Craig Groeschel


Craig Groeschel is the founder and senior pastor of Life.Church, an American evangelical multi-site church with locations in ten U.S. states.

Early life and education

Groeschel 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 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.

Pastoral career

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 the largest Protestant church in the United States with 32 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. He started the free Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast in 2016;
Life.Church was named America’s Most Innovative Church by Outreach Magazine in 2007 and 2008. Life.Church innovations include its free resource library with sermons, transcripts, videos, artwork, and a team that develops free software like and YouVersion the Bible app, which had been downloaded over 200 million times as of December 2015, and hit 425 million downloads as of May 2020. As of 2015, Life.Church was listed on Newsmax's "top 50 megachurches of America", with approximately 100,000 people attending weekly.

Personal life

Groeschel is married to Amy and has six children and two grandchildren. They live in Edmond, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, where Life.Church is based..