Develop to Deploy

It would be hard to overstate how influential John MacArthur has been in my life and ministry. With his passing there has been and no doubt will continue to be, a seemingly endless stream of tributes and retrospectives on MacArthur’s impact and legacy. Rightly so. Without hesitation, I believe John MacArthur is among the 2 or 3 most influential evangelical pastors in the world. How? MacArthur was never the most gifted leader nor the most charismatic communicator. In fact, one of his geniuses lies in his seemingly unimpressive delivery. No frills. No fluff. No theatrics. His sermons have always felt like extended readings from his commentaries. Far more informational than inspirational. But therein always lied his unique power. MacArthur’s expositional preaching ministry never strayed from the biblical text. It was only interested in what the text was saying. Nothing more and nothing less. This made it easy for people with different doctrinal positions from MacArthur’s to appreciate his ministry. His preaching and teaching style made it easy for millions of people around the world to listen to his sermons while doing something else (driving, working, writing, running). In this way, perhaps ironically, John MacArthur, a man who never owned a computer, was uniquely built for the technology age. In fact, in order to properly understand how a man like John MacArthur became one of the most influential pastors in the world, one needs to know the name: Lou Ottens. In all likelihood, John MacArthur never met Lou Ottens, but it was Otten’s invention in 1962, the cassette tape, that helped create the global ministry platform that MacArthur (or at least those around him) would eventually convert to the internet. Macarthur’s entire ministry at Grace Community Church, which began 7 years after the cassette’s invention, would be captured on tape. Those tapes of MacArthur’s preaching, verse by verse through books of the Bible, would be disseminated around the world throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, providing him with an audience that gleefully devoured his early books, particularly his most famous book “The Gospel According to Jesus”. Despite his enormous reach and influence, John MacArthur’s personal ministry was impressively one-dimensional and focused: The unrelenting verse by verse exposition of God’s Word each week from the same pulpit. In this solitary focus, MacArthur is a reminder of a bygone era of men whose ministry impact outweighed their ambition. Everything else MacArthur did was outworking of his weekly expositions. When he spoke at conferences, he would often preach the passage he had preached the previous Sunday at Grace Community Church. Which leads me to my John MacArthur story.

In October of 2013 I met John MacArthur for the first time. MacArthur visited my alma mater, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Kansas City, to deliver the inaugural “Spurgeon Lectures”. You can actually still watch these lectures HERE. As a remote-grad student who had been impacted by his ministry, I was eager to meet him. So I booked a plane ticket and made the trip to KC. Following his first address I took my place at the end of a long line of students who wanted to meet him. As the last student in the queue I expected the emotionally and physically drained preacher to have little left in the tank. Not only that, based on his pit-bull like tendencies in the pulpit I expected to find him cold and aloof interpersonally. I could not have been more wrong.

MacArthur was kind and warm. Gentle. He made consistent eye-contact. He oozed a humility, a meekness, that was powerful in its own unique way. After my opening “thank you for your faithfulness, your ministry has impacted me…” he quickly pivoted to asking about me. Me? A 28 year old pastor of a 30 person church plant that had only existed for a few months. His first question: “Tell me about your church”. His second question: “What book are you preaching through?” “I am actually preaching through the Sermon on the Mount”, I replied. “Wow, that’s great, starting a church with the teachings of Jesus. You can never go wrong there”. He then asked about my family and where the church was located. Finally he asked if he could pray for me and my church. He prayed a brief prayer with me, took a picture with me and I left. He never seemed rushed. He never seemed disinterested in me. He was present.

In the years that followed I had the chance to meet him on 3 other occasions. He was always the same guy. Kind. Warm. Gentle. Meek. A man who knew that his only real authority was found in the Word of God that he so faithfully taught, week in and week out, for well over half a century to the same people. In my last interaction with him, about 7 years ago, I ended our brief conversation with a “Thank you for everything Dr. Macarthur”. He half-smiled and said: “Call me John”.

For modeling faithfulness and consistency.

For standing for the Truth.

For preaching the next verse.

Thank you John.

Chad Williams