Harvest Bible Chapel (James MacDonald)

Harvest Bible Chapel was founded in 1988 by Canadian-born James MacDonald, growing from an 18-person Bible study to a multi-site Chicago-area megachurch with as many as eight campuses and inclusion in Outreach magazine's 2008 list of the 100 fastest-growing US churches. MacDonald's national profile grew through the Walk in the Word broadcast ministry (1997; global TV from 2014) and the Harvest Bible Fellowship/Vertical Church Network, which planted over 200 affiliated churches before disbanding in 2017.

Governance concerns surfaced publicly in October 2013, when World magazine reported that former elders and staff described a "puppet elder board" and a "culture of fear and intimidation"; three elders who resigned over these concerns were publicly reprimanded and removed from membership, before Harvest and MacDonald apologized and lifted the discipline in 2014. The pattern escalated: in October 2018 MacDonald and Harvest sued two former members behind the critical blog The Elephant's Debt, plus journalist Julie Roys, for defamation. In December 2018 Roys published a World exposé alleging financial mismanagement and authoritarian leadership, which the church disputed. Facing a court order to unseal subpoenaed documents, the church dropped the suit in January 2019; MacDonald took an "indefinite sabbatical" on January 16, and after radio host Mancow Muller aired recordings on February 12, 2019 in which MacDonald joked about planting fabricated child pornography on the computer of Christianity Today's CEO to blackmail him, Harvest's elders took immediate action to end MacDonald's tenure that same day, a firing the church announced publicly the next morning. The executive committee resigned February 19; MacDonald's two sons and the assistant senior pastor followed, and the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability suspended the church's accreditation in March 2019. Roys subsequently reported church funds spent on a vintage Volkswagen Beetle for a Christianity Today editor and Harley-Davidson motorcycles for other associates. In April 2019 the outgoing elders apologized for the lawsuit, calling it "a sinful violation of 1 Corinthians 6." MacDonald and Harvest reached a multimillion-dollar arbitration settlement in October 2020, and the church separately fired two camp staff over hazing at Camp Harvest that year. Under lead pastor Jeff Bucknam (from 2021), the network has continued to contract; its Chicago Cathedral campus merged into a separate congregation, Renewal Church, in January 2026.