Ravi Zacharias posthumously defrocked, ministry suspends fundraising after abuse report
Ravi Zacharias International Ministries has shut down fundraising as it deals with the fallout from a report about its founders. Several overseas offices of RZIM have also been affected by the report. RZIM Canada has announced it will shut down. Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias died in 2020. RNS photo illustration by Kit Doyle
February 19, 2021
(RNS) The Christian and Missionary Alliance has revoked the ordination of the late Ravi Zacharias, citing a “pattern of predatory behavior.”
“In recognition of this gross violation and its painful consequences to the victims and others who were impacted, the C&MA posthumously expels Mr. Zacharias from licensed ministry in our denomination,” the Alliance wrote in a statement. “This comes with the automatic revocation of his ordination.”
Read the rest of our March coverage of multicultural churches: Korie Little Edwards looks at how far the movement has come and how far it has to go, and Michael J. Rhodes unpacks prejudice in the early Corinthian church.
Evelyn Perez tried to share her trauma. Five years ago, she met every week with a small group of women whom she calls “great people” at her large nondenominational church in the San Francisco Bay Area. She told the group of mostly white women, plus two other women of color, that her marriage had grown dangerous. The relationship was breaking down, and her husband was physically and emotionally abusive.
Jordan's Orthodox Archbishop Moves to Deny Evangelicals Fu...... | News & Reporting christianitytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from christianitytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The French Press
The inside story of how Ravi Zacharias’s ministry concealed and enabled his abuse.
(Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Kathrin Forbes/GTMO Public Affairs/Wikimedia Commons.)
In May 2018, the senior leadership of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) gathered together with two more junior employees RZIM’s public relations manager and spokeswoman, my longtime friend Ruth Malhotra, and global media director Nancy Gifford at an offsite conference room for a three day “conciliation” meeting. The group had spent months together serving as an impromptu task force designed to deal with the fallout from claims by a Canadian woman named Lori Anne Thompson that Zacharias, one of the Evangelical world’s most-respected apologists, had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with her. She claimed he’d “groomed” her over a period of months and persuaded her to send him inappropriate pictures, including nudes.