C.J. Mahaney | |
---|---|
Born | September 21, 1953 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Pastor |
Spouse | Carolyn |
Religion | Reformed Christianity |
Church | Sovereign Grace Church |
Charles Joseph Mahaney is an American Christian minister. He is the senior pastor at Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville, and was formerly president of Sovereign Grace Ministries, now known as Sovereign Grace Churches. He was one of the founding pastors and leaders of Covenant Life Church, in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Under Mahaney's leadership, Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville is a member of Sovereign Grace Churches and works with the Southern Baptist Convention for training and Christian mission work. Mahaney resigned from the presidency of Sovereign Grace Ministries in 2013 in order to plant Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville.
A 2012 class-action sex abuse lawsuit was filed against Sovereign Grace Ministries and listed Mahaney as a defendant. The lawsuit was dismissed due to the statute of limitations; Mahaney released a public statement explicitly denying all claims in the suit. [1] [2]
Mahaney was born in Maryland into a Catholic household, the middle child of five. He was the son of a metalworker in Takoma Park, Maryland. [3] As a child, he was more interested in sports than God. [3] Mahaney attended Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. He reports having been converted to Protestantism in 1972 at age 18 by a friend who shared his faith. He says that a newspaper ad motivated him to join a local prayer meeting known as Take and Give, which evolved into Covenant Life Church. [3]
In 1974, aged 20, Mahaney had met Larry Tomczak, with whom he led and taught a large local prayer group named Tag And Give (TAG) started by Lydia Little. He says his only reading in theology at that time had consisted of the Bible and The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. [3]
In 1977, Mahaney became senior pastor of what had evolved into Covenant Life Church. He cites his reading of the works of 19th century Baptist leader Charles H. Spurgeon and the Reformed theology of John Calvin as influences. [3]
Mahaney was the senior pastor of Covenant Life Church for 27 years before handing the senior pastor role to Joshua Harris on September 18, 2004. In 2012 he planted a church on the east side of Louisville, Kentucky. [4]
In June 2011 Mahaney voluntarily took a leave of absence for self-examination after charges were leveled against him by a former Sovereign Grace pastor. [5] [6] [7] His leave occurred in the wake of accusations from a former top Sovereign Grace pastor who distributed hundreds of e-mails and internal church documents that portrayed Mahaney as focusing on the sins of others below him in the church hierarchy. After Mahaney's departure, the Sovereign Grace board gave a strong vote of confidence to him, saying that he is "a qualified minister of the gospel and this board approves his pastoral and teaching ministry." [8] After an extensive outside review by Ambassadors of Reconciliation [9] of the charges brought against him and affirmation of the Sovereign Grace board, [10] Mahaney continued to serve as president of Sovereign Grace Ministries. Covenant Life Church, the church Mahaney co-founded and pastored for 27 years left Sovereign Grace Ministries. [11]
In 2012, a class action lawsuit was filed against Sovereign Grace Ministries alleging that leaders including Mahaney covered up child sexual abuse. [12] [13] The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice in May 2013. The Maryland Court of Appeals also dismissed the case after finding that the Plaintiff's lawyer had filed the appeal too early. [2] Since the case was dismissed, a former volunteer at CLC, Nathaniel Morales, 56, was convicted of sexually abusing three young boys between 1983 and 1991. During the trial, Mahaney's brother-in-law, former pastor Grant Layman, admitted that he did not report sex abuse claims to authorities but tried to handle it within the church. [14]
Mahaney co-hosted the Together for the Gospel conference with Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan and Albert Mohler. [15] It was announced that he was pulling out of the 2014 T4G due to ongoing lawsuits against Sovereign Grace Ministries. [16] He returned in 2016 but withdrew again in 2018. [17]
In February 2016, Mahaney was the subject of a Washingtonian magazine article, titled The Sex Scandal That Devastated a Suburban Megachurch - Inside the Rise and Fall of Sovereign Grace. [18]
Mahaney is currently the senior pastor of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville, a church he planted in the fall of 2012 with Bob Kauflin, Brian Chesemore, Jeff Purswell, and Gary Ricucci. He resigned from the presidency of Sovereign Grace Ministries in April 2013 while planting the church. [4]
Mahaney met Carolyn Layman in the 1970s, while he was teaching at Take and Give and she was working as a secretary at a Christian conference ministry in Sarasota, Florida, and they soon married. Mahaney has one son and three daughters.
Reformed Baptists, Particular Baptists and Calvinistic Baptists, are Baptists that hold to a Calvinist soteriology. Depending on the denomination, Calvinistic Baptists adhere to varying degrees of Reformed theology, ranging from simply embracing the Five Points of Calvinism, to accepting a modified form of federalism; all Calvinistic Baptists reject the classical Reformed teaching on infant baptism as a sign and seal of the covenant of grace. The first Calvinistic Baptist church was formed in the 1630s. The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith is a significant summary of the beliefs of Reformed Baptists. The name "Reformed Baptist" dates from the latter part of the 20th century to denote Baptists who retained Baptist ecclesiology, and reaffirmed Reformed biblical theology, such as Covenant theology.
John Stephen Piper is an American Baptist theologian, pastor, and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Piper taught biblical studies at Bethel University for six years (1974–1980), before serving as pastor for preaching and vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church (Converge) in Minneapolis for 33 years (1980–2013).
Joshua Eugene Harris is an American former Evangelical Christian pastor. Harris' 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, in which he laid out his ideas concerning a Biblically based Christian approach to dating and relationships, helped shape purity culture for many Christian millennials. Harris was lead pastor of Covenant Life Church, the founding church of Sovereign Grace Ministries, in Gaithersburg, Maryland from 2004 until 2015. In 2018, Harris disavowed I Kissed Dating Goodbye and discontinued its publication. The following year, Harris announced that he was separating from his wife, had "undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus" and had given up on his Christian faith.
Sovereign Grace Churches is a group of Reformed, neocharismatic, evangelical and confessional Christian churches primarily located in North America. It has variously been described as a family of churches, a denomination, and an apostolic network. It has also been described as a cult, due to its unorthodox teachings, systemic control of members, and allegations of covering up child sex abuse. As well as the North American congregations, there are also congregations in Australia, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Great Britain, Germany and Mexico.
Covenant Life Church is a non-denominational, evangelical megachurch in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Established in 1977, it spawned other churches and was the flagship church of Sovereign Grace Churches until it left the group in December 2012.
Richard Albert Mohler Jr. is an American evangelical theologian, the ninth president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and host of the podcast The Briefing, where he daily analyzes the news and recent events from an evangelical perspective.
The First Baptist Church of Hammond is an Independent Fundamental Baptist megachurch in Hammond, Indiana, a suburb of Chicago. It is the largest church in the state of Indiana, and in 2007 was the 20th largest in the United States. Though founded in 1887 by Allen Hill, it was under Jack Hyles' leadership from 1959–2001 when it became one of the megachurches in the United States and during the 1970s had the highest Sunday school attendance of any church in the world. In 1990, the church had a weekly attendance of 20,000. It also operates Hyles-Anderson College, a non-accredited institution established for the training of pastors and missionaries, and two K-12 schools, called City Baptist Schools and Hammond Baptist Schools. John Wilkerson is the senior pastor at First Baptist Church.
Mark A. Driscoll is an American evangelical pastor and author. He is the founder and primary contributor of RealFaith ministries. He is also the senior and founding pastor of Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, which was founded in 2016.
Complementarianism is a theological view in some denominations of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam, that men and women have different but complementary roles and responsibilities in marriage, family life, and religious leadership. Complementary and its cognates are currently used to denote this view. Some Christians interpret the Bible as prescribing complementarianism, and therefore adhere to gender-specific roles that preclude women from specific functions of ministry within the community. Though women may be precluded from certain roles and ministries, they are held to be equal in moral value and of equal status. The phrase used to describe this is "ontologically equal, functionally different".
Mark E. Dever is a theologian and the senior pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and the president of 9Marks, a Christian ministry he co-founded "in an effort to build biblically faithful churches in America. Dever also taught for the faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and also served for two years as an associate pastor of Eden Baptist Church in Cambridge."
Eddie Lee Long was an American pastor who served as the senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a megachurch in unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, from 1987 until his death in 2017.
Jack Graham is the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas.
Larry Tomczak is a Christian evangelist and author. He co-founded People of Destiny International, a network of churches, and was editor of People of Destiny magazine. Tomczak is the author of several books, most prominently Clap Your Hands!, an autobiography.
New Calvinism, also known as the Young, Restless, and Reformed Movement, is a movement within conservative Evangelicalism that reinterprets 16th century Calvinism under contemporary US values and ideologies.
William Graham Tullian Tchividjian is a pastor and author of more than a half dozen books about Christianity and current issues, including One Way Love and It is Finished. He is a grandson of Christian evangelist Billy Graham.
New Birth Missionary Baptist Church is a charismatic Christian Baptist megachurch in Stonecrest, DeKalb County, Georgia. Its senior pastor is Jamal Bryant since 2018.
David Joseph Platt is an American evangelical Baptist pastor. He was senior pastor at the Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, from 2006 to 2014. At the time he was the youngest megachurch pastor in the United States. From 2014 to 2017, Platt was president of the International Mission Board. He became pastor-teacher at McLean Bible Church in 2017. He is the author of the 2010 New York Times Best Seller Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.
Darrin Patrick was an American author and teaching pastor at Seacoast Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a pastor of The Journey, a fellowship of churches in St. Louis, Missouri, which he founded in 2002. He served as the chaplain to the St. Louis Cardinals and was the author of several books. A prominent figure within New Calvinism, he was the vice-president of the Acts 29 Network, an international church planting organization, and a council member of The Gospel Coalition.
Matt Chandler is an American Baptist evangelical Christian pastor. He is the senior pastor of Village Church, based in Flower Mound, Texas and the executive director of the board of the Acts 29 Network.
Together for the Gospel (T4G) was a biennial conference for Christian leaders. It was formed in 2006 by Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, C. J. Mahaney, and Albert Mohler. These men were all associated with the New Calvinism movement although they differed on issues such as baptism and charismatic gifts. The first conference also included John Piper, John F. MacArthur, and R. C. Sproul as speakers. The stated aim of the conference was to "encourage and aid ministry leaders with three days of biblical preaching, fellowship, books, and singing." It was held in Louisville, Kentucky. Other speakers included Matt Chandler, Kevin DeYoung, and David Platt.