Pastor’s Words Reach Far Beyond Valley

With about 8,000 people attending his services each Sunday, the Rev. John F. MacArthur Jr. is the pastor of one of Los Angeles County’s largest churches--Grace Community Church in Sun Valley.

While increasing that church’s size tenfold over 28 years, MacArthur also extended his influence nationwide in the sometimes combative field of conservative theology and church practice. MacArthur’s books, radio programs, audiotapes and speaking appearances at times lambaste fellow ministers who, by fundamentalist biblical standards, fall short of traditional Christian teachings and decorum.

Yet, because MacArthur rarely speaks out on public issues, his name has not been well-known to the public--except inadvertently during a series of historic court battles in the 1980s.

Grace Community Church and its ministers were charged in the nation’s first “clergy malpractice” lawsuit arising from the 1979 suicide of Kenneth Nally, 24, of Tujunga, who had received counseling at the church. Nally’s parents said the church’s clergy were guilty of malpractice because they had failed to insist that the young man seek additional counseling from a psychiatrist.

The case finally ended in 1989 when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the ruling against the Nallys by the California Supreme Court.

MacArthur was hardly slowed in that time. In 1985, he was named president of Los Angeles Baptist College in Newhall, and the name was promptly changed to The Master’s College. He launched The Master’s Seminary the next year, housing the all-male theological school on the church grounds in Sun Valley.

The son of a prominent pastor at Calvary Bible Church in Burbank, young MacArthur served there as an assistant briefly in the 1960s before assuming the pulpit of Grace Community Church in 1969 when Sunday attendance averaged about 700 people.