Hal Lindsey

A life given to the Word

Harold Lee “Hal” Lindsey was born in Houston, Texas on November 23, 1929. He was born again in January 1955, at the age of twenty-five, reading a Gideon New Testament while working as a tugboat, crew boat and ferryboat captain on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Boothville, Louisiana.

What followed was seven years of study. Under Pastor Robert B. Thieme, Jr. at Berachah Bible Church in Houston, Hal went verse by verse through every book of the New Testament and most of the Old. In 1958 he entered Dallas Theological Seminary, majoring in New Testament Greek and minoring in Biblical Hebrew. Graduating from the four-year program in 1962 required him to translate the entire New Testament from Greek into English — and he went on using his own translation for the rest of his life.

Ordained first by Pastor Thieme and again by Dr. J. Dwight Pentecost, Hal spent the 1960s with Campus Crusade for Christ: director of all its West Coast ministries from 1962, headquartered at UCLA, then National Evangelist from 1966, speaking across North America. In 1969 he resigned to found the J.C. Light and Power House, a Bible training school in a former fraternity house next door to UCLA, where he taught and trained Christian ministers and workers.

In 1970, at forty, he wrote The Late Great Planet Earth. The New York Times named it the bestselling non-fiction book in the world for the decade of the 1970s. Tens of millions of copies are in print in more than fifty translations, and by the ministry’s estimate more than two million people have come to Christ through reading it. More than twenty books followed, several of them bestsellers, and for a stretch in 1973 three of them sat on the New York Times list at the same time.

From 1971 until 2007 he led teaching tours to Israel and baptized thousands of believers in the Jordan River. He founded Tetelestai Christian Fellowship in 1983 and pastored it until 1995. He hosted a weekly live call-in Bible program across 65 radio stations from 1984 to 1997, answering questions on the air from Christians and non-Christians alike. In 1989 the California Graduate School of Theology awarded him a Doctor’s Degree.

In 1995 Hal stepped down from the pastorate to give himself to the Church at large — through television, through his writing, and later through HalLindsey.com. The Hal Lindsey Report began in 2006 and ran until his retirement from television in 2019. Every dollar of production and broadcast cost was paid by contributions from what he called his “TV congregation.” He always said it was by the grace of God that he never begged for donations or used give-away gimmicks to raise money.

Hal was called home to his Savior on November 25, 2024, at the age of ninety-five.

His teaching is still here, and it is still free: the complete verse-by-verse study of Revelation, decades of broadcasts, and thousands of articles. That was always the point.

Preach the Gospel at every opportunity, by the most effective means, to the most people

That was Hal’s stated priority for his ministry, and it remains ours. The Apostle Paul described the same priority when he wrote to the believers in Rome:

Hal Lindsey Media Ministries exists to keep that teaching in front of as many people as possible. The Bible studies, transcripts, broadcast archive and weekly articles on this site are available at no charge, to anyone, anywhere. The ministry is supported entirely by the gifts of those who value the teaching — never by pressure, and never by gimmicks.