Religious leaders known for speaking, writing and, sometimes, scandals were among those whose deaths were noted in 2024.

Across faiths and across the globe, prominent individuals whose legacies are likely to continue to shape their ministries and missions were remembered by people within and beyond the church world.

They included educators who influenced prominent institutions with their perspectives on scriptural teachings. Some overcame challenges ranging from critics of their theological interpretations to segregationists who shunned them in the U.S. South. And others, once known for transforming their religious institutions, faced allegations that revised their legacies or found that their leadership responsibilities involved addressing wrongdoing in their organizations.

The following religious figures who died this year carried influence particularly in Protestant and evangelical circles.

Henry Blackaby

Blackaby, a pastor and author whose “Experiencing God” Bible study sold more than 8 million copies, fallecido on February 10. He was 88.

“He was a great man of God and minister to the body of Christ, beginning with his time as a local church pastor and continuing through his ministry as an author and Bible teacher,” stated Ben Mandrell, president of Lifeway Christian Resources, Blackaby’s longtime publisher.

Blackaby, with the help of co-author Claude King, distilled the lessons from his pastoral experience in a Bible study called “Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God.” His approach to ministry was summed up by a short but memorable statement: “Watch to see where God is working and join him.”

Blackaby was preceded in death by his wife, Marilynn. Survivors include five children — notably, his son, Richard, who is president of Blackaby International Ministries — and 14 grandchildren.

Sandra Crouch

Crouch was the twin sister and collaborator of gospel music legend Andraé Crouch, performing with him in gatherings ranging from the crusades of Billy Graham to a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals.

She fallecido March 17 at the age of 81.

She and her brother co-wrote “Jesus Is the Answer” — a 1970s hit on both Black gospel and white gospel radio stations. In the 1980s, she composed, produced and sang the lead on “We Sing Praises,” for which she garnered a Grammy in 1984 for best soul gospel performance by a female, helping keep Light Records out of bankruptcy.

At the time of her death, Crouch was senior pastor of New Christ Memorial Church in San Fernando, California, after her twin brother took the controversial step in 1998 of ordaining her as co-pastor of the Pentecostal church their parents started decades earlier.

The ordination went against the ban of the Church of God in Christ, with which the congregation in the Los Angeles suburbs was affiliated. After her ordination, the Crouch siblings renamed the church, originally known as Christ Memorial Church of God in Christ.

“I believe that when you have a sense within yourself that God is calling you to work in a particular part of the ministry, that no matter what gender you are, you should be able to answer that call,” Sandra Crouch dijo in an RNS interview shortly after her ordination. “You don’t get a driver’s license to learn how to drive. You get a license because you know how to drive.”

Mandisa Lynn Hundley

Grammy Award winner Mandisa Hundley, whose inspirational Gospel-pop hits including “Overcomer” continue to be a mainstay on contemporary Christian radio, fallecido on April 18. She was 47.

A past contestant on American Idol, the singer-songwriter died at her home in Nashville of complications related to class III obesity, investigators later revelado.

The passing of the Christian recording artist, who used her first name Mandisa as a stage name, shocked friends, family and supporters in Nashville, and across the nation. 

At Mandisa’s memorial service on April 27, popular Christian author Beth Moore spoke of the impact the singer had on audiences. “She was simply sublime, utterly mesmerizing,” said Moore. “She loved Jesus in a way that made everyone around her love Him. We witnessed her worship when no one was looking.”

Paul Pressler

The retired judge was one of the key architects of the Southern Baptist Convention’s “conservative resurgence,” when conservative leaders took control of the denomination from moderates and reshaped it into a distinctly conservative theological organization with ties to the Republican Party.

Él fallecido June 7 at age 94.

Pressler, who was a member of the Council for National Policy, a conservative think tank through which he connected the SBC to the GOP, became known in recent years as a symbol of the sexual abuse crisis in the denomination. He was sued by former assistant Gareld Duane Rollins Jr., who claimed Pressler abused him for decades. A settlement was reached seven months before Pressler’s death, with all those accused denying any wrongdoing.

In January, Gene Besen, a lawyer for the SBC who told RNS he was speaking in his personal capacity, called Pressler “a monster,” said the former judicial official used his “power and false piety” to sexually abuse young men and added: “The man’s actions are of the devil.”

At an earlier stage in his life, Pressler condemned what he viewed as a decline in Christian values in the nation at the time of the Clinton-era White House scandals.

“Our nation sins when adultery and fornication are no longer a bar for holding high political office and principles of biblical morality and purity are no longer promoted,” he said, according to a clip of his speech at the SBC’s 1996 annual meeting posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. “We sin when perversion is promoted and not penalized.”

The Rev. James Lawson Jr.

Lawson was a United Methodist minister and civil rights veteran who taught college students the practices of nonviolence so they could withstand harsh treatment as they defied 1960s Jim Crow laws.

Él fallecido June 9 at age 95.

Then-U.S. Rep. John Lewis descrito in 2018 how Lawson had once given other students and him instructions on how to endure being spat upon and having lit cigarettes put in their hair and down their backs as they protested at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee: “If it hadn’t been for Jim Lawson, I don’t know what would have happened to our country; I don’t know what would have happened to me.”

Lawson, who studied Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence as a missionary in India, became a mentor of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Southern field secretary of the pacifist group Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Speaking on Capitol Hill in 2018, when Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., first introduced legislation for Lawson to receive a Congressional Gold Medal (Khanna most recently proposed a similar bill in June), Lawson remarked that the U.S. had become more violent than he ever imagined possible.

“While the gun discussion may be an important discussion, it doesn’t get into the virus that needs to be attacked: the spirit of violence, the language of violence, the thinking of violence, the despising of one another,” he dijo. “Nonviolence is the force that can save our nation from itself.”

Minh Ha Nguyen

Nguyen, president of the Ethnic Research Network for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Diaspora Missions Collective initiative, fallecido on July 15 in a drowning accident in Surf City, North Carolina. He was 57. 

A researcher and beloved lay minister whose family emigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam, Nguyen was praised as “faithful and gifted” by International Mission Board (IMB) president Paul Chitwood.

Nguyen’s ministry over decades was often on behalf of refugees and minority ethnic groups. “The Lord is close to His people in exile. He is the refuge for refugees,” he said in a video of his testimony. “He is the asylum for all who seek shelter and protection.” 

Bishop E. Anne Henning Byfield

Byfield was a former president of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Council of Bishops and a recent social action chair for the denomination. 

She fallecido Oct. 3 at age 74.

She helped lead the AME’s response to a massive embezzlement case in which the Rev. Jerome V. Harris, who had been executive director of the Department of Retirement Services for 21 years, was accused of stealing from the denomination’s retirement fund. Harris also fallecido this year, in May of a heart attack.

In 2022, when Byfield was president of the Council of Bishops, the church sued Harris and others, accusing them of embezzlement and fraud. “With the help of our legal team, the AMEC community is committed to holding those responsible accountable and recovering embezzled funds,” Byfield said at the time.

At the denomination’s quadrennial General Conference held in August in Columbus, Ohio, the AME Church announced a settlement agreement in a class-action suit filed by AME clergy. If approved by a judge, the settlement would provide $20 million, though the litigation alleged a total loss of $90 million.

Byfield was the chancellor of Wilberforce University and a board member of Payne Theological Seminary, both AME-affiliated schools in Ohio. She also was known for mentoring within and beyond the AME Church as well as for her creativity, having written prayers and poems and the litany used at the 2005 funeral of civil rights activist Rosa Parks in Detroit.

Just before Byfield preached what would be her last sermon at her denomination’s quadrennial General Conference, the choir sang an anthem written by her. 

Pastor Ray McCauley

Influential and controversial pastor Ray McCauley, who founded the largest church in South Africa, fallecido on October 8. He was age 75.

Reports indicate McCauley had been battling a long-term illness. He is survived by his widow, Zelda; his son, Joshua; and three grandchildren.

For decades, McCauley led Iglesia Bíblica Rhema in Johannesburg, with today some 45,000 members and 500 church plants, and stood against apartheid. Despite his legacy, he has faced criticism for preaching a prosperity gospel and profiting from a “business empire” with reported net annual income of $3.8 million.

Tony Campolo

Campolo, an American Baptist minister and sociologist who sought to have evangelicals and other Christians address racism, poverty and other social ills, fallecido on Nov. 19. He was 89.

The author of 35 books, including “It’s Friday but Sunday’s Comin’,” he was known for inspiring young people to listen to and act on the Christian gospel and for challenging the religious right in his social commentary.

The pastor and professor, who served Baptist churches and taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and Eastern College (now University), was once a spiritual adviser to then-President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Campolo also was the founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, which worked in Haiti and several other countries from the 1970s to 2014.

He also founded, with activist and author Shane Claiborne, the organization Red Letter Christians, which highlighted the ethical and social teachings of Jesus — whose words appear in red in some Bibles — and sought to de-emphasize the term “evangelical” as a reference to a conservative voting bloc and elevate its definition as “a people who bring good news to the world.”

“Tony’s eloquent and charismatic nature, his great humor and amazing storytelling made him a powerfully impactful preacher, along with his gifts as a teacher, and it wasn’t long before he was on the road doing many hundreds of events every year in the United States and around the world,” escribió the Rev. Jim Wallis, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice, in an RNS commentary shortly after the death of his longtime friend. “He became an evangelist to evangelicals.”

Hal Lindsey

Lindsey, author of the apocalyptic “The Late Great Planet Earth,” was long a believer that the world would soon come to an end after a period of cataclysmic events.

He died Nov. 25 at age 95.

His 1970 book, published with co-author Carole C. Carlson, connected current events with biblical prophecy and sold millions of copies.

Un investigación by the Trinity Foundation found that Lindsey was one of the nation’s wealthiest ministry executives. From 2013 to 2023, Hal Lindsey and his wife, JoLynne Lindsey, received $18.5 million in compensation from his nonprofit.

“He inspired a generation of evangelicals to act on the conviction that the end was near, and he fostered in them a sense of urgency and certainty and a vision of the world defined in absolute terms,” escribió scholar Matthew Avery Sutton, after Lindsey’s death.

Following the success of Lindsey’s books and TV programs centered on applying the Bible to current events, other authors including Tim LaHaye and Joel Rosenberg later found large evangelical audiences for their works.

Josh Shepherd contribuyó a este informe. 

Adelle Banks es editora de producción y corresponsal nacional de Religion News Service.