts in Theology through RBC Inside, preparing them for Christian service both inside and beyond the correctional system.
Why We Exist
Ligonier exists to proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God to as many people as possible. God’s holiness is essential to understanding His character. When we rightly know the character of our Creator, we know who we are as creatures.
Look at Isaiah 6. The Lord reveals Himself to Isaiah, and for the first time in his life Isaiah knows who Isaiah is. To what end? So that Isaiah would then proclaim the great and awesome name of God Most High to his generation. We are not redeemed so that we hoard the truth and bury our treasure. Rather, we are saved to spend—to spend our lives for the sake of God and His righteous purposes in this world. Once we bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ, repent, and flee to Him as our only righteousness, we are propelled back into the world, back to proclaim His holiness to as many people as possible. Our greatest encouragement is when we meet people our Lord has reached with His truth and hear how they are putting it into practice in their lives.
Our vision is to propagate biblical Christianity throughout the world and see it flourish in the church. We believe that the best and most biblical expression of Christianity is found in the emphases that emerged from the Protestant Reformation. The world-shaping impact of Reformed theology includes a desire to see an awakening, but it goes far beyond that. We want to see hearts and wills conquered to such an extent that Christians are equipped to effect change in every sphere in which God places them—in the home, in the church, and in the culture.
This is why the mission of Ligonier endures: because just as the fundamental problem of the sinfulness of humanity endures, God’s Word endures, ever relevant, ever piercing to the root of our deepest need. Our prayer is that Ligonier, through our many outreaches, would be used by the Holy Spirit to equip you and generations to come to know the God of the Bible and, by His grace, change the world.
