On Thursday, August 20, the elders of Grace Community Church unanimously named Nathan Busenitz senior pastor. They told the congregation on Sunday, one year to the day after John MacArthur’s memorial service.
Chris Hamilton, chairman of the elder board, called the vote unanimous and enthusiastic. “We’re absolutely persuaded that Nathan is the man that God has raised up for just this time.” Busenitz thanked the elders and the congregation, said Grace belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ, and called the church a sweet group of saints to sojourn with toward heaven. The résumé explains why the vote was not a surprise.
The House Man
Busenitz is 48. He grew up at Grace. His father, Irv Busenitz, was one of the first men MacArthur hired onto The Master’s Seminary faculty and later served as a vice president there. Nathan never left the campus. Bachelor’s from The Master’s College in 1999. M.Div. in 2002. Th.M. in 2005. Ph.D. in systematic theology in 2015. All four degrees from the same school.
He shepherded college students in Crossroads, co-pastored the Cornerstone fellowship group, and joined the elder board in 2007. From 2005 to 2009 he was MacArthur’s personal assistant. He researched and edited the books that marked the last stretch of MacArthur’s published work, including Strange Fire, Slave, One Perfect Life, and multiple New Testament commentaries.
He has preached from the Grace pulpit since 2008, taught at TMS since 2009, served as dean of faculty since 2016, and served as executive vice president of the seminary. After MacArthur died on July 14, 2025, the elders made him interim staff pastor. A year later they dropped the interim. He is leaving the seminary post to take the pulpit. He and his wife, Beth, have four children.
What He Believes
Busenitz is not a mystery. He has spent twenty years putting the theology Grace already teaches into historical theology, so nobody can dismiss it as a twentieth-century novelty.
He is a cessationist. His 2005 Th.M. thesis asked whether Polycarp was a Pentecostal and answered no. He later wrote “What Cessationism Is Not,” arguing that the sign gifts authenticated revelation that is now closed, and that modern tongues and prophecy cheapen the Spirit by redefining the gifts downward. He helped build Strange Fire. Charismatics who expected Grace to soften after MacArthur will be disappointed.
He is a Calvinistic dispensationalist. He has taught that the early church expected a literal millennial kingdom and has sat with Mike Riccardi to defend the Israel-church distinction as exegesis, not a Scofield hobby. The current pulpit series is on the end times. That is the same eschatology in a younger voice.
He is a sola fide partisan. Long Before Luther exists to prove that justification by faith alone was not invented in 1517. MacArthur wrote the foreword. Grace still treats the Reformation as a recovery, not an upgrade, and Busenitz is the historian who made that case.
He is patriarchal in the ordinary Master’s sense. He edited Men of the Word. He contributed to Men Counseling Men. Nobody at Grace is about to get a woman in the pulpit.
The most politically useful thing he ever put his name on is God vs. Government, the 2022 book with James Coates. Busenitz defended Grace’s decision to reopen against California’s COVID orders. He wrote that whatever danger the virus posed, closing the church posed a greater one, and that America would have been spared the 2020 riots if churches had stayed open.Busenitz put it in print that the magistrate does not get to shutter worship because the health department panicked.
Johnson Guessed Wrong
In July 2025, days after MacArthur died, Phil Johnson told the congregation not to be dismayed if it took two years to name a permanent pastor. His suspicion was specific. It would be someone trained at Grace, sent out, proven in another pulpit, then called back. “Probably not someone who’s here now.”
They picked someone who is here now. They did it in thirteen months. They timed the announcement to the memorial.
Johnson assumed the next senior pastor would be a man who had already run a church somewhere else. Busenitz has never been the lone pastor of a congregation. He has been MacArthur’s assistant, MacArthur’s editor, a seminary professor, a Grace elder, and then the interim in the pulpit. The elders decided that was enough. They had watched him for a year. They already knew the man.
Austin Duncan was the other name people whispered. He held the college pulpit and the pastoral studies chair at TMS, then left last fall. Busenitz announced the departure. Critics later produced sermon comparisons with Dale Ralph Davis and called it plagiarism. Grace never used that word, and Duncan is not the pastor. Busenitz is.
Continuity
Busenitz has already said what he thinks this job is. In 2024 he warned that the great temptation in a generational handoff is apostasy. “Often a generation of faithful men dies, and the generation that comes after them does not share in the same convictions.” He said the attacks on the truth are coming from outside and from inside broader evangelicalism, and that the men who inherit the work cannot let their guard down. In a seminary video he stood in front of portraits of his father and MacArthur and said, “We have to get it right. Because if we don’t get it right, we’re squandering that with which we’ve been entrusted.”
Julie Roys will spend the next year calling him the keeper of a tainted legacy. The feminist pastor-hunters already have the script. He was not named in the Eileen Gray circus Evangelical Dark Web has already dismantled. He was not named in the later counseling and asbestos lawsuits. His public record is books, lectures, and a year in the interim pulpit. The complaint from that crowd is that he will not repent of being MacArthur’s man.
He will not. The elders did not ask him to. Grace had a year to look elsewhere. Johnson thought they would. They looked at the man who grew up in the pews, served MacArthur, taught the seminary’s church history, and held the pulpit for twelve months, and they made it official. Nathan Busenitz is not going to turn Grace Community Church into a different church. That is one reason they thought him the right man for the job.
