I don’t want to move on after reading the RZIM report
It has been many months since the RZIM report on Ravi Zacharias’ lurid activities was released and I’m not ready to move on.
While casually scrolling through my Twitter feed in late 2020 I came across the link to RZIM’s bombshell statement on the investigation into Ravi Zacharias’ sexual exploitation and harassment.
RZIM, and by extension Ravi, are well known to the churches that I am a part of and work with. The ministry is considered a partner, an ally and certainly a reputable organisation. I had not followed the events that lead up to the revelations and so the news completely blindsided me.
Unfortunately, in a not-so-unique way. In fact it was all too familiar. Echoes of the letter penned by Willowcreek’s eldership ringing in my ears.
I have read a number of articles, followed Twitter threads and watched a particularly bruising video response. An article on TGC Africa was the most helpful dissection of the trauma and yet I find myself unwilling to move on.
In the last couple of years the evangelical church has been hit by too many leadership catastrophes. They have included egregious moral wipeouts, bullying and manipulation and one leader simply renouncing his faith in favour of mountain vistas.
In this instance I find myself plagued by two questions, ‘how could someone so close to truth, a world renowned apologist, be unaffected by it’ and ‘how did this guy come to have so much influence in our faith community’.
Ravi’s victims, his spa employees, his staff — those sidelined after challenging him — deserve our heartfelt sympathy and support. I wish I could write something that aided their restoration. However from my once-removed vantage point I simply cannot get past the fact that someone who had carried the standard for Christ with such investment and diligence could simultaneously manipulate and exploit swathes of vulnerable women.
Defiant given not one but repeat opportunities to repent. Defiant facing public exposure and evidence of wrongdoing. Finally, faced with death and judgement… defiant.
At some level I have assumed that if we engage with truth it will change us. Sure, we may remain fickle and gloomy reflections of Christ, but surely honest faith melts and moulds our hearts and thereby our actions.
I am unstuck. I am reading a damning report of a man who surely had a fuller and more potent exposure and ingestion of truth than I ever will.
Inevitably there has been much discussion and autopsy. Yet it seems to me that troubleshooting organisational structure and personal accountability mechanisms is a course-correction when what is needed is the scuttling of ships.
As an aspirant leader 4 or 5 rows back from the front of the evangelical pack I find myself wondering whether those ahead have lead us all so far off course no one knows the way back to the trail. Have I mistaken trampled grass for a pathway?
Whether you are comfortable with celebrity culture or not, it shapes your view of success. Well known authors, conference speakers and podcast guests inevitably represent the pinnacle in your field, in our case ministry. In an age of celebrity and pervasive media, their influence is inflicted on us. When we’re inundated with a 2-dimensional ‘elite’ telling us that success looks like an invite to speak at a conference we lose the vocabulary required to think about success in ministry in any other way. An ambition to consult, speak and write on a grander scale flickers to life and in time most realize that the people on stage climbed up while no one was concentrating... few were ever ‘invited up’.
It is time to ask big questions about who should receive a platform, who is entitled to influence. In theory influence is organic, the fruit of personal effectiveness and gifting. In reality, influence can be created by rallying the resources of a church behind visible projects, launching websites, social media strategies and writing books.
It is time for big changes:
Influence should be invited not inflicted
Influence that is disconnected from personal discipleship should be recognised as a second-class substitute.
Writing is personally therapeutic for me, in this case an opportunity to lament. Yet the impulse to end this piece on an upbeat note is hard to resist — more evidence of my own ingestion of a culture of church leadership and discipleship that is focused on progress not personal reformation. It’s time to stop, to retreat and look around without presumption.
