Grace Community Church.

The Early Ministry at Grace Community Church 41

Word, and who will help his people develop and use their spiritual gifts, will enjoy the same results.'

He would not speak in that way in later years when he saw

more clearly how providential circumstances, in which he played

no part, had prepared the way. The Vietnam War had brought

widespread disillusion; new Bible translations were prompting

new interest in Scripture; and a hippy culture was being widely

touched by 'the Jesus Movement'. It was a time when numbers,

both young and old, were looking for a new direction. His

mature verdict was: 'We were dropped into the right place at

the right time; we caught the wave of those events.' 'I must

ascribe our church's numerical and spiritual growth to the will

of our sovereign God.'

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Threatening Reversals

ks MacArthur has described the characteristic of his early

years at Grace Church as 'a time of discovery and estab-

lishing the truth'. It was also a period of remarkable growth,

in which, for a time, the congregation seemed to double every

year. As already noted, in 1972 the original chapel had to be

replaced by another, capable of holding up to one thousand.

This building was, in turn, superseded in 1977 by the present

worship centre with a capacity of around 3,000. Even that

accommodation was not enough for the numbers attending

and two morning services were still necessary. At the evening

service the auditorium was again commonly filled. It was well

that the ground owned by the church was large, for it meant

the new buildings were additional to the old that were retained

for other purposes. In this way the one site gradually came to

house a whole series of buildings.

The tape ministry, begun spontaneously by Vern Lummus

in his spare time in 1969, reflected the same growth. From

an annual figure of 5,000 tapes produced in 1970, the figure

rose to 37,000 in 1973, by which time six men (in a voluntary

44 JOHN MacArtuur: SERVANT OF THE WORD AND FLOCK

capacity) were needed to keep it running under the name 'Word

of Grace'. The annual figure was over 110,000 in 1976.

The church growth would surely not have happened if the

'pastor-teacher' had not made the local church his priority.

Even so, it was impossible for him to avoid other demands on

his time. There were invitations to speak not only from other

churches, but from a whole range of sources, such as day schools,

Bible Colleges, police wives, fire brigade functions, ministers'

retreats, missions to the Jews, and Bible and prophetic confer-

ences. While such outside engagements in the early years were

in his home state, by the later 1970s there were growing calls

from places as far away as Chicago (the Moody Bible Institute),

Miami and Texas. Counsel from his elders on such multiplied

commitments was forthcoming, as a letter the preacher wrote

to the Secretary of the American Board of Missions to the Jews,

on January 11, 1978, indicates:

I have recently been instructed by the elders and my doctor

to change my schedule for this year. This has necessitated my changing several things, including about five speaking confer-

ences. There are some I am bound to and cannot get out of,

but aside from these I have cancelled all until summer.

The elders have directed me to concentrate here and to go on a missions trip with the staff to Brazil just two weeks prior

to your conference.

The Brazil meetings in Sao Paulo went ahead in the weeks of

April 17-28, 1978, with his main addresses on 'The Priorities of

the Ministry', and 'The Characteristics of an Effective Church'. It

was the response that followed this visit which helped the leaders

of Grace Community Church to recognize how the ministry in

their midst could have an international aspect.

Threatening Reversals 45

Another demand on MacArthur's time also developed in the

1970s, and it took a high place in his agenda. In 1972 there

were nine young men in the congregation conscious of the

call of God to become preachers. John would meet frequently

with them for prayer and fellowship, and his personal prayer

was that their number would be greatly multiplied. The formal

theological training of these men, and of others who joined

them, was conducted at Talbot Theological Seminary, with

which John retained his relationship. In 1977 the Seminary

awarded him the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Originally the

students for the ministry at Grace Community Church had a

round trip of eighty miles daily, in a church-owned Dodge van,

to the Seminary at La Mirada.

How this arrangement changed as the number of students

from Grace multiplied was reported in a news item in Christian-

ity Today (Feb. 10, 1978), under the heading, "Seminary Goes

to Church': 'More than 6,000 people attend Grace Community

Church in Panorama City, California, and ninety to one hun-

dred people in this relatively young congregation are seminary

students.' It went on to explain that, as increasing numbers of

these students were travelling back and forth to Talbot Seminary,

it had been agreed that an extension campus of Talbot should

be established at Grace Church. 'Instead of taking young people

out of the church for three or four years of seminary, Grace has

moved this seminary campus in-house to give its young people

on-the-job training.'

Additional faculty and staff were now employed to make the

Talbot extension in Sun Valley possible, and the regular input

and oversight from MacArthur continued. A magazine of the

Talbot Seminary students, The Tiger Tale, dated November 1,

46 JOHN MacArTHuR: SERVANT OF THE WORD AND FLOCK

1979, had for its leader, 'MacArthur's Love for Pulpit—and for

Talbot Students'. The article began:

The speaker: Dr John MacArthur. The day: a Monday off.

The audience: seventeen in number—considerably smaller

than the thousands who hear him preach every Sunday. But

the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church believes

the opportunity is well worth his time. His listeners are

Talbot students who attend his weekly expository preach-

ing class at the Seminary's Valley Extension Center.

wie

It is certain that a spiritual advance never occurs without

opposition. One surmises from the dedication in MacArthur's

first publication that all was not smooth in his early years at

Grace. His first publication, a 33-page booklet entitled, Chrzs-

tians and Demons (1973), carried the words, "To my beloved

fellow elders at Grace, whose strength and faith has already seen

us victoriously through many battles.' In at least one incident

in the church there was a forceful reminder of the real enemy

to spiritual advance. The course of a service was interrupted

one evening by a girl seemingly under demonic influence. She

kicked and screamed with a voice that was not her own. It left

MacArthur conscious that 'the battle is not against men'.

In the year 1979 varied forms of opposition from both out-

side and inside the church emerged. The opposition began on

February 3, 1979, when the Los Angeles Times headed an article

with the words, 'Woman's Place is at Home', and proceeded to

condemn a sermon MacArthur had preached on January 21,

from Titus 2:4-5, where Paul encourages 'young women . . . to

Threatening Reversals 47

love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home'. The

newspaper claimed that the sermon had brought 'the firing of

five or six secretaries on the church staff'. The report was false.

What had happened was that, following the sermon, numbers

of women re-examined their priorities, and some who were

full or part-time church employees resigned in order to give

higher priority to their homes and children. The Board of Elders

endorsed the sermon, and stated that the desire of the church

was 'to employ only those people whose employment would

have no negative impact on these God-ordained priorities'.

In subsequent years, MacArthur would often summarize the

scriptural teaching on married women with such words as:

Whether a woman works outside the home or not, God's

primary calling for her is to manage the home. It is the

most exalted place for a wife . . . far more crucial to the future of a woman's children than anything she might do in an outside job.!

From within the church problems also suddenly emerged

in that same year 1979. While the elders were supportive, and

the congregation flourishing, John had not noticed anything

untoward in the attitude of some of the additional pastoral

staff employed to support him. Perhaps a trait in his make-up,

noticed by a later associate pastor, 1s relevant: 'You were always

quick to believe the best about people—and the last to believe

anything negatrve—sometimes even to a fault." Trouble erupted

suddenly at a Tuesday morning staff meeting. MacArthur opened

the meeting, as he often did, by expressing his appreciation for

their help and friendship, only to be stopped dead by the words,

' Should a Wife be Employed Outside the Home?' in Successful Christian Parenting (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), pp. 224-6.

? Tom Pennington, speaking in 2009.

48 JOHN MacARTHUR: SERVANT OF THE WorD AND FLOCK

'If you think we are your friends you have another think com-

ing!' He then found that the speaker was part of a mutiny. The

experience shocked and devastated him. It was not so much the

personal criticism that hurt, but the realization that there was

disloyalty to the ministry at the level of the leadership. Those he

had taken to be his friends, whom he had personally mentored,

were undermining him behind his back. Such experiences, sadly,

are not unknown in Christian work.

On June 12, 1979, MacArthur wrote to Dr George Sweeting

of Moody Bible Institute, expressing his regret that something

of an emergency was preventing him speaking at an Institute

Conference in Chicago at that time.

It is not clear whether this letter relates to repercussions from

'Black Tuesday' (as the incident above came to be called), or to