Interview with Sam Allberry || What Can We Learn from the Ravi Zacharias Scandals?

today we are talking to sam albury and before i um get into my interview with um sam albrecht i just want to tell you where we're going because at the end of the last video i said that we'd be talking to a number of different people um about um this scandal this evil and uh and sam is certainly not the only person that we're going to talk to i'm very grateful that diane langberg dr diane langberg is going to join us on the program she has a pact schedule but um she'll fit us in uh in the next couple of months but um i'm very glad that she said that uh she she wants to address the issue of abuse in the context of the church and i think she's the number one person in the world that i would want to talk to about that issue how do we protect victims how do we understand abusers and the abuse that happens how do we understand the institutions that are around them how do we how do we find healing so i'm thrilled to say that we've got her coming up we've also got becca legg of restored ministries here in the uk and she's going to be talking to us not only about church abuse but also about domestic abuse that comes to light in the context of church and what is it that we do how do we shine a light on this how do we prevent it how do we do better when such things are uh alleged and reported um she's gonna help us as well so in the in the context of that another person who we might want to talk to is sam albree because what is it like to be on the inside of an organization that bears the name of its founder um and what is it like when you're being told by senior leadership um not to trust all these other voices that are um disparaging the leader and then what's it like to be one of those voices in the fullness of time when you start to see some of the things that are going on what's what's it like to be on the inside of that and sam is sam's is a voice of uh integrity as he says you know he's not claiming to have gotten everything right um but he's been learning through this process and i think our conversation has certainly taught me a lot about um the need when you look at a ravi situation the need for much better rigorous accountability transparency confession humility and to believe or at least take very seriously the accusations that come of people in positions of authority and how we can do better as institutions um when the possibility of abuse is there so without further ado i give you my conversation with sam albree i'm joined on the line from nashville by sam albree he is an author a speaker a pastor and a former member of rzim ministries thank you so much for joining us sam it's my pleasure thanks for having me yeah this is not um the most important thing to focus on in our conversation at all but um it'll help um people get a sense of you and your connection to all these things but tell us where um the connection between yourself and rather zacharias and ravi zacharias international ministries began yeah i joined the team in 2016 spring of 2016. had been familiar with the work of the team and with the work of ravi for several years i remember hearing um ravi speak at a mission in oxford i think in the early 2000s the first time i came across his ministry and had got to know various other uk team members amy or ewing michael ramston and uh we had joined the team in in 2016. so um i've known of them and worked with them for for a fairly long time and tell us about um some of the relationship between the there's this occur in the uk which is the oxford center for christian apologetics and there's the zacharias trust and there's rsim global how do those things all sort of line up together yes as i said i am is the global ministry um the uk branch of it has been has has been known as the zacharias trust and one of the ministries of the zacharias trust has been oka the the um program in oxford and what was it that sort of drew you to um the ministry in in the first place yeah well it really was it was their conviction that um we we need to have evangelism undergirded by apologetics and whilst i've never sort of seen myself primarily as an evangelist i through my own sort of thinking and writing and ministry being sort of straying further and further into various areas of apologetics particularly with issues of sexuality and gender identity and those kinds of discussions and um was they they were kind enough to invite me to join a team and i thought that this would be a good group of people to work alongside as we seek to to respond to the big questions of life and i'm still passionate about about doing that um trying to find excuse me compelling answers to the big questions that people have today um my background is as you said is is really serving as a pastor that's that's more how i see my primary sense of gifting and vocation um but increasingly i don't think we can be pastors without being apologists um if we live in the in the western world at the moment so for me part of my um part of my my burden part of my my my longing is to help equip the church to to respond well to the cultural challenges that we face and the opportunities that we face so i was glad to be part of the team and to be serving alongside them in that in that kind of capacity and the man himself ravi zacharias it strikes me that though he did have a global ministry he wasn't that often in the uk and certainly as someone who's lived a large part of my life in in the uk i can't think of a time when there was a sort of a a ravi tour of the uk and that that sort of thing um but what was your connection with the man himself either before you um joined the the organization and then since yeah i met him briefly as part of my um uh joining the team um but but as you say he's not someone who's been as visible in the uk as you know in terms of ministry as he has been in other other places um on the team our paths would cross maybe two or three times a year either at a team meetings or occasionally we'd both be uh speaking at the same event um so i've had several casual conversations with him i think we we had lunch together once but other than that it it sort of been we weren't close um there are others on the team who who worked with him far more closely and and over a much longer period of time than than i would have done um does anything stand out to you in terms of those those interactions like lunch or or well he always came across as someone who was very um self-effacing and and humble um he was a very charismatic individual um so it was that those interactions were always he was you know extremely polite and and self-deprecating and um that yeah very pleasant interactions but i i i couldn't say i knew the man himself and obviously even those who thought they did now realize to a large extent that they didn't um so he wasn't someone who sort of you know was a sort of an open book um some people you can have one lunch with and you feel like you know them um he wasn't sort of as open as that yes it's it's always one of those hindsight is 20 20 things isn't it that's you you start to see things that might have been obvious um if you knew what you knew in 2021 you would have viewed things a bit differently in 2016 say um are there any sort of things like that as you look back um not in terms of my own personal interactions with him but obviously um more generally you know we're aware that he was on the road often 200 250 days a year uh he wasn't a member of a church and those two facts just alone you know would make you wonder about this someone's spiritual health um i remember when the uh the spa allegations first surfaced and the christianity today peace first came out i remember thinking they were very credible very plausible and one of the team members said to me why do you find it credible and i remember thinking well when someone is away from home that amount of time and doesn't seem to have any spiritual oversight i'm not going to be completely surprised if they've been leading a double life um i don't mean that claiming any kind of you know special insight but just as a as a basic as a basic principle those those are not healthy dynamics to to be ministering in and i think you know that the leadership has the ministry has has said as much i think it was it was too easy to give him a pass on that based on his gifting and to think oh look well it's ravi so it's okay because look at look at how the lord is using him and that's obviously you know again something we we need to learn something very serious from is is gifting is not um is not a reason to sort of think someone doesn't need the same spiritual disciplines and means of grace that the bible says all of us need there's no kind of asterisk in in the new testament to that effect of you know if someone is super gifted it actually doesn't matter if they're not part of a church or something like that um so yeah there's lots of things to we should have thought more about at the time and um and and i think we're learning some people did challenge him on some of those things and he wasn't open to receiving that kind of challenge um so to give a bit of a timeline i i guess some of the first scandals that were breaking were um the inflation of credentials um dating back i i think steve baffman could could date things back to 1980 when ravi was was claiming to be a department head at a seminary that had no departments um and then more prominently there were claims of being a cambridge student and an oxford professor and and claiming to be doctor in a way that um those who had earned phds uh would severely question so i guess that kind of credentials thing was was already kind of in the public domain to some degree was it was it ever a part of the the conversation at azerim it was yes um and not to the um and maybe i wasn't listening carefully enough and that's that's that is a possibility and something that i i've certainly been guilty of at other points in this whole process but as i recall most of the conversation around the credentials kind of the narrative that i heard at least was you know he's got all of these honorary doctorates and part of the eastern cultural thing is is you know that you know it would not be unusual in that cultural context to call yourself a doctor given that so i sort of thought maybe there's a bit of cultural stuff maybe he's just been a bit clumsy and um careless with that i hadn't at the time gone through the the stuff steve bachmann was was trying to to draw to our attention and i hadn't seen the extent of that so it was more serious than i had realized i'd assumed it was you know anytime i i speak anywhere in america i've got an english accent and people call i'll often be introduced as dr samuel i don't have a phd it's an english accent um so you know i thought maybe it's that kind of you know people have sort of misunderstood and he's not corrected them carefully enough so i i'd sort of understood it as being more accidental than deliberate um and obviously we're you know i'm aware now that it was much more of a pattern of seemingly an intentional um deceit it seems to me that part of the reason why ravi was allowed to get away with things was partly because of the the inflation of the persona and the building of the platform and here's here's the mask and look how glitzy it is which the the further that gets from reality the greater the breach is and the more space there is for the sins to fester underneath and i think again it's one of those things with with hindsight you think well obviously um but but you're right at the time it it seems it might seem like a it is it is a much lesser crime than sexual abuse it it is but it's it's the context in which that abuse can take place and the other thing that strikes me about that is is that it was steve boffman um who um was doing the ravi watch stuff and i guess his his book um what was his book something in the kingdom in 2017 yes a seat in the kingdom or something like that or i'll uh we'll we'll we'll put it along the bottom here but um he was writing that book in about 2017 and the first thing that tipped him off was the credentials thing and i do wonder if we we didn't listen to him because he was an atheist i i don't wonder i i know in in terms of us as a ministry me individually um i'm not i'm not excusing myself from this but we we were told the staff he's he's just this kind of crazy blogger who's got this fixation we're trying to bring down ravi we were told to ignore him and to not respond to him and so i i didn't and to my shame um this you know and again being able to say well he's an atheist so therefore he's obviously got an axe to grind and some agenda but you know um may god humble us that it was an atheist trying to tell the ostensibly truth speaking christian ministry the truth he was trying to do apologetics with a with a group of apologists um so we owe him we owe him a debt i owe him an apology um yeah he's been working very you know diligently for for many many years on this yeah help us with that biblically and theologically um that sometimes a prophet arises from outside the church could that be possible yeah of course of course it is there is common grace um all around us there is there is there is always truth uh even in in world views that that are are far from the christian world view and there there can be people who don't know the lord but who do have a conviction about right and wrong that the church can learn from um as seems to be the case with with steve boffman it seems like in the in the prophets again and again there were those who would cling on to their ethnic identity and their spiritual identity and we've got the temple of the lord the temple of the lord the temple of the lord as jeremiah says in chapter seven and all the while it's the lord bringing those from outside god's people to bring judgment onto god's people and and to tear down their most cherished um spiritual securities which had become idols to them um it seems like um steve is in very much in that tradition um today but then the next sort of um scandal that really um rocked us was was laurie ann thompson and um this relationship that ravi had sort of initiated and um what what was what was known at the time in uh as that i am and what um since that time has come to light yes what what um what we were told was that this was a case of of someone who was a serial extortionist trying to again trying to take down ravi um his his own account to us as a staff team at the time was that he had been naive in his dealing with her in in kind of having a sort of um in his own personal emails back and forth with her um so it was it was very much explained as this is someone who is who was trying to entrap him and extort him and from from the inside i was thinking well ravi's got this you know many decades of of being above reproach um i you know i'll give him the benefit of the doubt and we were given what looked like evidence that this was extortion um so initially that was a sort of okay so that that's what's going on with that as as more information began to to kind of come into the public domain some of his emails to laurie and thompson were leaked um it didn't look quite as straightforward as that um there was the the threat of suicide um and other comments that he made to her that made you think this doesn't look like merely i've been a bit naive in having a kind of some form of email personal email correspondence more seems to be a foot and his his sort of kind of non-apology apology to us and and more publicly was that you know he said something to the effect of i i failed to exercise googly caution in my digital communications or something like that and i remember feeling at the time it feels like it's probably more than that and that something more than that seems to be going on and then then the thing about the nda came out and again that was explained to us as well this is this is just normal in in kind of legal settings and i don't know legal stuff at all so i thought okay maybe that maybe it's not a cause for concern that he's got an nda with her but it again with hindsight and i'm not excusing my um lack of due diligence at the time in hindsight it it's not consistent with being above reproach um to be to be in that situation to have an nda and then again didn't find out this until sometime later to that there had been a financial settlement as well so there were things we were told as a team that we now know were not true um we had been told money hadn't changed hands that everything had been looked into we've been told that the board had looked had access to all of ravi's emails to her that everything had been looked into and was fine and we didn't need to worry um so i remember thinking well on the one hand it feels a little bit fishy but on the other hand i'm being given assurances by these ministry leaders that i know and trust that actually it has we have done due diligence it has been investigated and not to worry about it so um i remember feeling a little just a little tall at the time um of feeling that that conflict of i know these people and i trust these people and it feels like there's a bit more going on here and again that that's that's on me um i believed monstrous lies about lorianne thompson and even if i had a sort of an inkling i think something more may have gone on here i should have asked more questions i should have um i shouldn't have just put it to one side um so i feel very convicted of that and you know um i think it's james 4 17 all around there where it says he who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it since um it was a sin of a mission um to which you know i've been able to reach out to lorianne thompson and to personally apologize to her for that sin against her of not doing the good i should have done and actually didn't know i needed to do at the time so that was that was the situation back in late 17 early 2018 and as it turns out through the miller and martin report of of this year um if they had looked at ravi's phone at that stage it would have corroborated everything that lorianne had been saying and phone's plural um because we now know he had four or five of them or something like that um no absolutely but it completely corroborates her account of things and would have saved three years of further abuse from taking place so what what's the lesson so knowing what you know now um if if you're in a christian ministry or a church and um allegations are made um knowing what you know now what's what is the correct response yeah i'm i don't have a definitive answer to that so i'm still trying to figure that out um one of the one of the the obvious lessons from this is is always to ask of a ministry what what what accountability is in place what transparency is in place um because there are there are two parts to this there's the sin of the the individual himself and there's also the integrity of the ministry that he worked for um so something i'm i'm talking through with the um the pastoral leadership of the church i'm at now in nashville is what what means of transparency can we put in place as pastoral leaders that actually protects the integrity of the church in terms of finances in terms of our use of devices in terms of our travel itinerary and that kind of thing that's something we're actually working on right now so that's not going to stop me from sinning because i'm the sin is in my heart and structures can can restrict opportunities but you know if you want a sin you will find a way to sin but at the very least it could protect the integrity of the local church that they could say well we on our end we we've done what we can to make sure there is realistic transparency so with in the case of ravi there clearly wasn't i don't think any accountability um he was free to travel on his own for extended periods of time um i don't know to what extent people in the ministry would have known where he was at any given moment where he was staying or who he was with that kind of thing um and did detail with his use of of devices so there are certainly significant lessons and you know i've already had conversations with other ministries and you know the question is well what what is our board doing to to make sure actually we we're above approach as an organization on these things um what is due diligence look like for church leadership teams for boards of elders for ministry boards and that kind of thing and what are we doing as as christian leaders pastors speakers to to make sure that as far as is is appropriate and realistic and and healthy that are that there is transparency um in our own handling of things um so that that's one certainly one thing to learn from all of this um so that if if an allegation if it does come that the church can at least say well these are the things we we've always in made sure that we have access to and can know um which at the very least is a is a better starting point than we've gotten hiding what he's been up to yeah yeah yeah and that that leader is not above reproach and that that that leader can be called to account and whatever image they have projected for the past however many decades um you know the ballots are probabilities that that person is lying um well the probability goes up massively if they're not connected to a church if they're not accountable if their you know phone is off off the grid and all those other things if if they are known for um inflating their credentials et cetera you know so we deflate that probability but i think also with those who allege abuse um we ought to bump up at least in most people's understanding the probability that they are bringing a truthful accusation because the number of hurdles they have to get over in order to be brave enough to make accusations against powerful men is actually immense and and therefore um what some you know some some might assume that um everyone's going around making false accusations of powerful people all the time um but actually the power dynamics are such that um actually the probability of that is low um and and it seems like we need to tilt our understanding well i i think i need to tilt my understanding massively in in in favor of at least giving the most fair hearing i possibly can to such allegations absolutely absolutely i completely agree with that and another another aspect of this less significant than the one you just raised which i think is probably the most important thing we can learn from this is what are appropriate levels of trust um we don't want to be cynical people who don't trust anyone and we're meant to live as christians with with a degree of trust in one another and of those in leadership over us but we're not to be naive either and it's not to be unquestioning uncritical or uninformed trust it's trust that should be based on you know being above reproach on on having the right level of of transparency and that kind of thing it's it's seen trust rather than blind trust um because it's easy after something like this has happened to say see the only person you can trust is jesus and that's true in an ultimate sense and and one of the great comforts for me through this whole season has been the the the joyous reassurance we will never discover an ugly side to jesus that has been hidden from us that is always a possibility with with anybody else um there will nev there's never that risk with jesus um but we're still meant to live with a degree of trust in one another um but it's got to be informed and not uncritical um and one of the things that we've again been learning through this process is the the from from what we what we're hearing is that ravi did not respond well to the times when people did question him or challenge him and that itself is another sign that you are not above reproach um and that those are things that are coming to light that again are very serious if someone is if someone's response to legitimate probing and questioning um about their own personal conduct is anger that is that is not a good sign that they are someone who is qualified to be in christian leadership no it should be a massive red flag um but it's a sign of the the massive charisma i guess of of ravi that he could get away not just charisma but i think what we're seeing is from what people have been sharing in recent days is intimidation yeah so there's the charisma side of things but you can be spellbound by him but there's the intimidation of if you say the wrong thing and ask the wrong question you you're crushed by him and you won't do it again and that that seems to have been going on as well during this time which which again means there are many signs it transpires that he was not fit to be in ministry and signs that should have been evident over many many years so he died in may 2020 and then when was it was about september when the story broke about uh three massage therapists um who had worked at a spa that was jointly owned by ravi making allegations of all sorts of inappropriate uh behavior um it seems like the initial response from azerim was that you know these reports do not match the the man that we know um looking back on that statement how do you feel um it was it was not a statement i was happy with at the time because as well as saying that it said we the teammates and family or something like that of ravi zacharias believe these allegations to be false and i remember saying at the time i'm a teammate i'm on the team here i can't say that um it doesn't doesn't mean i i know for a fact they're all true but i i i can't say i believe them to be false that you know that the story as it was broken by christianity today was was extremely credible this was responsible honest to goodness journalism um from a reputable journalist um daniel silliman so and i think you know these are these are really this this is legit um we need i i found it i believed it um i believed those allegations and so i i i said i can't i can't say i believe these allegations to be false um i can understand saying this doesn't fit with a man i've known for for 30 years because it's possible to know someone for 30 years and not realize who they are we now know there were things that were known by some in the leadership about ravi that make that statement now sound deeply disingenuous so it was a it was a a very inadequate statement and the subsequent statements from the leadership have have i think acknowledged that and you voiced that at the time didn't you you said look i'm a teammate i i i find these women's stories credible um how was that received um in a variety of different ways my first my first concern was to protect the freedom of conscience for the for the ministry team um so we we had a staff q a and um i wanted the first question to be i thought i just said listen i i believe these allegations um they seem highly credible to me my question is do we have freedom of conscience am i allowed to say what i just said and can we have assurance that no one will be made to feel disloyal or unspiritual if they do believe these allegations can you can you guarantee freedom of conscience and the answer was given that yes of course there will be complete freedom of conscience that that's fine um there were some who were deeply unhappy that i had said that and who did feel it was disloyal there were some members of the team in other parts of the world and even members of of the family who felt it was a kind of betrayal and i shouldn't be on the team if i think that um but i know from uh just from interactions with the wider team that we have victims of sexual assault as part of the team and people have been abused at other times in their life and who i i knew would be feeling very would be feeling very vulnerable at a time like this and my main concern was was not you know how this is going to go down with the family but how are they going to be cared for um are they going to be safe if this for them is is triggering memories of their own experience and again ringing very true in their ears that this this is credible and and probable um so yeah so then azeram global commissions a report and eventually it's the law firm isn't it miller and martin um that undertook um to to do that um did you have any inkling that the report would be as devastating as it turned out to be um well only on the basis that i i had no reason to disbelieve that the charges being brought um from the christianity today article i remember when i first read that article it was it was devastating um you know again daniel suleiman had done due diligence uh he he's he's not a um a self-appointed you know lone ranger on this he's working under professional editorial constraints and standards so i had no reason to think it wasn't true based on his his careful work and the grieving process many are going through now i went through then many many of us went through it then in september as we as we read that article and i remember thinking um you know i've heard i've heard some of our team members commending faith in the resurrection of jesus based on less evidence than the christianity today pieces is offering us of these allegations um i had no good reason to to disbelieve them so i i had a sort of baseline assumption that the the if the investigation was being done well and legitimately it would most likely corroborate um those things that were being said in christianity today it would certainly be extremely hard to disprove them um and the thought did occur if if this is what he was getting up to in atlanta what might he have been getting up to on these long solo trips to southeast asia um and then they released a preliminary kind of finding in december that the you know the investigation released a preliminary finding to the effect that we can corroborate the allegations and we have found evidence of more serious i think their language was more serious misconduct um so we you know we were all kind of bracing ourselves then for what the final report would contain and it was certainly you know i think all of us were expecting it to be distressing and horrifying and indeed indeed it was and i think not least because what we see in that final report isn't oh this is someone who struggled it was so brazen and so willful and right up until the point he went into hospital to die of cancer um you know right up to the end he was still doing these things um with no apparent indication of any kind of contrition or repentance or confession or any of those things um so it and just on a scale and over a time period that is is is deeply horrifying how do you how do you account for that um you know blog pages uh um numerous about you know was he saved or was he not saved do we um do we do we conclude that he was a phony from the outset um or not um what do you think happened to ravi to to let it get that bad i i just don't know i mean um maybe this was something he was always never going to yield on and it you know it could have been this could have been what he was up to from day one it could have been one of those bit by bit incremental things he himself said many times that sim will always take you further than you want to go um maybe he was maybe that was as close as he as he got to confessing something to us um so i just don't know um whether he got himself gradually more and more ensnared in this or whether you know whether even the the ministry itself was the structure he purposely built in order for this to happen um i just don't know the lord the lord knows and maybe as more details come out over the years we'll get a bigger sense of the the kind of the narrative of this and the the history of this um but either way we just reinforces the urgency in our own lives of putting to death the misdeeds of the flesh um and of having people in our lives that we can confess our sins to i think one of the big takeaways from this for me over these these many months has been you know that there's confession of sin to the lord but the bible does tell us to confess our sins to one another as well and so the question i've been asking myself i ask ask my friends is you know who do you confess your sins to um who who's in your life that you can do that with um uh we we need that desperately and we're not good at it and it's very un-english but that's not the issue um we've got to be christian um and there's there are aspects of our englishness and and fear of awkwardness we just have to crucify those things as well if it if obedience to christ necessitated so we we need to have people that who who actually know the best of us and the worst of us um people we can confess our sins to and and walk in the light with yeah yeah and whatever cultural background you're from it's you know fascinating as soon as adam and eve sin what's the first thing they want to do you know fig leaves um and then hiding behind the trees you know it's we're always we're always trying to look good in the presence of judgment instead of trying to look bad in the presence of love which is uh the redemption of that that christ brings um it is and god god is god can cover our sins uh we we think we can but we can't he actually can um and we if we if we uncover them before him we can find in christ that they're covered through him um but if we try and hide them from him and from others it just never ever works does it we think we get away with that it just never works yeah yeah our sins find us out and our sins spread and cause such havoc um tell me what do you i mean i don't i don't have any ravi zacharias books to to throw out but i think if i had some i think i would um but there would be a number of reasons why people might do that how should people assess um the writing and the teaching of ravi now um well for myself um i i will be getting rid of his books um the primary reason for that is because um well there's lots of reasons for that but not the least of which is if if someone who is a victim of sexual abuse is ever in my house and sees a book with his name on it it's an act of kindness to not have someone be potentially triggered i don't wanna i don't want them to see that the name of a known abuser on the shelf of books that are looking like they're you know commending christian truth um he is not a model of a christian teacher so he may have said things that were true and that that i learned from um but i don't want to learn from him now um because he he was never qualified to teach um so if if someone is not qualified biblically to to lead and to teach the people of god um i don't want to be having their books alongside those who are plus there's a danger there that we kind of relativize the sin and go yeah but the truth is still true and therefore i can still read all of his books and kind of learn from them and park his his character but i i don't think the new testament encourages us to to bifurcate in that kind of way and it's actually that kind of thinking that then justifies godly and ungodly behavior on the basis that well the ministry is still working so we'll just kind of tolerate the sin um we've got to not separate what god has joined together which is your words and your person and your character and your ministry yes yes yes absolutely i've been very struck by that because you know you want to say okay it's just christ alone and so um of course humans are going to be terrible um and then you you don't deal with with human sin and structures that are continuing to victimize people and then there's this bifurcation between you know truth and character um it's not the way god has gone about you know revealing truth to the world is it it's not enough to say well all teachers are flawed because the bible says there are certain qualifications required for christian ministry and if someone is not qualified they should not be in ministry um none of us is a perfect pilot um but that doesn't mean i'm going to get on a plane that anyone is flying i want the pilot to be qualified they're not going to be perfect they will be flawed but actually the qualification matters because i'm i'm entrusting my my my life into their hands and if we're entrusting our spiritual lives into someone's hands we want to know that they're qualified and that someone has kind of done due diligence on that and even if i find out a pilot who's been flying successfully for many years if i find out actually they were never qualified i'm still not going to get on a plane i don't care how many successful flights they've flown if i if i now know they never went to flight school or whatever you do to learn to be a pilot um i'm not going to trust them to to carry me safely that's a good analogy what would you say to people who um ravi had been very important in their journey to faith and maybe they they do have all his books and and um yeah he he was from a great distance he seemed to be a spiritual father and and many of those people are feeling incredibly rocked by this what do you say to them yeah i mean the the pastoral quite apart from the what the victims themselves have gone through and will need in terms of care there are there are so many wide ripples of kind of past rule issues that are gonna are gonna flow out of this and and tens of thousands hundreds of thousands maybe of of christians who who would have been deeply distressed by all of this um uh russell moore wrote an article a a little shortly after the report came out where he addressed this by saying it's when you when you discover the person who taught you the gospel was a fraud it doesn't mean the gospel isn't true it's the gospel that you trust not the person who taught you the gospel so to those who've come to faith or been significantly formed through ravi's ministry your faith was never in ravi i mean he may have been someone you you trusted and deeply respected as a teacher may have had faith in him as a teacher but your christian faith was in resort has always been in christ and ravi has let you down and betrayed you christ hasn't the gospel is is no less true [Music] and it's actually the truth of the gospel that exposes the depth of the betrayal it does highlight the importance of proclaiming christ in your message so that the reason why someone might come to faith is because they are trusting the christ you proclaim and there is there is a danger going on if if your ministry is about um persuading people that you can be clever and a christian and people look up to ravi and they say he sounds clever he's quoting people verbatim and he has all these conversations with all the you know all these anonymous you know people who he trounced in debate um and they're not here to tell us their side of the story but he he made you feel like you could be a clever person and a christian and i think and i think a lot of the draw of ravi's ministry was kind of that and so how much how much more is the betrayal if the reason why they're coming to faith is not so much the christ deeper claims but if it's mixed in with a whole bunch of um you can trust the credibility of dr zacharias who tells you these things and no turns out not so much yeah and that's true of some of the other scandals we've seen in recent days too with the whole kind of celebrity pastor thing it's hey i can be i can be cool um and a christian i you know i can be intellectually respectable and a christian i can be pushy and obnoxious as a man and a christian if i follow mark driscoll you know whatever it might be yeah which you know i'm struck in galatians paul talks about um longing to see christ formed in you as as the goal of his ministry he doesn't want to see himself in the people that he's ministering to he wants to see jesus being formed in them um that should be that you know our motives are always mixed at the best of times but our deepest desire in christian leadership should be that that people are attracted to christ and being formed into his likeness and that we're we're kind of incidental along the way hopefully we can be a good example and um point him in the right direction but that the arrow isn't on us the arrow is on is on jesus he must increase and it's not like if i increase jesus will increase if i look good he'll look good it's no no i've got to get out of the way i've got a decrease so that he can increase which means not put your faith in me and jesus but put your faith in jesus means don't put your faith in me um hopefully i can say with christian integrity you know follow my example as i follow the example of christ but even then it's a derivative example um christ is the one we're actually following so it's it's a word to all of us isn't it because we we like our little empires and we we you know in any church you see something of the best and worst of the pastor's personality being reflected in the life of the congregation and it's why it's good to have plural eldership multiple pastors more than one teaching voice within the church and to sort of counter balance some of those quirks and limitations yeah what what would you say to victims i mean you said that um i mean you reached out to lorianna very graciously she's um she's um spoken to you and you you you've gone back and forth um what would you say to people like laurie anne and victims not only in the um in the ravi case but um especially those who at the hands of christians who should have um behaved a whole lot better uh what do you say yeah there are people far more qualified to answer that question than i am i'm still learning in one sense what to say i mean my my initial my initial thing is is obviously up to anyone who's ever been abused by people who should have had who should have had their trust um or who claim to have their trust is you know we we we weep with them we we're so profoundly sorry that anyone has had to go through that i'd want someone to know in in time that our our savior is you know don't don't judge jesus by the worst of his people and judge judge us by him the very categories we have for understanding the the true horror of abuse controversy precisely from the moral categories that christ himself embodies and that he condemns such things in in in the strongest possible terms um so in other words my kind of pastoral yearning is for people to realize jesus is safe um those who've come in his name might not have been but he is and in in time and this can take a a very very long time just from my own experience with church members who've gone through abuse um you know to to begin to find christians that that you can trust and that you can journey with who who will encourage you um you know that can take a very long time to to even think about going near a church or something like that but um yeah we you know speaking for myself i'm still um i'm still a novice when it comes to understanding a lot of these dynamics i'm i'm grateful for the ministries of those who are equipping and teaching us on this um i think of diane lamberg and wade mullen and rachel den hollander and many other voices who are helping us as as fellow christians to respond in ways that are healthy and helpful rather than just you know i'm causing more hurt and trauma unwittingly yes we've got diane langberg coming on uh the show later and um and becca legg from a uk perspective as well um uh tell us sam just as we close um what is your situation now and as you look forward um what do you think you'll be doing differently in ministry having lived through this season yes um so as for now right now um i i've my employment has been with the uk branch of i said i am and um the day following the report the um board for the uk team um announced that the uk team was entirely separating from from im and they they gave the reasons for that in their own uh their own statement so with with them i am now not part of of ours that i am um and you know that that's one decision that's that's been made as a uk team we're we're obviously asking the the question should we should we still exist as a team given given all that's happened with this ministry globally um i think i think it was the right decision to to separate but the question is should should we fold or do we continue what do we do now and we need to come before the lord with with an open hand on that um as as for myself i you know my my sense of uh of irrespective of all of these things i i've been um in the process of trying to move to to nashville for the past year or so and covert has slowed that down enormously with visa applications and uh no longer being part of ourselves we'll slow that down even more um so i'm i'm still planning to be based over here which means i will probably not um whatever happened to the uk team i probably won't be a full member of the uk team solely because i'm i'm wanting to be based over here now anyway and serving at the church here and uh continuing to think and teach uh where i can as well um in terms of excuse me what what to do differently some of that is already has already happened um i have two fellow pastors here in nashville we we try to meet once a week and we we walk in the light together so um to have again who who are the men in my case that i'm going to be confessing my sins to and and to have transparency with um that's that's one thing as i said we're working as a as a pastoral leadership team on on a kind of what to put in place um for the church leadership to make sure there's there's appropriate access to our digital and financial and in my case um travel life as well just so that those things are are accessible and seen by someone and not just a complete mystery i've said to the church leadership in as much as i'm still traveling around and speaking different places i don't ever want the answer to the question where's where's sam these days to be modern i think he's just away somewhere i want people to think oh yeah he's his travel schedule he's in london this week speaking for this group um i want that level of people knowing what i'm up to and where i am and um how i'm conducting myself so those are two things and obviously um in the light of uh my own negligence with particularly with lorianne thompson's um case to to be to do better due diligence as and when accusations come to to make sure they're being taken seriously and and heard appropriately yes and all all of which is um in a sense mortifying in in that you know old-fashioned sense you know you you've already talked about putting to death the misdeeds of the flesh from romans chapter eight and and the official term for that is mortifying and it feels mortifying um to constrain your liberties and to confess your sins and to admit to error and to do an about face on this that or the other um but i'm i'm very struck by the fact that the word for witness in the new testament is mata um and we need to die well actually as we move forwards don't we yeah every day deny yourself take up your cross um that the discipleship is is ongoing martyrdom yes um yes it's daily daily death to self yes and isn't isn't that the best response to a scandal that happens when you build up the flesh build up the flesh build up the flesh um no no the the the way is in christ and with christ and through christ pouring ourselves out um it's excruciating for us um but it is the way it is the way of life and it's the way of blessing as we as we move forward so um all all strengths to your elbow um sam i've been blessed so much by your ministry by your writing by your speaking by your friendship um and thank you very much for your honesty and transparency in um speaking about these things because you know some of this is mortifying for you it's it's of a different order than um the issue that um victims are going through right now and we'll certainly be addressing that um at speak life as well but it's been so um helpful to get your your wisdom on on the journey that you've been on and i pray that many learn from it sam aubrey thanks so much for joining us thank you for having me glenn i'm grateful to have this time and grateful to you for your ministry as well

Channel: Speak Life

Views: 58,176

Rating: 4.8279009 out of 5

Keywords: glen scrivener, speaklife, uk, God, Reaching out, sam alberry, sam albery, sam allbery, ravi zacharias, abuse scandal

Id: SMA6ZDS7eLc

Length: 62min 1sec (3721 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021