Bible Church, for it alarmed Jack MacArthur to find that some
12. JOHN MacArrHur: SERVANT OF THE WORD AND FLOCK
Bible Church, for it alarmed Jack MacArthur to find that some people imagined he had named it after himself!
Glendale and Burbank at this time were fast-developing communities at the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley, an area of some 240 square miles, in Los Angeles County, but separated from the denser population to the south by encircling hills and mountains. At the beginning of the century only a few thousand people lived in the temperate grasslands and scrub of 'the Valley', mainly employed with cattle and wheat farming. Water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct (1913) introduced citrus fruits, followed by a boom in industry during the Second World War, and sprawling ranches gave way to urbanisation. But with the population of the whole valley a little over a million in 1960, housing in such communities as Glendale did not have the density the family had known in Downey in the city to the south.
As a boy, John was not always healthy. He spent more time sick than is usual with children, and occasionally in hospital recovering from such things as rheumatic fever and pneumonia. By his mid-teen years, however, when he was at high school at Colter Academy, these health problems were over and he became distinguished in baseball, football, basketball, and sprinting. Indeed such activities were his absorbing interest and a professional sporting career was an attractive possibility. But his mother had prayed that her son would be a preacher, and from his early years John himself had known a call in that direction. It was with that expectation in view that his parents sent him to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1957.
John was not overly enthusiastic about his parents' choice for his university years. For one thing there were no intercollegiate