MacArthur was born to Irene Dockendorf MacArthur and John F. MacArthur Sr. on June 19, 1939. He was the son, grandson, great-grandson, and great-great grandson of evangelical preachers, going back to Canada and Scotland.
His father was a Baptist pastor and traveling evangelist who launched a ministry to movie stars, including actors Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, in Southern California in the early 1940s. The elder MacArthur also had a radio ministry called Voice of Calvary, which was influential in the conversion of John M. Perkins, who went on to become a prominent evangelical advocate of racial reconciliation.
The younger MacArthur recalled that he began to imitate his father at age five or six, standing on a box in the backyard to preach to neighborhood friends and his three younger sisters, Jeanette, Julie, and Jane.
“I don’t ever remember a time when I didn’t believe the gospel,” MacArthur said. “I was one of those kids that never rebelled and always believed. And so, when God did his saving work in my heart, it was not discernible to me.”
As he grew older, MacArthur was more interested in sports than preaching. He wanted to play football in college, but his father insisted he go to Bob Jones University, which did not have an intercollegiate team at the time. Instead of playing football, MacArthur was put on a street-preaching team.
He “chafed a little” at Bob Jones, as he later recalled. A car accident convinced him he needed to submit to God completely.
As he told and retold the story in sermons for years after, he was driving cross-country on a preaching tour with five other young people after his freshman year of college. The driver tried to pass someone on an Alabama highway and lost control. The two-door Ford Fairlane went into a spin and then flipped and rolled at 65, 70, or 75 miles an hour, landing on its roof.
MacArthur was thrown from the vehicle, skidding down the road on his back.
“My back literally was raw down to the bone,” he recalled. “I stood up, and I realized I was alive.”
In the hospital on his stomach for several months, he decided to return to Bob Jones for a second year. He thought he discerned a call to ministry and felt he needed to commit everything to God.
“Lord,” he prayed, “I can see now that my life really is in your hands and you have absolute control of not only my eternal destiny but my time here in this world.”
MacArthur got another chance to play football a year later, though, and took it, transferring to Los Angeles Pacific College. He would later claim he was recruited by numerous professional teams, including the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Browns, but school records show he wasn’t a standout player at the California college. One year, he had only five tackles and three rushing yards.
MacArthur decided in 1961 that he didn’t want to give his life to football anyway. He would rather follow his father into ministry.
His first job after seminary was associate pastor under his father at a church named for his grandfather: Harry MacArthur Memorial Bible Church. After a few years, he decided to go out on his own and accepted a call at Grace Community Church, an independent, nondenominational congregation in the Sun Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Two pastors in a row had died, leaving the congregation of about 400 eager to find someone young.
MacArthur, 29, was not impressed with the church. Grace’s motto was “in essentials unity, in non-essentials charity,” which he dismissed as silly and sentimental. The church had no real doctrine, according to MacArthur, and many of the longtime members and even leaders in the congregation were not real Christians.
“There were unsaved elders on that board, and unsaved people in leadership in the church,” MacArthur said. “But there were enough good people that knew what they wanted and knew that they needed to be taught the Word of God.”
MacArthur preached his first sermon in 1969 on Matthew 7:21, which says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
After that he started preaching through the New Testament one book at a time, beginning with the Gospel of John and then moving to Peter’s first and second epistles. MacArthur spent 30 hours a week preparing sermons and delegated almost all other pastoral responsibilities to the church’s elders and lay leaders.
The church grew rapidly. Grace built a new building that could seat 1,000 in 1971 and expanded again in 1977, tripling in size. It became the largest Protestant church in Los Angeles by the end of the decade.
The demand for recordings of MacArthur’s sermons also exploded. Church members sent out 5,000 tapes every week, then 15,000, then 30,000. By the end of the ’70s, more than 100,000 Christians around the country were receiving MacArthur’s recorded sermons every week. The church also launched a separate ministry, Grace to You, to broadcast MacArthur’s messages on Christian radio.
“John’s ministry proves how timeless preaching can be when it is merely sound, clear biblical exposition,” Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You, said in 2011. “If the aim of preaching is the awakening of spiritually dead souls and the cleansing and transformation of lives spoiled by sin, then all that really counts is that the preacher be faithful in proclaiming the Word of God with clarity, accuracy, and candor.”
That preaching, however, was not without controversy. In 1979, MacArthur taught on Titus 2 and the apostle Paul’s instructions that women “be busy at home” and “subject to their husbands” (v. 5). He said that women should not work outside the home and families should not require two incomes.
The leaders of the church decided the staff, not just the leadership, needed to be all male. The announcement caused an uproar in the church and the surrounding community. A number of people left Grace, accusing MacArthur of “Christian male chauvinism.”
The following year, the family of a man who had attended Grace sued for clergy malpractice—a first in the United States, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ministers at the church had counseled a suicidal young man named Kenneth Nally, telling him he should pray more, read the Bible, and listen to tapes of MacArthur’s sermons. When Nally took his own life, his parents hired a lawyer. They claimed ministers who provided counseling should be held to the same legal standard as psychologists. A California court ultimately dismissed the suit on First Amendment grounds.
Critics, including a number of conservative evangelicals at Dallas Theological Seminary, accused MacArthur of mixing faith and works and denying justification by faith. Theologian Charles C. Ryrie wrote that MacArthur diluted and polluted the grace of God. New Testament professor Zane Hodges went further, calling MacArthur’s teaching “Satanic at its core.”
Other prominent evangelicals rallied to MacArthur’s defense. They argued he was only articulating traditional Christian ideas about repentance and discipleship.
Theologian J. I. Packer, for example, identified MacArthur’s position with the Reformed teaching that faith “is a whole-souled reality with an affectional and volitional aspect as well as an intellectual one.” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler called The Gospel According to Jesus “a much-needed corrective to dangerous misunderstandings.”
Some observers said the two sides had just misunderstood each other.
“There is often a difference in what MacArthur says and what he apparently means,” wrote New Testament professor Darrell L. Bock. “Certain ambiguities in MacArthur’s style make it difficult to determine what his real position is.”
No one accused MacArthur of ambiguity in his attacks on charismatics. He said the Christians who believed they were filled with the power of the Holy Spirit were teaching a counterfeit, “aberrant” Christianity. He called them “harebrained people … prompted by Satan” and decried the charismatic movement’s widespread presence in Christian media.
MacArthur specifically attacked popular women’s Bible teacher Beth Moore, saying she had the natural ability to sell jewelry on TV but shouldn’t confuse that for a call to preach. He told her to “go home.”
There was another controversy in the 2020s, when a woman named Eileen Gray came forward to accuse him of shaming her publicly for leaving her abusive husband. David Gray, a children’s minister at Grace, confessed to hitting his daughter “way too harshly—brutally” on her legs, feet, hands, and head and dragging his two other children as a form of discipline. Gray said she had been instructed by Grace ministers to forgive him even if he didn’t repent and to show her children how to “suffer like Jesus.” When she instead took her children and moved out, MacArthur condemned her from the pulpit and instructed the congregation to shun her, suggesting she was not really a Christian.
David Gray was later sent to prison for physical and sexual child abuse.
Hohn Cho, an elder at the church, looked into the decision to disfellowship Eileen Gray in 2022 and concluded she had been treated unjustly. He urged leaders to make things right with her, at least privately. The elder told Christianity Today that MacArthur said to “forget it.”
Cho instead stepped down, only to discover at least eight other women at Grace with stories about being counseled to stay with abusive husbands, even when they feared for their own safety and the safety of their children.
The waves of controversy, decade after decade, did not notably limit MacArthur’s influence.
Grace’s 3,500-seat sanctuary still filled multiple times per weekend in 2025. MacArthur’s sermons were broadcast on more than 1,000 radio stations across America and distributed by Grace to You. More than 700 men were enrolled at The Master’s Seminary, where MacArthur served as chancellor, and around 5,000 attended an annual conference for church leaders.
The MacArthur Study Bible continues to sell and is currently available with the New King James Version, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, and the Legacy Standard Bible translations. The MacArthur Daily Bible smartphone app has been downloaded more than 5 million times.
Publishing veteran Chip Brown said people turn to MacArthur because they trust him as a pastor and because he “is just unpacking what the text says and how that fits into our lives.”
MacArthur, for his part, said he hoped he would be remembered for teaching the Bible.
“I just really want to be known as someone who was a servant of the Lord,” he said, “faithful to the teaching of the Word of God and to the unfolding of the mysteries of the gospel of the New Testament.”
MacArthur is survived by his wife, Patricia Smith MacArthur; their children Matt, Mark, Marcy, and Melinda; 15 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.