While I must speak forthrightly about the sins and errors that plague our community of faith, I have misgivings about doing this series. I will begin by communicating three of those misgivings.
Misgiving number 1. I am not qualified to do this. I am neither professor, historian nor theologian. I have written no books. I have never pastored a large church or run a large organization. I work a day job as an unskilled laborer. As for my ministry background, I tried but failed to plant a church. As a pastor I failed to keep two dying churches from folding. Before that, as a missionary linguist I failed to persuade an indigenous group to allow me to translate the Bible into their language. I acknowledge my laughably inadequate qualifications for taking on so ambitious a project. I am waddling up to a high-jump bar whose height should only be attempted by a C. S. Lewis, a Carl F. H. Henry, a John Stott, a James Montgomery Boice, or a D. A. Carson. But they were all dead, or unavailable, so here I am.
Misgiving number 2. In this series I must expose, judge and condemn that which so richly deserves exposure, judgment and condemnation. But there is danger in that. It is easy to condemn. It is even agreeable. Condemnation is an addictive, beguiling drug. When we condemn we are energized, and we feel good about ourselves because we know we’re not as bad as those people.
The Pharisees of the Bible were so good at condemning that they judged Jesus Christ while justifying themselves. I don’t want to be a Pharisee, and I don’t want to train you to be a Pharisee. So I urge that we keep before us those Scriptures that humble, convict, and terrify. 1 Corinthians 10:12: “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” Romans 2:1,3: “[I]n passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things... Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?” James 3:1: “Let not many of you become teachers, my brothers, because you know that we will be judged more strictly.” Luke 6:46: “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, but don’t do what I say?”
If Jesus asked me that question, “Paul, why don’t you do what I say?” I don’t know how I would answer. I know I could not respond, “But it’s not true! I always do what you say!” Someday soon – could be today, could be 15 years from now, I will appear before the judgment seat of Christ. I will look Jesus in the eye – if I dare raise my head to meet his gaze. 2 Corinthians 5:10 says, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he had done in the body, whether good or evil.” I believe that, and it unsettles me. We ought never dismiss that unease insofar as it spurs us to holiness and does not cripple us in despair. In this series I know that I will be tempted, and I will tempt you, to indulge the genial task of condemning other people’s sins while neglecting the more painful and necessary task of repenting of our own.
Misgiving number 3. I understand that this lament over the current state of things could be preached – and indeed has been preached – in every generation.
In 1988, in the wake of multiple televangelist scandals, Pastor Warren Wiersbe wrote a book called “The Integrity Crisis”. The subtitle was, A blemished church struggles with accountability, morality, and lifestyles of its leaders and laity. That was 33 years ago.
And before any of the televangelist scandals broke, Francis Schaeffer had already written a book published in 1984 called “The Great Evangelical Disaster” – a similar diatribe about how bad things were.
In 1959, Martyn Lloyd Jones preached a series of messages on the factors that were hindering and subverting revival in his day.
In 1887 and 1888 there was the famous Downgrade Controversy that featured rhetorical warning bells sounded by none other than Charles Spurgeon, the best-known and most gifted preacher of the time. (Perhaps of all time). He wrote: “No lover of the gospel can conceal from himself the fact that the days are evil…[O]ur solemn conviction is that things are much worse in many churches than they seem to be, and are rapidly tending downward.”
More examples could be added to that list going further back in history, but I will stop there. The fact that preachers have been lamenting the current state of things forever could call into question the legitimacy and urgency of this lament in 2021. In my mind I can see the eye-roll, I can hear the weary sigh of some historically informed Christian who says, “Oh no, not that again. Not that ‘Everything’s-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket!’ line again. We’ve heard that too many times before.”
I will come back to this third misgiving and provide my answer to it in about 20 minutes before I conclude my message.
But first, in order to show why I think things are especially bad, let me go through a brief list of some prominent evangelical leaders and outline their scandalous behavior over the past 15 years.
Number 1: Ted Haggard. Ted Haggard was the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. He had a church of 14,000 people that he founded from scratch. He was politically influential and had the ear of George W. Bush. Reportedly he communicated with the White House every Monday morning. In 2006 it was revealed that he had a three-year paid relationship with a male prostitute, Mike Jones, with whom he used methamphetamines. When first outed for this behavior Ted Haggard lied, repeatedly, denying everything - until the evidence became irrefutable. Later it was also revealed that he had sexually harassed a male volunteer to whom he said, “You know what, you can become a man of God, and you can have a little bit of fun on the side.” For Ted Haggard, a little bit of fun on the side was godless, perverse, unwelcome sexual harassment.
Number 2: Bill Hybels. Bill Hybels, one of the founders of Willow Creek Church, is far and away the most influential evangelical of the past 50 years. No one else is remotely close to Hybels in terms of impact on evangelical culture and practice in the past half century. This influence was deliberate, and exercised through his megachurch, satellite churches, association of churches, and the Global Leadership Summit. It is impossible to calculate how many people over the past few decades left good churches to go to Willow Creek or to one of its satellites, just as it is impossible to calculate how many churches became or tried to become Willow Creek clones. Heaven knows how many pastors succumbed to it, or how many were told by their congregants, “Let’s do it the Willow Creek way!”
In 2018 Bill Hybels was revealed as a sexual predator. At least 10 women testified against him, demonstrating a pattern of life that went back decades. In response, he denied everything and lied and lied and lied, slandering his victims, and to this day has shown no repentance or remorse. Shortly after his disgraced departure from Willow Creek, his friend and the theological kingpin of that church, Dr Gilbert Bilezikian, was also shown to be a pervert with a pattern of preying on women that went back decades. Less well-known is the name Dave Holmbo. He was the other co-founder of Willow Creek way back in the 1970s. He was forced into resignation back then because of sexual immorality.
The most influential church of our generation, the infamous Willow Creek that sucked a thousand evangelical churches into its black hole nightmare of fake Christianity was founded not upon the rock that is Jesus Christ, but upon the ambitious megalomania of three adulterous sons of hell.
Please let that sink in. For the love of God let that sink in.
Number 3: James MacDonald. MacDonald had the other megachurch mega-phenomenon in the Chicago area, Harvest Bible Chapel with all its affiliates. MacDonald had a daily radio program on WMBI, “Walk in the Word”, and was a regularly featured speaker at conferences and seminaries and events like Moody’s Founders Week. He was also the focal point for gathering around himself other megachurch pastors to mentor them, influence them and network with them.
A friend of mine from seminary worked with James MacDonald just over 10 years ago. I’m not sure I am at liberty to mention my friend’s name. I’ll call him John. John witnessed firsthand how utterly malicious, dishonest and lascivious James MacDonald was in his daily interactions with people. And it was no secret among those who knew him. John said, in shock, to one of the elders at the time, “James is not a spiritual man!” and the elder responded, “We all know that.” John told me that he literally came to fear for his life. At one point John told his wife, “Listen, I am not depressed, I am not suicidal. If anything happens to me, insist upon an investigation. Because I think James might try to have me killed and make it look like an accident or suicide.” She told him to write that down. They wrote it down, signed and dated it and sent it to themselves certified mail to be opened in case of his violent death. They still have the letter.
Does my friend John sound paranoid to you? I mean – come on, really? Could one of the most prominent evangelical preachers in America with a worldwide influence over evangelical laity and other evangelical megachurch pastors really be an assassin at heart?
Around the time that MacDonald was finally and abruptly fired by his own elders in 2019 for across-the-board wickedness that even they had to acknowledge, Chicago radio host Mancow Mueller revealed that twice in the preceding year MacDonald had talked to him about hiring a hitman. Mancow thought that MacDonald was joking, but then came to realize, oh no, he was serious. Then, independently of those chilling encounters, MacDonald’s former bodyguard, Manny Bucur, revealed that in 2015 MacDonald offered to pay him to murder his ex son-in-law Tony Groves. According to Bucur, MacDonald offered to help dispose of the body. These are all mutually independent attestations.
Of course there is much much more with regard to MacDonald. Constant lies. Multi-million-dollar indebtedness and financial mismanagement and fraud. Stunningly abusive, profane and misogynistic language. Attempting to grope a female staff member on an airplane. Insanely luxurious lifestyle that included high stakes gambling forays with fellow evangelical fraud Jerry Jenkins of “Left Behind” fame. MacDonald was recorded talking about planting child pornography on the computer of a Christian statesman he disliked. James MacDonald is basically Al Capone. He’s a psychopathic mobster who masqueraded as an evangelical pastor and managed to fool the vast majority of the evangelical public into believing that he was a Christian. For decades!
Number 4: Ravi Zacharias. Zacharias was celebrated by some as the greatest Christian apologist of our generation. An apologist is one who defends the faith intellectually before skeptics and antagonists of that faith. I know it is easy to say this now – but it is nonetheless true – I was never a fan of his apologetic work. It always seemed that when I heard him speak I had the frustration of listening to a man who could not hold a train of thought in his head for more than 90 seconds. He was extremely listenable, but organizationally his presentations were all over the place, and none of his thoughts tied together. His talks melted away in your mind like unsweetened cotton candy. That said, I had nothing against him personally.
That is, until about a year and a half, two years ago, when I learned that he had been lying constantly for years. And his lies were thoroughly, openly documented in work of Steve Baughman, an atheist opponent. For example, Zacharias had claimed to be a professor at Oxford. He claimed to study quantum mechanics under physicist John Polkinghorne at Cambridge. He exaggerated or just outright invented academic credentials again and again and again. When his mammoth dishonesty was exposed it should have ended his public ministry right there. But it didn’t. He still had his radio program on WMBI. He was still invited to Christian conferences around the world, like the Sing! 2020 conference hosted by the Gettys (though it was cancelled by Covid). His self-named organization Ravi Zacharias International Ministries continued to rake in tens of millions of dollars. And sadly, none of the respected speakers in his ministry like John Lennox or Sam Alberry resigned in protest and disgust. I was disgusted. In my outrage I even wrote an essay, “Why is my atheist son more honest than Ravi Zacharias?”
If a man is a chronic liar like Zacharias, you can be sure that dishonesty is not his only vice. After Ravi’s death in May of last year it was revealed that he had abused an untold number of women here in the States and in Thailand, India and Malaysia. Under the guise of massage therapy he demanded sexual favors from the women treating him. He groomed them, pressured them, threatened them, demanded their silence, and paid them off when necessary. His phone after his death was found to have hundreds of pictures of such women on it.
All those years that Ravi Zacharias spent speaking at our conferences and writing bestsellers and receiving accolades as the greatest Christian apologist of our generation he should have spent in a prison cell as a rapist.
It makes me want to scream and break things. But I know that I must exercise emotional and physical self-control lest the truths that I speak risk being dismissed as the rantings of an unbalanced zealot. I am a follower of Jesus Christ, whom I love and before whom I tremble. I am a follower of Jesus Christ, who loved sinners like me and gave his life on their behalf in order to unite them with God the Father. I am a follower of Jesus Christ in the evangelical tradition, meaning, among things, that I am eager to communicate the evangel - the good news - that Jesus Christ is Lord and king, and through his death and resurrection he has opened the way to the Father that we might have a share in God’s eternal, holy delight.
But in seeking to communicate this truth to a spiritually needy world, I find that there have gone before me utterly depraved conscienceless demons in human form who wore the mask of evangelical Christian, but whose daily lives indicated that they had rejected Jesus, did not have the Holy Spirit within them, and obviously never believed for a minute that they would actually appear before him to render account. And moreover, these fakes, these evildoers, have not been obscure cases, marginal oddballs, one-out-of-12 bad apples like Judas Iscariot. They have been, one after another, the most prominent names in evangelicalism.
And I have barely scratched the surface. When I began preparation for this message I had 15 names I wanted to give you. But I realized that there would not be enough time, and it would become oppressive, and your eyes would glaze over. So let me run through just three more names, very quickly, with just a few sentences each.
For years, the largest evangelical university has been Liberty University in Virginia. Till last year its president was Jerry Falwell Jr. Jerry Falwell Jr. is a lying drunken skirt-chasing party animal. Among many other acts of Jerry Springeresque depravity, he matched up his wife to a handsome young pool boy so that he could watch the two of them cavort together.
Next, Hillsong (frequently and understandably misheard as Hellsong.) Hillsong is a musically fecund megachurch headquartered in Australia but with venomous tentacles everywhere. Most evangelical churches support it unknowingly by singing its copyrighted songs. Hillsong’s New York pastor, Carl Lentz, was pastor to the stars. He palled around with Justin Bieber whom he baptized in Tyson Chandler’s bathtub. Kevin Durant also went to that church, along with Selena Gomez, a Kardashian and a couple Jenners. And of course Lentz got to be interviewed by Oprah. He was finally exposed for tawdry extramarital affairs and let go by his boss, the founder of Hillsong and openly greedy celebrity panderer Brian Houston. Earlier this month, Brian Houston was formally charged by police with covering up the crimes of a child rapist – his father, Pastor Frank Houston, who gave Brian his start in the ministry. Listen: Hillsong is a big pile of manure from beginning to end. It’s garbage on steroids posing as a church.
Do you remember my misgiving number 3? That is, someone could say, “But evangelicals have always been saying, ‘Friends, things are really bad now.’” Here is how my imagination responds. If I could time-travel Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones and Schaeffer and Wiersbe into the present moment and explain to them what has transpired – not in the world generally, nor in Christendom vaguely, but specifically in evangelical Christianity among its prime representatives - I picture these preachers of old growing pale, grabbing an armrest for support, having to sit down, and then saying something like, “Surely the end of days has come.”
And I do not believe it is simply a matter of our having a particularly bad run of corrupt leaders. Rather, evil men have risen to power and influence within evangelicalism in large part because of a foolish, undiscerning, careless evangelical public. In this regard I like to quote my son Peter who once said, “Hitler did not kill six million Jews by himself.” He had help. Of course Hitler had the active help of villains and bloodthirsty psychopaths. But he also stood atop a great pyramid of sleeping boulders in the German public who lent their unthinking support.
Part of my goal over these next few weeks is to awaken analogically similar sleeping boulders in the evangelical community. I want fellow Christians to know the part they played, perhaps unwittingly, in the current debacle. And I want them to be better equipped to spot the warning signs and red flags to which our community has been, and still remains, culpably blind. There are still many wolves out there in shepherds’ clothing, and sometimes I almost despair over the fact that my dear brothers and sisters still do not see the fangs and the claws.
I will close now by addressing what to me is the biggest elephant-in-the-room question. Are the corrupt spokesmen of evangelicalism that I listed today damned souls? Are they going to hell, or in Ravi Zacharias’s case, in hell already?
I prefer to stop just short of saying, concerning any specific individual, that that person is in hell or will certainly go to hell. There is more than one reason for this reticence. I am not the arbiter of anyone’s final destiny. God is. And I could never know whether a man was – perhaps - born again on his deathbed and then received by God’s grace into paradise.
But here is something I do know for sure because the Bible says it so many times. People who behave the way these men behave are not saved, and they are bound for hell.
Ephesians 5:5: "For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient."
Galatians 5:19-21: "The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God."
1 Corinthians 6:9-10: "Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."
Revelation 21:8: "But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur."
God alone knows who is saved and who is not. 2 Timothy 2:19 says, “The Lord knows those who are his,” And then it goes on to say, “Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness.”
I wonder if anyone who hears or reads these words thinks, “But those scary verses about God’s condemnation of the wicked apply to me! I’m going to hell. According to the Bible I’ll be excluded from the kingdom of God and cast into the fiery pit.”
I am not here to reassure any evildoer with mild words saying, “You’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.” But there is a question I would put to any person who knows himself or herself to be a sinner in danger of God’s condemnation. And the question is, “Do you want to be made good?” Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Do you want to be pure in heart? The Bible says, “Without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). Do you want to be holy? Be honest. Many people would prefer to remain the way they are because the idea of being remade, reborn into truly good personhood and fashioned by God’s hand into a fit and worthy citizen of heaven is too difficult, too costly, too alien, too different from that which they know themselves to be.
I can’t answer this for you. But if you want God and you want his goodness and you hate your wickedness and you just wish you could be free from it, I have good news. God loves you. It is not God’s will that you should perish and go to hell. It is his will that that you repent and be saved. It is his will to transform you into someone he can love more fully and who can know the joy of delighting in him forever. And there is more good news. Your sins, which are many, and which testify against you, and which indeed would weigh down your soul into the pit of hell, have been placed upon the shoulders of God’s Son Jesus Christ, who died so that those sins could be forgiven and who rose again so that he could receive you into the place where he lives, in joy, forever.
Talk to him now and ask him to save you. The Bible says, “Anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).
I will now say a prayer on behalf of any who want to be saved from their sin and made holy unto God. Let us pray.
Lord God, there is wickedness all around me, including among those who claim to know you and have been your chief representatives here. I can’t do anything about them. But right now my only concern is the wickedness within me. Please don’t let it stay there and fester and turn me into a monster. Don’t let me be or become a fake. Save me from myself. Forgive my sin. May your Holy Spirit take control of me and change me, no matter how hard that is and no matter how long it takes. Thank you that because of what your Son Jesus did on the cross, dying on behalf of sinners, I can pray this prayer and have hope of receiving your grace.
