In the middle of the twentieth century, with suburbs and churches exploding with intensity, novelist Peter De Vries saw big problems ahead for mainline Protestantism. He wrote of the Reverend Peter Mackerel, so sophisticated, erudite, and cultured. The very epitome of Protestant respectability—at least it seemed—Mackerel preached to a wealthy suburban congregation of liberal Protestants. The congregation designed their new church building with care, “America’s first split-level church,” with no straight lines. Everything was curved, including the pulpit.
Not so at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. In John Fullerton MacArthur Jr.’s church, the lines are straight, and all lines point to the pulpit, for there stands the preacher preaching the Word of God, and the preaching of the Word of God stands as the central act of Christian worship.
For more than a half-century, John MacArthur, who died Monday at eighty-six, largely defined biblical preaching in the United States and far beyond. He would have been the first to insist that God had raised up, and would continue to raise up, an army of biblical expositors ready to preach, as Paul instructed Timothy, “in season and out of season.” But JMac, as he was often called, did stand out from the rest.
It must have started early, for John MacArthur’s father and grandfather were both preachers. His grandfather was a conservative Canadian and Anglican. John’s father was an influential independent Baptist who deserves his own place in the panoramic story of American fundamentalism. John was formed and fashioned in conservative Protestantism, and upon graduation from high school, he was off to Bob Jones University. He later transferred to Los Angeles Pacific College, where he finished his degree and played football.
After college, John went to Talbot Theological Seminary, part of Biola University. Biola, founded as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, was conservative and dispensational in its identity. The school’s dispensationalism was reflected even in its original architecture: Jesus is coming quickly, so no need for much of a campus. Eventually, Biola would go on to build more permanent structures, and when MacArthur was undertaking his graduate studies in theology, the school had become a major engine for evangelical energy.
The historic opportunity came in 1969 when little Grace Community Church was looking for a pastor. The church had a small campus on Roscoe Boulevard even as the San Fernando Valley was exploding in population. The congregation took quite a risk in calling a young pastor. John was only twenty-nine when he assumed the pulpit. His first sermon was long, but the congregation loved it.
Mainline Protestant sermons were often presented as works of art that started with just about any safe biblical text, wandered through a bit of existential angst, and landed safely with a good story. That shouldn’t take more than twenty-five minutes, should it?
A short sermon from John MacArthur went on for forty-five minutes. The congregation came to expect an hour of exposition, and they ate it up. His congregation grew and grew, as did his reputation. The church soon needed a larger auditorium, so they built it—right up to the property line: a box-like structure with thousands of seats, a central platform with MacArthur’s custom-designed pulpit at the center, and a commodious choir loft behind the preaching area. The room was built for preaching, not for therapy. Sorry, Rev. Mackerel, there isn’t a curved line in the house. It’s all straight lines leading to the pulpit, and the pulpit is where John MacArthur stood several times each week for over fifty years. He stood and preached the Holy Scriptures, verse after verse, book after book, preaching through the entire New Testament by 2011.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, famed liberal preacher of the modernist age, once told divinity students at Yale that “no one comes to church on Sunday morning wondering what happened to the Jebusites.” That was an insult to the biblical text, but it also insulted the congregation. John MacArthur went up to the pulpit and left the congregation ready and waiting to hear more about the Jebusites. He thought that was his job. He was amazingly good at it.
The church is his legacy, but so is an army of preachers and pastors all over the world. John MacArthur was able to bridge the sociological gap that befuddled so many fundamentalists. He was courageous, but unfailingly gracious in person. He preached (and wrote best-selling books) against superficial gospels and charismatic distortions. He became more seasoned in connecting the themes of the Bible and the great doctrines of the faith. He became more Calvinistic, simply by preaching verse by verse through the New Testament. He became more overtly confrontational with the cultural powers that be, and more explicitly political, especially when he resisted Covid restrictions.
His preaching reached the world through cassette tapes and radio. I first heard a John MacArthur sermon on tape when I was a seventeen-year-old boy. I was hooked. So were untold thousands around the world. He later became my friend and we often preached together—a true gift.
Grace to You, the media platform for his teaching, can now stream thousands of MacArthur messages all over the world. Through the Shepherds Conferences, he gathered and taught multiple thousands of preachers. He established The Master’s Seminary and served as president of The Master’s University. He edited a massive study Bible and produced exposition that reached all over the world. That reach, based in the authenticity and power of his preaching and teaching, explains why MacArthur defined biblical preaching for his age.
Let me put it another way. Wherever I may be around the world, when I see a preacher carrying a MacArthur Study Bible, now translated into multiple languages, I know immediately that this is a man committed to integrity in expository preaching. He may preach in a building of any size, or no building at all, but he knows how to stand before God’s people, read a text of Holy Scripture, and preach a straight line. John MacArthur was a preacher to the end. What a legacy.
