Matt Chandler Praises God for Clean MRI, Being Cancer Free for Over 5 Years Now
Matt Chandler, lead pastor of a multi-site church near Dallas, Texas, announced Monday that his most recent MRI brain scans returned positive results and he's been cancer free for over five years.
"Astounded again at God's faithfulness. Another clean MRI today. Hard to believe it's been over 5 years #jehovahrapha," Chandler wrote on Twitter Monday.
On Thanksgiving Day in 2009, Chandler, lead teaching pastor at The Village Church in Highland Village, collapsed in his living room from a seizure that resulted from a golf-ball size tumor in his right frontal lobe.
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The Christian Post reported that while his doctor was able to remove most of the malignant brain tumor through surgery, 18 months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment was still required. This was followed by regular MRI scans to monitor Chandler's progress every year.
In 2013, Chandler was featured in CP for being among a new generation of pastors preaching and teaching orthodox biblical Christianity and traditional biblical views on family and morality.
Chandler, who continued preaching through his chemo and radiation treatments, was 39 at the time and had witnessed The Village Church's multi-site weekly attendance grow from 160 to 10,000 in a span of 11 years.
Speaking about balancing orthodox biblical theology with being relevant to young generations and engaging the culture, Chandler told CP: "I don't think there's anything more relevant than orthodox Christianity because the second you move away from orthodox Christianity I don't believe you have Christianity any longer. You have some version of it but it ultimately lacks its power to transform, and lacks its ability to call sinners to be reconciled to God, because you can't call anybody a 'sinner.'"
"Ultimately," he added, "orthodox Christianity is the most relevant thing in the world and it and it alone has the power to transform lives. I start to lose track of what we're talking about if there's a version of Christianity that no longer says that sin exists and that people don't have to repent of it. At this point, you no longer have the cross of Jesus Christ."
The president of the Acts 29 Network for church planters and author of The Explicit Gospel, Chandler and his wife, Lauren, are the parents of three children and have spoken openly about the challenges they've faced with the brain tumor diagnosis and multiple miscarriages.
"Before Matt had the brain tumor, I had experienced a couple miscarriages," Lauren told CP at the Defined by God conference for pastors' wives in San Diego, California, in 2012. "I feel like the Lord really prepared me through that season of praising Him in the hurt, and really that was where my heart was resting, was in praising Him and not in questioning and doubting."
She continued, "He is big enough to hear my doubts and questions and my crying out to Him, literally, kind of like, 'Why?' Actually, He gave me a picture in my head of this heart being wrung out like a towel, and just this phrase that sometimes He wrings the worship and just this idea of the Lord squeezing our hearts and squeezing that worship out sometimes — that real deep worship.
"I really think that our hearts will not rest any other place but in worshipping Him and praising Him in the midst of heartaches and storms and lost and doubt and frustrations. But sometimes it's a fight. It's a fight sometimes."
Recently the Chandlers have posted weekly videos as part of a series for singles on marriage, sex and dating ahead of Matt Chandler's new book, Mingling of the Soul: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex and Redemption, which is now available and offers biblical insights on love and intimacy through the Song of Solomon.
