Joni Lamb, the co-founder and president of Daystar Television Network, one of the largest Christian television networks in the world, died on the morning of Thursday May 7, 2026. She was 65 years old.
Daystar confirmed her death in a statement shared across its social media platforms and to news outlets.
The network’s statement said:
“With heavy hearts, we share the news that Joni Lamb graduated to Heaven this morning. We know that she is in the presence of Jesus, reunited with Marcus, and receiving her reward for a beautiful life lived in surrender to the Lord.”
Lamb had been managing serious private health challenges for some time before a recent back injury compounded those existing conditions and led to a medical deterioration that her doctors and family did not anticipate.
The specific underlying health condition was not disclosed by the network or her family, consistent with their request for privacy.
“Despite the dedicated efforts of her medical team and the prayers of so many around the world, her condition worsened in the last few days,” Daystar’s statement said.
Her family is requesting prayers and privacy.
Who Was Joni Lamb?
Joni Lamb was born Joni Trammell on July 19, 1960, in Greenville, South Carolina.
She became involved in Christian television in the mid-1980s and met Marcus Daron Lamb, a televangelist and broadcaster from Cordele, Georgia, who would become her husband and her partner in one of the most significant Christian media ventures in American history. They married in 1982.
Together, Joni and Marcus Lamb co-founded the Daystar Television Network in 1993.
The network was based in Bedford, Texas, a suburb of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and what began as a local broadcasting operation grew steadily into something neither the founders nor the Christian media community had seen before.
By the time of her death, Daystar was reaching more than 110 million homes in the United States and broadcasting to more than 5 billion people worldwide, extending into nearly every country on earth.
Daystar claimed by 2010 to be the second-largest Christian television network in the world, trailing only Trinity Broadcasting Network.
That claim reflected a book value of approximately $230 million at the time, real money built from religious programming, viewer donations and the kind of sustained institutional growth that requires decades of consistent management and vision.
Joni’s specific roles within Daystar were multiple and overlapping throughout the network’s history. She was co-founder, president and executive producer.
She was also a visible on-air personality, a singer, an author, a talk show host whose signature program, Joni Table Talk, brought her into direct conversation with viewers across the network’s reach.
She described herself as someone driven by a simple message of surrender to God, and the program reflected that sensibility, personal, direct and oriented around what she understood as genuine faith rather than performance.
“Authentic, refreshing and relatable” was how Daystar’s promotional materials described her. The network’s success across three and a half decades suggests the audience agreed.
The Loss Of Marcus And What Joni Did Next
The partnership that built Daystar ended in November 2021, when Marcus Lamb died from COVID-related complications at the age of 63 or 64. His death was significant for multiple reasons, the obvious loss of a co-founder and the network’s original face, but also for the circumstances surrounding it.
Marcus Lamb had been a vocal advocate against COVID vaccines, and Daystar had hosted programming that questioned the vaccines’ safety during the height of the pandemic.
His death from COVID shortly after that programming generated significant public attention and criticism, none of which Joni Lamb addressed in ways that publicly departed from her husband’s positions.
After Marcus died, Joni continued as president of Daystar and kept the network operating at its established scale.
She had been part of every major decision the network had made since its founding.
The network was not simply her husband’s creation that she inherited, it was a joint creation that she had helped shape from the beginning, and she led it through the period following his death with the same directness she had always brought to her work.
She remarried in 2023, wedding Dr. Doug Weiss. The marriage drew attention within the Christian broadcasting community given the relatively short time since Marcus’s death, though Daystar continued operating through that transition without significant disruption to its programming or reach.
What The Network Said
The Daystar Board of Directors issued its own statement alongside the broader network announcement.
“Joni’s love for the Lord and for the people we serve shaped this ministry from the beginning,” the board wrote. “We grieve her loss, and we are grateful for the legacy of faith she leaves behind.”
The language is the specific language of an organization that is simultaneously mourning a founder and beginning the work of figuring out what comes next.
Daystar is a major institution, 110 million American homes, programming in nearly every country, decades of viewer relationships and donor relationships and infrastructure built around the specific vision and personality of its founders.
The death of its second co-founder, following the death of its first co-founder less than five years earlier, presents the kind of leadership and institutional continuity challenge that no statement can fully address.
Joni Lamb’s daughter-in-law Suzy Lamb, wife of her son Jonathan, paid tribute to Joni following her death despite what had been a publicly noted period of tension within the family.
The nature of those family dynamics had been a subject of discussion within the Christian media community in the period before Joni’s death, and Suzy’s tribute was received as a gesture of reconciliation and respect across the family.
Forty Years In Christian Broadcasting
Joni Lamb spent nearly four decades in front of a camera and behind the management of a major Christian media operation.
She entered Christian television in the mid-1980s, before the cable and satellite era had fully matured, and she was present and active as the landscape changed around her, from the era of VHS recording to satellite distribution to streaming, from the dominance of established networks to the fragmentation of digital media.
Throughout that period, Daystar maintained its position as one of the primary distribution points for Christian programming reaching audiences who might not encounter those messages through other channels.
Hospitals, nursing homes, international communities, and households in every part of the world were among those the network specifically identified as core parts of its audience.
The reach of 5 billion people, claimed at time of death, reflects programming that extended far beyond American evangelical media, into contexts where Christian broadcasting carried a different kind of cultural weight.
She described the animating purpose of her work in consistent terms throughout her career. Sharing a message of surrender to God that transforms lives.
Whether in an interview, a Joni Table Talk episode or a fundraising appeal, that framing was the constant.
The Daystar Television Network will continue operations. What her death means for its long-term leadership and direction will emerge in the months ahead.
Her family has asked for prayers and privacy as they process a loss that was, by the network’s own account, sudden in its final progression even if the underlying health challenges had been present for some time.
Joni Lamb was 65 years old. She died on the morning of May 7, 2026, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of North Texas, where she and Marcus had built the network more than thirty years before.
