by The Rev. John MacArthur passed away in Santa Clarita, California, on Monday. He was a Southern California pastor who was theologically uncompromising, impacted generations of evangelical preachers, and became a culture warrior in his later years. He was eighty-six.
Phil Johnson, who oversaw Mr. MacArthur’s media ministry and edited a number of his publications, announced his passing.Over the years, Mr. MacArthur had multiple heart and lung surgeries. This month, he was admitted to the hospital due to pneumonia.
For nearly his whole career, Mr. MacArthur, a theological conservative and natural polemicist, preached from the same pulpit at Grace Community Church in the Los Angeles region, frequently and frequently—up to five times a week. In contrast to many evangelical pastors, he always wore a suit and tie when he was preaching.
His church’s expansion went against the grain of seeker-sensitivity theory, which placed a strong emphasis on attracting non-churchgoers. A more approachable evangelical preaching approach that prioritized supposedly real-life stories and useful applications was rejected by Mr. MacArthur. Thousands of conservative Protestant pastors who attended the seminary he directed or just listened to his sermons on the radio or online were impacted by his unwavering emphasis on expository preaching that was specifically focused on the meaning and historical background of a certain passage of scripture.
In an interview earlier this year, R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, stated that John has led the most powerful pulpit in evangelical Christianity for over fifty years. Evangelicalism is a pulpit-driven movement.
Mr. MacArthur has been getting more involved in cultural and political conflicts in recent years. He became a prominent Christian critic of wokeness and condemned critical race theory. When the coronavirus epidemic struck in 2020, his church disregarded official public health orders and started hosting in-person services indoors after closing for several months. The church sued, claiming that the limits violated religious freedom, and later secured a $800,000 compensation from the state and Los Angeles County.
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