Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Ravi Zacharias: Responding to Sexual Abuse in the Church

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Recent revelations about Ravi Zacharias' abusive sexual behaviors have been in the Christian headlines. In this episode, we discuss how the church should respond to abuse and construct its systems such that abuse cannot continue. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. If this podcast has been helping you in your walk with God, would you take five seconds to help us? Hop onto Twitter and follow our new Twitter account at TMBT Podcast. If you go there, you can see our latest episodes. You can also follow Keith and I and send us messages. We'd love to follow you back and see what's happening in your life.

life. Unfortunately, it feels ever more common to read headlines about sexual abuse that is not just happening out there in the world, but is even happening inside of the church. And probably the biggest headline in the Christian world last week was revelations that Ravi Zacharias, a very famous apologist, perhaps the most famous apologist in the world. After his death, there's been an investigation into his last six years, and it's come out that he is guilty of. much of that. And I don't want to go into more detail right off the top because I realize that we have people who listen to this podcast with their children, and this might not be the right podcast for your kids. That's obviously up to you as a parent. I'm sure we will be using some graphic language that

you might want to have a conversation about ahead of time. And this is hard to talk about because our hearts and our prayers are for the victims. There are many women who were victimized by Ravi Zacharias, and it's difficult to put into words for me, and I think for Keith, how sickening it is to read these stories. I think of my wife, my daughter, my sister, people that I dearly, dearly love and know that this could be them and that they could be the ones who have been harmed, and that that harm can go beyond just the physical and psychological harm. It is a deeply spiritual harm that can even have eternal repercussions. And so normally on our podcast, we have a jovial attitude. Today's episode, to be honest, preparing for it was not remotely

fun. We're going to have a gravity around this topic because it demands it. And we're going to have a gravity around it because we think that leaders inside the church have to take these stories seriously for the very reason that we don't want to have more stories like this happen. We want to protect victims and protect the body of Christ from this kind of terrible behavior. Yeah, unfortunately, in these kind of situations, the victims are often overlooked. Everybody talks about the perpetrator, analyzes the motives, maybe tries to empathize with the perpetrator, what's going on in the perpetrator's mind and heart, how do this person get to this position? And the victims aren't talked about, and we have a tendency to not empathize with

them. Maybe because we don't know them, because for good reasons, they would like to stay anonymous. They're obviously not as well known. So we want to make sure that although we're going to talk a lot about Ravi Zecharias and his sinful choices that really did a lot of damage that we say up front that these victims deserve to be heard and they deserve the church to rally around them and they deserve the truth to come out. Ravi Zecharias was the leader of RZIM. You'll hear us refer to that acronym quite a bit, Ravi Zecharias International Ministry. And here's the thing, Patrick and I, neither one of us, have necessarily been big fans of Ravi Zecharias. He just wasn't really much on my radar for whatever reason. I don't think I've ever read a book by him. I've read excerpts

of books. I've read people talk about books that he's written. I have some friends who are kind of big fans, big Ravi fans, but me personally, not so much. You either, Patrick? I don't know if I've ever listened to a Ravi Zacharias talk. The closest I've got into engaging with him is probably reading infrequent quote here and there in a book. So he hasn't had a major influence on my life, but it's worth acknowledging he's had a big influence on a lot of people within the reformed tradition, and that's a tradition that we are a part of. So just like you, I know a tremendous amount of people who have been influenced by him. He was known for apologetics and for taking the arguments about the truthfulness of Christianity into what people would call hostile territory, maybe countries around the world that were more closed to Christianity as well as college campuses. So there's a lot of people out there who say, I came to faith, or I grew in my faith, or I became more confident that Christianity is true because of the ministry that Ravi Zecharias had. So let's stop for a second and say,

why are we addressing this? Because here's a guy who's dead and all these revelations come out. Why talk about it now? And just to be frank with you, I don't want to do the virtue signaling thing. Like, oh, we're so much better than him. Look how bad he was. We're not like that. I think the reality is that one of the things that we've been confronted with over and over is that any of us could fall. Any of us could be in this same situation. But on the other hand, we don't want to just act like this sin is just like any other sin. Hopefully before we're done today, we'll be able to talk about that some sins really are more serious. Some sins do far more damage. So we don't want to minimize the damage that this particular sin did. But maybe the most important thing is that we as Christians have to say,

this is wrong, and we have to call it out, and we have to call it out publicly, and we have to make changes within our own institutions, our own churches, our own personal lives to prevent these kinds of things from happening. And it's not just the sin we'll talk about, but it's also the cover-up related to the sin. We need to put things in place to make sure this doesn't happen. And the only way we can do that is by being willing to embrace the truth here. This is not just the story of one man's sin. This is the story of an entire system that allows a man with a lot of fame, a lot of money, a lot of power to take advantage to spiritually abuse, sexually abuse women who were under his influence. And so this is not just, again, a story about

one person. It's a story about an entire institution. And the reality is, if you are a part of a church, it doesn't matter whether or not you're part of a church. You are a part of systems everywhere you go. You are ingrained in communities of people, and we can't just focus on the individual all the time. We have to talk about the bigger picture. How do we interact as a community? And what kind of behavior do our communities condone, allow, hide? And what kind of behaviors are our communities designed to address and bring justice to? Let's dive in. Patrick, why don't you just kind of walk us through a timeline? What do we know? What are the facts here? What's the story as it's unfolded? We'll start all the way back in 2017, about three and a half years ago. A woman named Lori Ann Thompson

began to make accusations against Ravi Zacharias that he had solicited nude photos from her, that he had a solicited sexual activity from her. And she made these accusations to the ministry that oversees Ravi and kind of had a responsibility. He was supposed to hold him accountable. When these accusations came out, the ministry claimed to investigate it. Ravi Zacharias immediately denied it. He actually sued her for defamation.

And when the internal ministry, RZIM, started. looking into it, he refused to go along with the investigation. He said, you know me, you know my character. I don't have to give you my phones because he had multiple phones. I don't have to give you any of my communication. So now the public didn't know that, right? I mean, we've only learned recently that he prevented a real investigation from happening. It was eventually made public in 2017, but it was made public in the fashion we're talking about as a totally discredited claim. What what he actually said happened was that she sent him nude photos unsolicited. So he acknowledged the fact that nude photos had been sent. For some reason, this doesn't put up red flags and

radars for the people inside the ministry. And they actually create an investigation team, supposedly to look into this. But that investigation team wasn't actually given anything from Ravi or the case to investigate. And did that investigation become public? Or was that just kind of sat on and never really got to the public's attention? What the public knew was that Ravi Zacharias had settled for $250,000 with Lori Ann Thompson, and that they both signed a non-disclosure agreement in NDA. And so people knew something happened. They didn't know the details of what had happened.

And again, while it was kind of in the news, it was basically passed over. And according to people who were inside the organization, there were members of that investigation team who said, there's a lot more going on here than we're letting on. And they tried to lean in and say, okay, we actually need to look into this. And they were discredited internally. They were called disloyal. One person was told by members of the executive board that she was one step away from being totally insane because she was pressing so hard.

We really do need to look into this. Ironically, she was put on sabbatical. They took away all of her communications. So they refused to take away the communications of Ravi, but they take away her phone, her laptop, her email, all of that. They take it all away from her while she's gone. Can we just go back for a second and say that if you have multiple. phones. First of all, that's a really bad sign because why do you have multiple phones? What you'll discover is there were always defenses. He would say, well, I'm a public figure,

and so people get my phone number, they get my information, and so I need to have a private phone that people can't get access to so that I can protect myself. Okay, fair enough, but what's the explanation for why you're asking people to sign NDAs, non-disclosure agreements? These red flags start popping up, and unfortunately, maybe because of his reputation, they just weren't taken seriously. Around this exact same time, it was revealed that though he claimed to have a PhD of some sort, he said that he'd studied at Oxford and Cambridge. It came out that those were all false claims. No one knew where he got his so-called doctorate from. He had an honorary doctorate, and eventually he posted a statement that said that there are different customs in different parts

of the world, and it's not totally uncommon to call yourself a doctor for an honorary doctorate. Now, I don't know exactly if that's true or not, but yeah, I'm not buying that. And it plays into a broader pattern that people who had been around Ravi Zacharias now have acknowledged and seen that he was quite willing to be flexible with the facts when it came to his reputation. And of course, there's a massive leap from lying to sexual assault. And yet we can see that there were seeds of deceit secrecy that were beginning well before any of these events. So Ravi Zacharias died in May of 2020 from a very aggressive cancer. And in September of 2020, Christianity Today broke a very, very big piece

on Ravi Zacharias. And it looked at the fact that he had owned a number of massage parlors, which, again, was actually known by RZIM. They knew that he owned these parlor. Some of them were here in the States, and many of them were in the East. And so he owns these parlors. And according to Christianity today's investigation, these were all stateside, the people who they had spoken to and got interviews from, he had a massage therapist who he would see regularly and reportedly was masturbating in front of them, was reportedly seeking nude photos from them, and other sexual activity from them. Now, in this case, they all said, we never did anything sexual with him, but they described in really graphic detail what happened, that he would tell

them that this was his reward, that he was exhausted, he was tired, and that he'd lived a godly, upright life and that God just needed to give him this release, this reward of being with them. He would sit down with them and pray afterwards, and he would thank God that they got to share in this experience together. Now, RZIM responds to this, and no surprise at this point, they deny all of the allegations. And they say that in an effort to clear Ravi Zacharias's name, they're going to hire an outside investigator to look into the claims. Now, internally, it sounds like there was a lot of debate over the kind of investigator they should find. You can imagine you could find someone who's going to say the story that you want to have told. They considered an investigator who was known

for being rather rough, and the idea seemed to be shaking down the victims and getting them to confess that their stories were fake. But that's not who they went with. They picked a different group of people who then began this investigation. And in the midst of all that, you had people who were associated with RZIM who had heard the Christianity Today article responding, while the investigation is ongoing. Yeah, there's a guy named Sam Albury, who's written several books. You guys might be familiar with him. And he was on the board of RZIM, and he just came out and said, hey, look, I believe these

stories. I mean, they're credible stories. The people are credible, and there are several of them that sound pretty similar. And unfortunately, he was attacked for that. Ravi Zacharias's daughter was a CEO of the ministry, and she writes him this scathing email in which she accuses him of being unbiblical and unchristian and really defaming the name of Christ and taking down her dad's ministry and all this. Unfortunately, that's what happens sometimes when people try to stand up and speak truth. When they try to stand up and protect the vulnerable,

they then get turned on. It's a way to silence other people. If we go after Sam Mulberry like this, then we'll go after you also. And it's one of the most terrifying things when you have an institution that is fully committed to protecting and defending the reputation and story of one individual. In December of 2020, the investigators send a email to the leadership of RZIM telling them, hey, we've been looking into this and it's bad. In fact, it's not just bad. It's worse than we thought. And someone leaked that to the press. It came out. And so it alerted virtually everyone to the fact that at some point we were going to receive the full story of what had happened with Ravi Zacharias, which takes us to last week in February, when RZIM released a 12-page report detailing what their investigation had uncovered.

So I'm going to read a few paragraphs from Christianity Today's article about that report that Patrick just mentioned. It'll help you understand what was involved. Even a limited review of Zecharias's old devices revealed contacts for more than 200 massage therapists in the United States and Asia and hundreds of images of young women, including some that showed the women naked. Zacharias solicited and received photos until a few months before his death in May 2020 at age 74. Zacharias used tens of thousands of dollars of ministry funds dedicated to a humanitarian effort to pay for massage therapists, providing them with housing, schooling, and monthly support for extended periods of time according to the investigators.

One woman told the investigators that, quote, after he arranged for the ministry to provide her with financial support, he required sex from her, close quote. She called it rape. She said Zecharias, quote, made her pray with him to thank God for the opportunity they both received, close quote. And as with other victims, quote, called her his reward for living a life of service to God, close quote, the report says. Zecharius warned the woman, a fellow believer, if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged. The spiritual abuse there is horrific. Like you said, the emotional, the psychological, the physical. But for a Christian leader to use God and the Bible and his spiritual authority to pray upon another Christian, I don't know what to say other than it's heartbreaking. we should all pray for this woman and the other people who are involved. There is only one word for it. It's evil. It's absolutely evil. It's grievous. It's wicked. The Bible has a lot of words for exactly what this is. They're not words that actually today we use that much, and yet they're spot on. And unfortunately, this story, like I said at the

beginning of the episode, is coming probably not at the end of, but in the midst of a chain of revelations ever since 2015 with the Me Too movement, then there was the church to movement of pastors and people in power using their power in some cases to sexually use others, in other cases to bully and hurt others. So you think of people like Bill Heibles, Mark Driscoll, Darren Patrick, C.J. Mahaney, and all those stories and instances are different that didn't all involve sexual assault so far as we know. Yeah, I think that's important to say is that not all these stories are the same. And based on what I know, which let's admit that's limited, the Ravi Zacharias story was at a whole new level of wickedness. So I just want to make sure that we're not

trying to draw some sort of equivalency in all these stories. You can find out more about it. I think the key thing is that unfortunately the last few years have brought out a lot of Christian leaders who have blown it spiritually, blown it in using the position God's given them, damaged a lot of people. And here's the deal, damage the reputation of the church, damage the reputation of Christ. And you can't help but hear Jesus's words when he said those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. You almost feel like what we're watching is people who exalted themselves now be humbled by God. Sin finds us out. We kind of believe this lie that we can sin and get away with it. We can sin and no one will know. But our sin is

comes out sometimes even after we've died. There are probably a whole myriad of things we could use to explain why this happens. But one thing that these men all share in common is that they were celebrity pastors, that they had a massive reputation. And on top of that, they had an entire ministry, which was built on their reputation, which effectively meant that there were, in some cases, tens or hundreds, or in Robbie Zacharias's case, thousands of people who were employed under their name, under their reputation, who had their jobs and livelihoods tied up with these celebrity pastors' reputations. That was how they made their living. And that helps underline why these things can be so difficult to uncover. Because you have to imagine, if you are working inside

of a ministry, and that entire ministry relies on the reputation of a single charismatic individual, well, that individual has a moral failing, or in this case a serious, grievous, evil, ongoing set of actions. If that happens, you have an institution which is fundamentally designed to defend that person. Because by defending the person, you're also defending yourself. It reminds me of that wine where it was originally found, but you say that you can't get a person to believe something they're paid not to believe, you know, that there's this incentive structure. And unfortunately, when our financial incentives are our reputation or our careers, our family's life, when they're tied to a particular person or a ministry or a company doing well, then we have

every incentive in the world to not see what is right in front of us. And you can't help but think that that's what happened at RZIM. There were people who, for a variety of reasons, didn't want to see what was happening. As you read the story, I have to say, if you had a thinking brain, it was actually pretty obvious in this instance. There was red flag after red flag after red flag, starting in 2017, and unfortunately, their inaction allowed for four more years of ongoing abuse. I don't want to condone anything they did. I'm just saying that in hindsight, it always looks clear. And my guess is there were people in that ministry who probably genuinely bought it. Now, they shouldn't have. You know, they were being foolish, but they weren't trying to

necessarily hide something or cover up something. It just never really crossed their mind that this guy they knew, they respected, had such an impact God was using, could, fall prey to this. I want to agree and push back. My agreement is I highly doubt that people in the ministry actually knew the things that have come out now. It wasn't as though they knew it and then they decided we're going to cover this up. And yeah, on the flip side, they were so resistant to any form of investigation. We think about the story of the person who's on the investigative team who's told you're absolutely insane because you want to press further. And again, remember, the investigation itself never really happened. They hadn't really looked into anything. And that seems,

to be the heart of the temptation, which is, I don't want to look, I don't want to know. I'm going to assume the best, and I will assume the absolute worst. I mean, the person who was put in that sabbatical told stories about how the original accuser became a joke at RCIM. They were laughing about her. They were saying how terrible her marriage was, what a bad person she was. And now, again, with hindsight, we can say she was totally right the entire time. But it highlights a problem. I guess I agree then with the pushback, if this is what you're saying, is that there was enough happening here, enough evidence, enough smoke that people should have looked hard into the fire. And maybe they would have found there wasn't. Maybe they would have found there was, who knows,

but they needed to press further in to ask hard questions, and they just refuse to do that. Part of what this comes down to is that we have to check our biases. We have to check who we empathize with. You already brought it up. If you're a part of an institution whose your entire welfare is based on the reputation of one person, you will, by nature, empathize with that person. You will, by nature, be biased in favor of that person. Now, let's go back to something that happened a few years ago in the Brett Kavanaugh hearing. He had been nominated by President Trump to become one of the associate justices on the Supreme Court. And Christine Blazy Ford leveled these accusations about him, what he did to her when they were in high school.

And it was kind of interesting as you just listened to the debate. debate around that is that people took sides. Now, some of that was driven by pure politics, and that's not what I'm referring to here. I'm saying that they empathized with one side or the other. And so you heard a lot of guys going around saying, hey, I was in situations like that in high school, and who knows what I would have done, or who knows what I did, or these were kind of drunk and free foralls, and there really weren't any rules. And then you heard other people, usually women, identifying more with Christine Blaise Ford, who are saying, I've been in situations where somebody was trying to take advantage of me and did more or less, depending on the circumstances,

but they immediately start empathizing with the victim in this particular situation. Now, we're not adjudicating what happened between Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blaise Ford. The Senate made its choices and moved forward, and we are well behind that now. Our only point about it is this, is that we have a natural tendency to identify. or to empathize with a particular narrative, a particular person in the story. And we have to be careful. And Patrick says we have to check our biases. We have to say, why am I identifying with this particular person? What about the other person? If you're identifying with Christine Blaise Ford, maybe you needed to see this through the eyes of Brett Kavanaugh. And vice versa, of course,

if you identify with Brett Kavanaugh, maybe you need to see it from the other person's side. And so when we find ourselves in situations where we're hearing stories, not in the media, but now people in our life, people at our work, people in our neighborhood. And we have a tendency to write them off or we have a tendency to only believe them. We've got to check ourselves. Proverbs 18 says that a witness sounds accurate until you talk to the other side. I butchered that paraphrase, but you get the point. And so what we need to do is investigate, ask some questions, press in. don't let your biases keep you from seeking the truth.

In 1 Timothy 521, we read that this is Paul's command to Timothy as a pastor. He says, keep these instructions without partiality. He says, don't have partiality. You can't have partiality towards one side or the other and do nothing out of favoritism. This idea, it's fascinating because it can be so offensive to both sides. I know some people who seem to be under the impression that in cases of sexual assault, it's not even that someone is innocent until proven guilty. It's that they simply must always be innocent.

I see on the other side, the exact opposite, a presumption of guilt until they're proven innocent. And I think the biblical standard is to say, no, when something like this happens, when there's a serious accusation, there needs to be a serious investigation. Partially, I think that's the case because the Bible holds pastors up to a higher standard. In Paul's qualifications for elders, he says that elders need to be above reproach. It says that they need to have a good reputation in their community. Well, the minute an accusation like this is made, of course, that brings their above reproachedness and their reputation into question. And it should be taken seriously. There should be a serious investigation. Not just we're going to believe one side or the other.

We should look into it. And by the way, I'm not saying in a shakedown, let's make someone prove the point kind of way. I'm saying in a smart, thoughtful, empathetic, responsible manner. So in 1st Timothy 519, Paul says, do not admit a charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses. So it seems like this is calling charges against an elder, a pastor, to a higher standard. In other words, it should only be believed if there's evidence of two or three witnesses. But I think that's because there are also stricter judgments. In other words, in 1st Timothy 520, just the next verse, it says that when an elder sins, when a pastor sins, it needs to be told to the whole church. It's not something to just be kept private. James 3.1 says that teachers

face a stricter judgment. So like Patrick said, their elders are supposed to be above reproach. They are supposed to live lives that are exemplary, that you could look at them and not have a hint of immorality or bullying or abuse of power. So there's a higher expectation. There's a higher standard of witnesses. And there's a harsher punishment for those who are in leadership. I've seen First Timothy 519, I think be used in a rather unhelpful way where I've pastor say, oh, well, in these sexual assault cases, you need to have more than one accusation because if it's only one, then you haven't had two or three witnesses. And I think that is a gross misunderstanding of what Paul is trying to do. Paul is giving Timothy a general principle

for how life works. See, he's not talking. I don't think about extreme circumstances. So he's not saying that even in the case of a sexual assault, you need two or three witnesses. I think what he's saying is exactly what it sounds like. You need to investigate. In fact, to what Paul's alluding to here comes from the law code in Exodus 20 to chapter 23, where it's talking about witnesses in a case. And the basic principle that the law code's trying to lay out is that when an accusation is made, you can't just believe one side of the other. You have to investigate. And so I think a proper application of this passage is, if there's an accusation made, you should investigate the case. And guess what? In this digital world, there's a good

chance there's more than two or three witnesses. That guy's phone, that guy's computer. Look at it. look into what's happening inside of there, and I think you might get an idea of whether this person is staying true to the story. I think you make a good point that sometimes people use the Bible to hide sin. So I think not just First Timothy 5, like you mentioned, but in Matthew 18, where Jesus lays out the protocol, kind of the how-toes of what we should do when we're sinned against. And there's the idea that you approach the person who hurt you, and then if that doesn't work, you call more people until eventually the elders of the church are brought in. Now, I think sometimes people use that verse to tell the victim of some crime that they didn't

handle it in a biblical way. So I think sometimes people use that passage in Matthew 18 to shut down people who say they were hurt, maybe like in this case, raped or assaulted in some way, taking advantage of, because they say, well, look, you need to go talk. Did you go talk to Ravi? Did you handle it one-on-one privately, like Jesus said in Matthew 18? But surely we don't think that what Jesus is trying to do is tell people who've been abused sexually or abused by someone's power that they've got to go now confront the person in power in some one-on-one setting. That isn't what Jesus is calling us to. It's laughable. Again, taking a general principle with how you deal with ordinary conflicts in life.

What is Jesus talking about? It seems like he's talking about ordinary conflicts in the church, which, by the way, that is part of being in a church. But we can't extrapolate from that how we should respond to extreme circumstances. Let me speak for myself. If accusations were made against me personally, as a pastor, I have committed myself to something greater than myself. And that is the reputation of Jesus. And so when I act without faith, when I have gross immoral improprieties, it's not just about me. It's about the one to whom I have literally made vows. I got down on my knee. I took vows to become a pastor.

It's part of what you do, at least in our denomination, when you become a pastor. He didn't marry the church like proposed, like down on his knee, if that's what you're wondering. No, I was not proposing to anyone. But people laid hands on me, and I made commitments about the kind of life that I was going to live. Because I did that, I have to say that Jesus' reputation matters more than my own. And so what that means for me personally is if someone were to bring accusations against me, one, I should have lived a life so far above reproach that I should not have anything to fear about handing over my communications to someone saying, hey, you look into it.

I'm not afraid. You can look into my email, into my computer, into my phone. Go for it. This is yours to look at. But beyond that, my greater concern or my greater concern should be, not for me, but for the reputation of Jesus. And so if nothing bad has happened, then I should say, you know what? Look into this so that we're not just clearing my name. We are clearing the name of Jesus. We're clearing the name of his bride, the church. And so I think, again, this is why as institutions we have to take these accusations seriously

and we have to investigate them when they come up. If they're not credible, they'll be discharged. They'll be removed. If they are credible, then we've done a great service, not just to the church, but to the person who committed the sin. because you know what Ravi didn't get in his life? He did not repent. So far as we know, there was no repentance to his action. And it would have been a grace that in 2017, that ministry had investigated what had happened. They would have taken him out of his position of authority.

They would have rebuked him and called him to repentance. Maybe he wouldn't have repented. I don't know what would have happened. But that would have been a better thing for him as well. So contrast the idea that if I'm charged or like Patrick just said about himself, if he was hypothetically accused of something and a willingness to turn over documents, computers, phones, contrast that with non-disclosure agreements and lawsuits. So I don't want to go down the road that every NDA means you are for sure guilty of everything that has been charged. But I do want to say that as a pastor, I think you probably have relinquished your right

to ask other people to sign NDAs. And by the way, who is it not being disclosed to? Because it's being disclosed to God. He's the one that you should care most about. And there's no NDA when it comes with him. He sees it all. He knows it all. So let's go back to this institution thing for a second.

Because the question is not, will sin happen, could sin happen? Of course. I mean, whether you're in a school system, you're in a government bureaucracy, you're at a university, you're on a team. Of course, sin will happen and could happen. The question is that if serious sin happens and needs to be addressed, can the church, can the institution, can the school, can the company address it? Do they have a system that's set up to handle these things, to investigate them, to not whitewash them, and protect itself?

And the fact is, most systems are set up to do exactly that, protect themselves. That shouldn't shock anybody. But in the church, I think it's one of our major takeaways, whether you're a pastor or you're in leadership at a church, is to think through, do we have systems? Are we trying to put systems into place if we don't have them to help address these kinds of things when they come up? One of the blessings in my life, our life here at the church that we work at is that we don't have a senior pastor. There's no Ravi Zacharias. There's no top person, Bill Heibles, Mark Driscoll, Darren Patrick, those people we've mentioned before, that we have shared leadership. And therefore, we're not all dependent on protecting the image of one person. And that is probably something that

drives me crazy on some days. In fact, it sure does. Let me assure everyone, it drives keep crazy sometimes. I would love to be the person in charge that got my way. The part of me that wants that is the sinful part of me, the humble part of me, the part of me that knows I need other people in my life, that I need other people's eyes on me, watching me, that I can't trust myself with power, too much power? Absolutely not. That I would fall prey to a lot of the same sins that some of these other people that we mentioned. By God's grace, we have a system here in which we can call each other out, and we can push back hard on one another because none of us signs the other person's paycheck. None of us is dependent on one person. It's the team. And at our church, we have two people

preaching consistently. We have Keith one week, Dave, the next week. And that, I think, protects us even further because it protects us from celebrity cults, from character cults, from people becoming obsessed with, well, you'll finally take, Mark Driscoll, you've got a singular figure who's in charge, and yes, he has an elderboard around them, but they had no ability to challenge him because the entire church was on his shoulders. If Mark Driscoll falls, there is no Mars Hill church anymore. I'm pretty sure if I remember right, I could have this wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the elders were paid pastors. It wasn't even like lay elders. It was people who owe their job. Okay, that's a really bad situation to be in.

It's a bad situation. And thankfully, we have elders who are not paid by the church. We have people on our executive team who are not paid by the church. And that's a good, good, good thing. And we're not saying, hey, we've figured this out. We started there. We said, we haven't. But the point is, I think for each church, every community, just to ask, what systems do we have in place?

Or could we put into place? Or are we trying to implement to protect not the church, but to protect the church? I hope that makes sense. In other words, we're not trying to protect the institution of the crossing, the church that we're at. What we're trying to protect at the end of the day is the body of Jesus and its integrity and the people inside of that body who trust us to lead it. That's part of the vows, again, that we took. It's not just about me and me representing Jesus.

It's my calling to be a shepherd who cares for the men and women and children who are a part of this church to make sure that nothing like this happens in their lives. Yeah, so the Bible tells us that we should emulate the faith of our spiritual leaders. And I don't think there's anything wrong with having certain authors or pastors, speakers, podcasts that you get a lot from and you look up and you admire that person. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it's good and biblical and probably really helpful in my life and in your life. But there is a line that's crossed where people get too loyal to a person, that they start listening to maybe

just one pastor, one Bible teacher. And that was when it starts to become a problem, because that person starts to be elevated into a world where he or she can't do anything wrong, that they're always right. Listen to people. I used to go to these conferences. I hate conferences now, but back years ago, I would go to a conference, and there'd be like a big name. I'm just going to say it. So I went to a John Piper conference. And Piper is a great guy from what I know, and I've really benefited from his ministry, but his kind of lieutenants, that's not what he called them, but it's what I think of them as, they would get up when they prayed. They would be emulating John Piper's prayers, like these breathy prayers and earnestness. And I'm just like, oh, come on. Now, I always got that

from John Piper, that was really authentic. That's who he was all the time. But it seemed clear that to these younger guys, he had become the man, and now they're going to even try to pray like them. When you start finding yourself getting attached to one person too much, that's probably not good for you, and it's not good for the leader. It's not good for that person either. And it's not good for the other people who are part of that institution or part of those ministers. I mean, again, back to Ravi, in some level, he was able to take advantage of people precisely because of his reputation. And so I saw someone tweet out the other day as God killing the culture of celebrity pastors. And it's an interesting question. I think there's a

broader problem, which is that we live in a nation which already has a celebrity culture. So I don't see it ever happening that we kill any kind of celebrity culture. But I liked the question, because maybe there's a good thing about not putting people on these pedestals where we worship them and they feel like they've become untouchable. Yeah, Christians critique the celebrity culture in a lot of places without acknowledging that the celebrity culture has invaded the church. And it only can, and people like, well, what do you do about it? And I say, well, do you want to know why it exists, it's because of you and me. You know, you have celebrities because there are people who are idolizing them. And so again, that's one of the challenges that I have to face is say,

no, one, I should not idolize leaders. I should read widely. I might have a few people that have had a big influence on me like Keith was saying. I've got a friend, and he always says this to me, he says, very few people can be given power and money and survive. That is true if you're in business. It's true if you're in entertainment. It's true if you're in politics. And it is absolutely true, even if you are a pastor. I think it was Lincoln that said, if you want to know what's in a man, give him power, and you'll find out.

Yeah, and God protect me. God protect people listening to this in some senses from ever receiving that. Because I just don't think there are many people who can actually handle it. A closing thought here. In Matthew 23, Jesus is critiquing the religious leaders of his time.

And the critique was that they had done a lot of things on a surface level that made them look like very righteous religious people. They were very careful about their tithing. That's what he's talking about. But he accuses them or he criticizes them because he says that they have neglected the more important matters of the law,

which are justice, mercy, and faithfulness. And I think that's a calling that God has given to all people in leadership, men, women, in the church, outside the church, to every single one of us, that we should not just care about our reputation and how we look on the outside. outside. We should care deeply about being committed to justice, about being committed to mercy and

faithfulness. That's our calling in life. I was talking to a friend about doing this podcast. She's on our staff team, and she's really sharp. Her name's Ann Alin, and she sent me a paper that she wrote in seminary. Now, it wasn't about this exact topic that we're talking about today, so it's a bit taken out of context. But I asked her permission if I could quote this. And it's an appeal that she made to her brothers in Christ, to pastors who are in leadership. And the appeal here was, in particular, to care for women in the church. And obviously, in Ravi's case, it was women who had been taken advantage of. But I think this is an appeal that can go even beyond that, not just to care for women in the church, but to care for all people in the church. That's what God calls leaders.

That's what God calls pastors to do. That's what I pray he'll call me and others to do. I just thought this quote was great. I'm going to close with this plea that she wrote. said, I want my brothers in Christ, those who have been entrusted with the leadership and care of women I love and have committed my life to serving to prioritize mercy and compassion over their own or other's reputations. I want them to identify with and show loyalty to the powerless rather than the powerful. I want them to be so committed to sharing God's heart for his people that they feel the pain of God when one of his daughters is hurt. I want to be able to trust them to carry out their authority over church disciplined faithfully, unmotivated by self-interest.

I want them to devote themselves to safety, healing, and justice, particularly within the body of Christ. I agree with that plea, and my prayer is that God would align my heart and the heart of all people leading in the church today to want that exact thing, to love those who are weak, to love those who have entrusted themselves to the leadership and care of others, to put the needs of others first, to put not your reputation first or your own self-interest, but the interest of others before your own. And I want that to be my prayer for my life. And my prayer, honestly, for anybody who's listening to this, because there's some area in your life that you are leading, that you do have responsibility over.

And my prayer for you is that you would do that too, because that's what Jesus did. That's what Philippians 2 said. He set aside the glory and the riches of heaven to become a person, to die a death on a cross. He put aside his own self-interest for the sake of you and me. the model of leadership. It's a model of responsibility. It's a model of love that we need to have in our lives. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them

grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations. recommendations.