Matt Chandler
Matt Chandler was born on June 20, 1974, in Seattle. An American citizen, he pursued his education at Hardin–Simmons University, a period of study that preceded his entry into a life of ministry and theological work.
Chandler's career has taken shape across several overlapping occupations within American evangelical Christianity. He works as a pastor, preacher, theologian, writer, and missionary, roles that together reflect a broad engagement with church life and Christian thought. His work is conducted in English and is associated with the Reformed Christianity movement, a tradition that has shaped the context in which he operates. That association connects his preaching, writing, and pastoral work to the wider world of Reformed evangelical Christianity in the United States.
As a writer, Chandler has contributed to the literature of American evangelical Christianity in a way that aligns with his other roles. As a preacher and pastor, he has addressed congregations within that tradition. His work as a missionary places him in contexts that extend beyond the local church. Taken together, these occupations describe someone whose professional life is thoroughly embedded in the structures and conversations of evangelical Protestant Christianity, all of it grounded in his association with the Reformed Christianity movement.
Chandler holds American citizenship and continues to work as a pastor, theologian, preacher, writer, and missionary within the Reformed evangelical tradition. His career, rooted in his identity as an American evangelical Christian pastor, has been carried out in English across these multiple dimensions of ministry. Born in Seattle in 1974 and educated at Hardin–Simmons University, he remains active across the range of occupations that have defined his public life.
Quotes by Matt Chandler
Matt Chandler's insights on:
I preach hard against that idea and plead with people to make war against sin. I tell them it’s not going to be easy. Some people are meant to wrestle with their sin a long time before God brings them to freedom, but let’s wrestle. Let’s fight. Let’s do something besides just complain.
The reconciling gospel is always at the forefront of the church’s social action, because a full belly is not better than a reconciled soul.
Until Christ is our treasure, any other motivation we have to suffer for him is a fool’s errand.
What made me love Christ wasn’t that all of a sudden I figured out how to do life. What made me love Christ is that when I was at my worst, when I was at my lowest point, when I absolutely could not clean myself up and there was nothing anybody could do with me, right at that moment, Christ said, “I’ll take that one. That’s the one I want.
Everybody knows something’s broken in the world. But illogically, foolishly, we are looking for fixes from broken people with broken ideas in broken places.
What does it look like to live life in a manner worthy of the gospel? It looks like dying with Christ to one’s self and being raised in Christ to walk in the newness of life with our brothers and sisters. It means living grace-filled lives that grant patience and mercy and gentleness for the spiritual journeys of others and a respect for the differences and idiosyncrasies we all bring to the Lord’s table.
We carry an insidious prosperity gospel around in our dark, little, entitled hearts. We come to the throne and say, “I’ll do this, and you’ll do that. And if I do this for you, then you’ll do that for me.
The general confusion is that our moral behavior is what justifies us before God. Most of us would never say that with our mouths but we feel that lie in our heart and believe it in our minds. You can be morally upright and not be a worshipper of Christ at all.
If you’re a church person and not a Jesus person, my heart hurts for you. It’s like being engaged and never getting married. It’s miserable.
When we live with a lack of anxiety about the future, even in those tightrope kind of times, we communicate the truth that our God is indeed worthy of our trust.