He served Presbyterian churches in Decatur, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Cleburne, Texas, where he met and later married Ruth Inez Jordan.
McGee and his wife moved to Pasadena, California, where he accepted the pastorate at the Lincoln Avenue Presbyterian Church in 1941.
At the Lincoln Avenue Church, McGee started the Open Bible Hour radio program, which aired once per week.
[9] McGee became the pastor of the Church of the Open Door in downtown Los Angeles in 1949, succeeding Louis T. Talbot (1889–1976).
That same year, McGee gave one of the daily invocations at Billy Graham's two-month-long Christ for Greater Los Angeles Campaign.
[10] In 1952, McGee was asked by evangelist and university president John Brown, owner of KGER radio station (now KLTX) in Long Beach, California, to take over a radio program (started in 1950 by young-Earth creationist Harry Rimmer, whom McGee admired) to which listeners could send in questions that were answered on the air.
[18][failed verification] Frequently in TTB broadcasts, McGee would tell anecdotes, many from personal recollection, about prominent evangelical Christian ministers from the past century, such as G. Campbell Morgan, Lewis Sperry Chafer, Mel Trotter, and Dwight L. Moody and some of his successors at the Chicago Moody Church, such as R. A. Torrey and Harry A. Ironside.
McGee also frequently referenced favorite Bible passages in his sermons, such as Galatians 6:7 (Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap).
The continued success of the long-running TTB program has been attributed to McGee's oratorical abilities, folksy manner, and distinctive accent, as well as his insistence on maintaining the original mission, which was to spread the Scriptures with consistency of message.
Dwight L. Moody, whom McGee often spoke of in his sermons, was influential in preaching the imminence of the Rapture, [20] which is important to Dispensationalism.
An obituary distributed by the Associated Press reported that McGee died of heart failure at a nursing home in Templeton, California, at age 84.