Dr. John D. Garr is the founder and president of Hebraic Christian Global Community, an international, transdenominational, multiethnic organization that seeks to network believers who want to restore the church to the Hebraic foundations of the Christian faith. He is also chancellor of Hebraic Heritage Christian College, an Atlanta, GA-based institution that features a curriculum which is totally based on Christianity's Hebrew roots and is delivered to students around the world by an Internet on-demand learning management system.
Dr. Garr's teaching ministry is unique in that it combines excellent scholarship with intense spirituality and personal integrity. He is a theologian with extensive and diversified training. At the same time, he is a minister with a history of more than forty years of wide-ranging service to the international church. An academician with a pastor's heart, he contextualizes the great central truths of orthodox Christian faith in terms that laypersons can understand and incorporate into their lives. His ministry features teaching and preaching that challenges believers to a faith that is manifest in biblically sound, Christocentric lifestyles, grounded in the Hebraic heritage of Jesus and the apostles.
Garr's academic credentials include a Bachelors Degree in Theology, a Masters Degree in Theology (summa cum laude), a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Church Administration, and a Doctor of Theology degree from Evangelical Theological Seminary. Besides his academic career as a seminary chancellor and professor, he has also had a long and successful ministerial career, serving the Christian community with distinction in many capacities, which include evangelist, pastor, overseer, presbyter, missionary, church planter, conference speaker, and teacher.
Dr. Garr serves as editor and publisher of Restore!, the official journal of Hebraic Christian Global Community. He has also contributed hundreds of essays and theological studies to various magazines and journals around the world. He also writes, edits, and publishes Hebraic Insight, a Bible-study journal that encourages inductive Hebraic learning by individuals, families, study groups, and congregations. A prolific writer, he has authored many books. His works focus on the historical and theological emergence of Christianity from the matrix of biblical Judaism, the subsequent Hellenization and Latinization of the church, the resultant Judaeophobia, anti-Judaism, and anti-Semitism that have characterized the church for nearly eighteen centuries, and the work of restoration that has been underway for the past five centuries to recover the church's biblical heritage.
For many years, Dr. Garr has cultivated unity in the international Christian church by promoting dialogue on polarized issues in theology and polity through the biblical concept of unity in the pluriformity of diversity rather than the traditional concept of unity through uniformity and credalism. He believes that a historically over-Hellenized and over-Latinized church needs to recover its inherent Hebraic ideals in order to be more in the sense of being more like Christ, its Jewish Lord, and in order to bring true maturity into the lives of believers.
Dr. Garr has been married to the former Pat Hall (B.S. Business Administration, Covenant College) of Knoxville, Tennessee, for the past forty-five years. They have three sons, John David II (M.S. Mechanical Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, M.S. Environmental Engineering, University of Alabama, engineer and flight controller for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas), Timothy Daniel (B.S. Chemical Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, engineer and production specialist for Dow Chemical Company in Houston, Texas), and Stephen Michael (Pharm.D., University of the Sciences at Philadelphia, neo-natal clinical pharmacist, Lubbock, Texas). They have four grandchildren, John David III, Lillian Faith, Daniel Caleb, and Benjamin Boyd. The Garrs reside in Atlanta, Georgia.
