Childhood, education, and early ministry McGee was born in
Hillsboro, Texas, to itinerant parents, John McGee and Carrie McGee (née Lingner). His father held many jobs, his last one being an engineer at a cotton mill in Oklahoma, After his father's death, Vernon's family relocated to Tennessee. Before entering the ministry, Vernon worked as a bank teller. After attending
Southwestern at Memphis where he majored in Greek, and
Master of Theology and
Doctor of Theology degrees from
Dallas Theological Seminary. McGee's ordination occurred on June 18, 1933, at the Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee. McGee became the pastor of the
Church of the Open Door in downtown
Los Angeles in 1949, succeeding
Louis T. Talbot (1889–1976). That same year, McGee gave one of the daily invocations at
Billy Graham's two-month-long
Christ for Greater Los Angeles Campaign. In 1952, McGee was asked by evangelist and university president
John Brown, owner of KGER radio station (now
KLTX) in
Long Beach, California, to take over a radio program (started in 1950 by
young-Earth creationist
Harry Rimmer, whom McGee admired) to which listeners could send in questions that were answered on the air. In the next year, 1953, another family tragedy occurred. McGee's mother was killed after being struck by an intoxicated driver in Pasadena. McGee did not press charges against the driver and only requested of the judge that justice be done. This story was told in Thru the Bible, Vol. 29: The Prophets (Jonah/Micah), Chapter 3: "The Prophet's Third Message." By 1955, McGee had a well-publicized break with the
Presbyterian Church, in which he claimed that the church's "liberal leadership [had] taken over the machinery of the presbytery with a boldness and ruthlessness that is appalling." This
Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy within the Presbyterian church had been growing since the 1920s. It was during this time that a large number of nondenominational evangelical Protestant churches, such as the
Moody Church in Chicago, had begun to appear across the U.S. After retiring from the pastorate at the Church of the Open Door in 1970, McGee devoted his remaining years to the
Thru the Bible Radio Network. He also served as chairman of the Bible department at the
Bible Institute of Los Angeles and as a visiting lecturer at
Dallas Theological Seminary.
Thru the Bible In 1967, he began broadcasting the
Thru the Bible radio program (
TTB). In a systematic study of each book of the
Bible, McGee took his listeners from
Genesis to
Revelation in a two-and-a-half-year "Bible Bus trip", as he called it. He had earlier preached a "Through the Bible in a Year" series of sermons, each devoted to one chapter of the Bible, at the Church of the Open Door. After retiring from the pastorate in January 1970, and realizing that two and a half years was not enough time to teach the whole Bible, McGee completed another study of the entire Bible in a five-year period. At the time of McGee's death, the
Thru the Bible program aired in 34 languages, but has since been translated into over 100 languages. It is broadcast on
Trans World Radio throughout the world every weekday. McGee advocated
creationism and upheld the literal interpretation of the
first chapter of the
Book of Genesis, interpreting the six "days of creation" to six 24-hour periods of time. Recurring themes in the
TTB broadcasts were the doctrines of
Sola fide (salvation through faith alone) and assurance (theology)|[absolute] assurance of salvation, or
eternal security, which proclaims that once a person sincerely accepts Christ as personal savior, there is nothing they can do, no sin they can commit, that will forfeit their salvation. He often spoke of the days of societal
apostasy in Christianity and
secularism that he believed he was witnessing during his lifetime, warning that spiritual apostasy was always the first of the three stages leading to the fall of nations, commonly observed throughout the Bible, the second and third being, respectively,
immorality and
political anarchy. Frequently in
TTB broadcasts, McGee would tell anecdotes, many from personal recollection, about prominent evangelical Christian ministers from the past century, such as
G. Campbell Morgan,
Lewis Sperry Chafer,
Mel Trotter, and
Dwight L. Moody and some of his successors at the Chicago Moody Church, such as
R. A. Torrey and
Harry A. Ironside. McGee also frequently referenced favorite Bible passages in his sermons, such as
Galatians 6:7 (
Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap). The continued success of the long-running
TTB program has been attributed to McGee's oratorical abilities, folksy manner, and distinctive accent, as well as his insistence on maintaining the original mission, which was to spread the Scriptures with consistency of message. During one of his programs he chuckled that one of his listeners said he talked like the cartoon character Huckleberry Hound.
Beliefs, teachings, and writings McGee received his advanced degrees from the
Dallas Theological Seminary. Many Bible colleges were modeled after the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Dwight L. Moody, whom McGee often spoke of in his sermons, was influential in preaching the imminence of the Rapture, which is important to
Dispensationalism. McGee opposed the viewpoints of
Fatalism and Absolute
Predestination in Calvinism. McGee rejected the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine that Peter went to and founded the Church in
Rome, asserting, rather, in many sermons that the Church in Rome was founded by
Paul. McGee often argued for the distinction to be made between the "false" Roman Catholic Church and the
Early Church, particularly in regard to the latter's role in developing the
New Testament of the
Bible. McGee was a frequent and popular summer conference speaker at the Cannon Beach Christian Conference Center in
Cannon Beach, Oregon.
Death McGee continued many speaking engagements after he retired, including throughout a bout of cancer from which he fully recovered. However, a heart problem surgically treated in 1965 resurfaced, and he died in his chair in 1988. Since his death, the five-year program of
Thru the Bible has continued to air on over 800 radio stations in North America and is broadcast worldwide in more than 130 languages via
radio,
shortwave, and the
Internet. An obituary distributed by the
Associated Press reported that McGee died of heart failure at a nursing home in Templeton, California, at age 84. His wife, Ruth, died in 1997 after suffering from
dementia for nearly a decade.
Recognition McGee was posthumously inducted into the
National Religious Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1989. ==Education and areas of service==