Matthew Tyler Meinecke is the founder and Chancellor of Grace Team University and the preacher behind Grace Team Seattle, an open-air preaching ministry in the Pacific Northwest. His charge — and the university's — is the one he has carried into the streets for years: preaching to the lost at any cost.

He is a street preacher before he is anything else in this work. With the Grace Team he preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ in the open air — at stadiums, festivals, transit stops, and street corners across Seattle and beyond — calling sinners to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and taking the reproach that comes with it.

The Case — and the Win

In 2022, Matthew was arrested in Seattle for preaching the gospel in public. He did not plead, settle quietly, or stop preaching: he fought the case on First Amendment grounds, and he won. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in his favor, and the case concluded with a settlement with the City of Seattle. The right to preach Christ in the public square — the right the team exercises every week — was vindicated in federal court.

Why He Built This University

The streets taught him what the churches confirmed: the lost are perishing and the church is starving, and both for the same cause — the Word of God is not being taught. Men die in their sins without ever hearing the gospel preached plain, and professing Christians sit for years unable to rightly divide the Scriptures they claim to believe.

Grace Team University is his answer: the whole Bible taught verse by verse — every book, every chapter — from the King James Bible, with an exam at the end of every teaching, and free to anyone with ears to hear. No tuition. No watered-down gospel. Sound doctrine, taught straight, meant to equip you, convict you, and send you — to your family, to your street, to the highways and hedges.