BATON ROUGE, LA—Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, a faithful preacher of the gospel and founder of the worldwide ministry and Bible college that bears his name, passed away this morning at about 7:30 a.m, surrounded by his family. He was 90. His death was announced by the SonLife Broadcasting Network.
Rev. Swaggart was hospitalized after suffering a cardiac event at his home on Father’s Day, June 15, 2025.
Rev. Swaggart was a devoted husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, pastor, evangelist, musician, singer, author, and broadcaster whose life’s work was dedicated to preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to a lost and hurting world. For nearly seven decades, he proclaimed the message of salvation to millions through his international ministry, his anointed music, and his unwavering commitment to the Cross.
Rev. Swaggart, a Pentecostal, founded the SonLife Broadcasting Network in 2010, which airs preaching, teaching, and gospel music generated from the non-denominational church he built and pastored since 1984, Family Worship Center. The twenty-four hour network includes his teaching programs, A Study In The Word, which has aired on television since 1974, and The Message of the Cross. Classic crusades also play on SBN, reflecting on a decade when the evangelist preached to massive crowds in nearly every major U.S. city and more than 40 different countries.
It was growing crowd sizes that forced the evangelist to change venues from the small rural churches he started in when he entered full-time ministry in 1955. A few years later, at the urging of his wife, Frances, he produced his first record, Some Golden Daybreak. Since then, Rev. Swaggart has recorded more than 200 gospel albums and sold over 20 million recordings worldwide. Among other awards and accolades, the most recent recognition for his music came from the Southern Gospel Music Association, inducting him into the Class of 2025 Hall of Fame. Some of Rev. Swaggart’s many signature songs include “There Is A River,” “Sometimes Alleluia,” and “God Took Away My Yesterdays.”
He was able to play some of his early records on radio, after he started up a 15-minute radio program in 1969 called The Campmeeting Hour, a program that 600 radio stations nationwide would put on the air. Today, Rev. Swaggart’s SonLife Radio Network is made up of more than 70 ministry-owned stations.
Throughout most of his 70-year ministry, Rev. Swaggart has written more than 60 books, thousands of pages of Bible commentary, and published The Evangelist magazine since 1970. But the printed work that meant the most to him was The Expositor’s Study Bible, which he completed in 2005. More than 7 million copies have been purchased or donated and distributed to pastors and Christian workers in other countries.
