Independent investigation confirms: Ravi Zacharias was guilty of sexual misconduct

How sad for everyone - the women, his family, the ministry, the gospel.

….I’ve not read the report—it’s out and it looks pretty detailed—the question I have is whether there were people who were looking the other way when they should have been seeing signs that all was not right.

This report should cause RZIM to shut down and use whatever assets they have to pay Ravi’s victims.

I think more Christian leaders need to think about castration.

I am sure I am not alone, but I have personally witnessed the way some well known evangelicals behave when they’re not in the public eye. They seem to think the command for humility doesn’t apply to them. They use people and then discard them without a moment’s thought. They misuse funds to feather their nests.

I could go on…but….

Zacharias was a gifted communicator, but I never like the way he kept talking about himself. And honestly, spas? What is a full-time minister of Christ doing owning spas? Urghh!

Give us names, Paul! Give us names …

….but massage parlors, really. He was also hiring the help from overseas, which indicates two other things; he wasn’t interested in U.S. accreditations, and he was interested in workers who might fear ICE and deportation if they spoke up about being abused.

(side note; OK, perhaps a pastor ought not be moonlighting as the owner of a spa, but I can see a place for Christians to operate them, if possible, in a way that honors God)

Back to the subject, I think that if we really knew, we’d be very shocked at the extent of sexual misconduct in the church, and maybe one of the reasons we don’t spot it as an “outlier” is because…it’s not. I know my wife and I have been pulled aside a few times by people asking for prayer for others stuck in fornication, and we’ve even been asked for counsel by those who find themselves there. My wife was also told after we married that she was one of the few people another person knew who hadn’t taken their spouse “out for a test drive” before marriage.

I have taken some heavy hits for standing up to this stuff, including my reputation. In one particular case I felt that while broaching these matters with the individual was important, I did not wish to ruin his reputation. I did not feel God would bless that. The individual was dealt with. The rest awaits the Bema.

I fully concur with what Bert says.

I know you can’t name names. It was a joke!

Sorry Tyler, I realized that. Didn’t mean to get all serious.

They’re following up on this with more investigations, and have hired Rachael Denhollander to counsel them on how to interact with victims of sexual abuse and assault. They have also looked through his cell phones back to 2014. So they are taking this deadly seriously, and the one thing that’s hanging out there is the NDA which RZ concluded with the Thompson family—an NDA over which apparently RZIM had no authority or knowledge. So that one is apparently in the hands of his widow.

I hope never to be able to apply this knowledge, but this is about as good as I’ve seen for a response, albeit belatedly.

Reading through the report, I must confess that I’m afraid this will get far uglier, because there are a bunch of warning signs of problems. I would also suggest that since RZ’s career included a fair amount of falsification of credentials to go along with his adultery and sexual abuse, RZIM is going to need to go over his body of work with a fine toothed comb to figure out what’s real, and what is not.

Hate to say it, but shutting the whole thing down per Tom’s recommendation does not seem like the worst thing they could do in this case. Let another organization get the intellectual property, take it off the market, and then publish new works as each claim is vetted for the truth. Make sure that any statements from RZ are used sparingly and very carefully, because right now, they’re poison to large numbers of people.

Another fault of Christian celebrity. “Ministers” get so big that their victims are easily silenced. This happens in small ministries as well of course but “it will hurt the ministry” is too often a justification for misconduct for years before it comes to light. This is another reason that para-church organizations are not the way to go. There needs to be direct accountability from a church.

No argument that we ought to have churches taking part in this, Josh, but the Houston Chronicle just put out another (sigh) set of articles about how the Southern Baptists aren’t dealing terribly well with this kind of thing, either. The way I see it, Ravi had his publisher to keep him accountable, his ministry leaders, his family, and his church, and whatever each group saw, they failed to act.

Reality is that it’s tough to cultivate a culture of accountability and reporting. In my church, I’m attempting to do a bit of that, and here are some of the tactics I’ve put into our church’s child safety manual:

• Explain that in any actual legal case, any evidence will get revealed to us in discovery. We therefore can go first to authorities with high confidence we’ll learn everything we’ll need to learn.
• Explain that it’s good to go to authorities because they’ve got a good nonsense detector, far greater resources to investigate, subpoena power, capability of collecting physical evidence, and….the blame if they drop it.
• The reporting form is an “incident” report, not an “accident” report. We want people to report for the little stuff too so they don’t freak out as much over the big stuff.
• We describe problematic situations in some detail, and ask that those be reported—and point out that if you violate the rules, imagine an aggressive plaintiff’s lawyer asking you about it.
• We also teach about the definitions of the crimes involved and the responses many victims had to them.

Is it working? I don’t know. I want to think we’re doing better than average, and thankfully we haven’t had any disastrous reports yet. Suffice it to say, though….”there but for the grace of God go I”, no?

I agree, Josh. While churches have failed in this regard it is only because they have not followed biblical guidelines for leadership and accountability. The solution (note: not a “cure” as sinners will continue to do evil until the end) is not to look to outside regulators but to actually do ministry according to the NT.