Craig Groeschel
| Craig Groeschel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 2, 1967 Houston, Texas |
| Occupation | Minister, author, speaker |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | weight: 190 height: 5'9" |
| Subject | Leadership Christian growth |
| Website | |
| http://www.life.church/leadershippodcast/ | |
Craig Groeschel (born December 2, 1967) is the founder and senior pastor of Life.Church, the largest church in the United States with twenty six locations in eight states. He is married to Amy and has six children. They live in Edmond, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, where Life.Church is based.
Groeschel was born in Houston, Texas and grew up in southern Oklahoma, attending Ardmore High School. After high school, he attended Oklahoma City University on a tennis scholarship and was a member of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and received a bachelor's degree in Marketing. Shortly thereafter, he met his wife Amy and the two married in 1991. That same year, Groeschel entered the ministry as an associate pastor in the United Methodist Church. He attended Phillips Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and earned a Master of Divinity degree. He was an associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City during the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.
In 1996, Groeschel and a handful of people started Life Covenant Church in a two-car garage. He later told Business Week that he started the process by performing market research of non-churchgoers and designed his church in response to what he learned. Groeschel’s non-traditional style was successful and attendance of Life Covenant grew rapidly, eventually evolving to become (as of September 2016) the largest church in the United States with twenty five Life.Church campuses. Groeschel began using video to deliver some of his sermons, when his fourth child was born in 2001, and he was unavailable for the Sunday service, discovering that the videos were popular with his churchgoers. In 2006, he set up a website called Mysecret.tv as a place for people to confess anonymously on the Internet. Groeschel also began delivering his services to the Second Life virtual world on Easter Sunday 2007.
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