Chuck Swindoll has said that pastors “should never retire,” and the 89-year-old won’t be stepping away from the pulpit at the same time as his church welcomes his successor.
Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas, announced this week that Swindoll will transition to founding pastor, continuing to evangelise on Sundays, as Jonathan Murphy becomes its senior pastor on May 1.
“This is a really unique way of expanding, of ‘moving into one other chapter,’ as we frequently call it here,” said Swindoll in a video clip alongside Murphy, a Belfast-born preacher who currently serves as chair of pastoral ministries at Dallas Theological Seminary.
With over 60 years in ministry, Swindoll is one in all the oldest and most influential megachurch pastors within the country, and he has been vocal about his plans to stay lively in ministry until his death.
“One of my great goals in life is to live long enough to where I’m within the pulpit, preaching my heart out, and I die on the spot, my chin hits the pulpit—boom!—and I’m down and out,” he said at age 75. “What a solution to die.”
In his recent role, Swindoll stays Stonebriar’s regular preacher, while Murphy leads day-to-day ministries and fills in to evangelise when needed, based on the church’s announcement.
“We have the founding pastor with the ability to proceed to evangelise so long as the Lord would have, and I can have a season as a senior pastor taking responsibility for the staff and caring for them and the ministry direction of the church at large,” said Murphy, who has been a guest preacher at Stonebriar and serves on the board for Swindoll’s long-running radio ministry Insight for Living.
The two have been preparing for the transition for several years, with Swindoll befriending and mentoring Murphy. The church’s elder board began considering him as a senior pastor candidate in 2022 and decided last month to bring him into the brand new role.
Swindoll will remain an elder, and Murphy will even join the elder board. “At the suitable time in the longer term,” the church said, Murphy will even turn out to be the church’s primary preacher.
Warren Bird and William Vanderbloemen, the authors of Next: Pastoral Succession That Works, wrote that an “intentional overlap plan” appears to be the strongest model for transition.
The need for pastors to make plans for his or her successors has only grown more urgent within the US as clergy age; 1 in 4 senior pastors plan to retire by 2030.
Last yr, Swindoll suffered a fall, experienced low blood pressure, and underwent an angiogram. He was away from the pulpit in January while recovering from an aortic valve procedure.
While president of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS), Swindoll helped found Stonebriar Community Church in 1998. A Texas native, Swindoll had graduated from DTS and commenced his pastoral profession within the Lone Star State within the Nineteen Sixties.
Stonebriar drew in 1,500 weekly attendees inside its first six months; CT dubbed it an “easy megachurch.” At its twenty fifth anniversary in 2023, the nondenominational evangelical church outside Dallas reported 3,700 members, 300,000 square feet of constructing space, and an annual budget of $17 million.
Swindoll is understood for his preaching. He has twice appeared on Baylor University’s rankings of only preachers, and a 2010 Lifeway Research survey of Protestant preachers found he was the country’s most influential preacher not named Billy Graham.
Murphy commended Swindoll and his congregation for his or her love for the word. “We speak about expository preaching, but I like that they’re expository listeners,” he said. “They come able to hear from God, to not be entertained.”
Despite Swindoll’s remarks that pastors shouldn’t retire, he has also said, “There’s nothing incorrect with retirement so long as you don’t stop living for God. You never retire from the Great Commission.”
