Louie Giglio is the American pastor of Passion City Church, located in Atlanta, Georgia. The founder of the Passion Movement, he is an author and public speaker.
Biography
Giglio was born in Atlanta on June 30, 1958. He grew up in the Atlanta suburb of Smyrna and graduated from Campbell High School. He later graduated from Georgia State University and earned a Master of Theology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Later he went to Grace Theological Seminary to pursue a Doctor of Ministry degree. After finishing seminary, Giglio and his wife Shelley, whom he married in 1986, began a weekly Bible study called Choice at Baylor University where he was doing graduate studies. After several years, over 10% of the Baylor student body was attending the weekly gathering, and Giglio's heart for the significance of the "university moment" was set. In 1995, Giglio decided to move from their home in Waco, Texas, to Atlanta, Georgia, because of his father's failing health, although his father died from a brain infection and a heart attack prior to their arrival in Atlanta. Around that time, during a flight from Texas to Georgia, Louie was inspired to start a national gathering of college students, which would later become Passion Conferences. The first Passion Conference was held in 1997 in Austin, Texas, with about 2,000 university students in attendance. Since then, Passion continues to host annual gatherings in the United States and around the world for college students. Until the founding of Passion City Church, Giglio was a longtime member of North Point Community Church. Giglio is the national-bestselling author of Not Forsaken, Goliath Must Fall, Indescribable: 100 Devotions about God & Science,The Air I Breathe: Worship as a Way of Life and I Am Not But I Know I Am: Welcome to the Story Of God. Giglio's latest release, Not Forsaken, debuted at number 3 on the Publishers Weekly Trade Paper Frontlist, and ranked number 6 on the May 2019 Religion Nonfiction bestsellers list. His previous trade release, Goliath Must Fall, made the Publishers Weekly bestseller list in May 2017 and was #31 in the list of the top 100 bestselling Christian books of 2017. His talks "Indescribable" and "How Great Is Our God" have been viewed by churches and individuals around the world. The "Laminin" clip from his message "How Great Is Our God" has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube.
Statements
On January 11, 2013, Giglio withdrew from the second Obama inauguration at which he due to deliver a benediction after it became known in a sermon he delivered in the 1990s he urged Christians to oppose the "aggressive agenda" of the gay rights movement. He described homosexuality as a "sin in the eyes of God, and it is sin in the word of God". In a conversation about racism with Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy and rapper Lecrae in June 2020, Giglio suggested that Americans replace the phrase "white privilege" with "white blessing". He said that the "blessing of slavery" had built up the framework for the world that white people live in. After social media backlash, Giglio issued an apology on Twitter for his comments.
Passion Conferences
Since 1995, the Passion Movement has hosted close to a million university students at events ranging from the first Passion Conference in Austin, Texas, in January 1997 which 2,000 people attended to "OneDay 2000", a gathering of 40,000 students for prayer and worship outside Memphis, Tennessee, to the seventeen-city Passion World Tour of 2008. Passion has hosted local campus events at leading universities in The U.S., as well as larger regional and national events in cities like Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. Notably, in January 2017, more than 55,000 students gathered for Passion 2017 in Atlanta's Georgia Dome for one of the largest Jesus-focused events in its history, and one of the last events to be held in the Georgia Dome prior to its November 2017 implosion. Each year, Passion Conference attendees are encouraged to give generously toward Christian outreach around the world: raising $785,000 to build a Syrian Hospital in 2016 and sponsoring 7,000 at-risk children through Compassion International in 2017. As a part of the Passion movement, Giglio also founded sixstepsrecords, a record company that works in partnership with Sparrow Records and is a subsidiary of Passion Conferences. This label is home to artists Crowder, Sean Curran, Kristian Stanfill, and Passion. In 2008, Giglio, with the help of Chris Tomlin, founded megachurch Passion City Church, a branch of Passion Conferences, in Atlanta, GA. Passion City Church would later expand to Cumberland, Georgia and Washington, D.C. in 2017.
