Craig Groeschel

Craig Groeschel (born December 2, 1967) is the founder and senior pastor of Life.Church, an American evangelical multi-site church with locations in 10 U.S. states.

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 January 2019) 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.

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 ChurchOnlinePlatform.com 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.

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