McLean Bible Church


McLean Bible Church is an evangelical independent Bible Church, multi-site megachurch with several locations in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. An average of 13,000 adults attend each weekend at the church's five campus locations: Tyson's Corner, Arlington County, Loudoun County, Prince William County and Montgomery County, Maryland. David Platt, former president of the International Missions Board, is the Lead Pastor- succeeding Lon Solomon in 2017.

History

Founding

McLean Bible Church was founded in 1961 by five families in Northern Virginia. Its first service was held on Easter Sunday at Chesterbook Elementary School in McLean with Pastor J. Albert Ford.

Pastor Lon Solomon

Senior Pastor Lon Solomon was born and raised in a Jewish home in Portsmouth, Virginia, before converting to Christianity in the spring of 1971. He graduated from the University of North Carolina with a B.S. in Chemistry. He then completed a Th.M. degree in Hebrew and Old Testament at Capital Bible Seminary in Lanham, Maryland. He completed graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, receiving a master's degree in Near Eastern Studies in 1979.
Solomon taught Hebrew and Old Testament at Capital Bible Seminary from 1975 to 1980. In 1980, he became the senior pastor at McLean Bible Church. Solomon has been on the board of Jews for Jesus since 1987, where he now serves as chairman of the board's executive committee.
In September 2002, Solomon was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve in his administration as a member of the President's Committee on Intellectual Disabilities. He received a Doctorate of Divinity degree from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in 2005. Solomon is the author of the books Brokenness: How God Redeems Pain and Suffering and The 23rd Psalm for the 21st Century.
In December 2017, Lon Solomon started his own ministry, Lon Solomon Ministries.

Pastor David Platt

In September 2017, David Platt was confirmed as the Pastor-Teacher, later "Lead Pastor", replacing Lon Solomon. That same year McLean Bible Church started cooperating in some aspects with the Southern Baptist Convention in areas of missions and church planting, but is not officially considered a "Southern Baptist Church." Under the leadership of Platt, McLean has also been the broadcast location for several Radical simulcasts. On June 2, 2019, McLean made national headlines when President Donald Trump made an unplanned visit. After playing golf nearby, President Trump appeared on-stage at the Tyson's Corner campus after communion where Pastor Platt prayed for him.