The legislation agency additionally discovered a sample of intimate textual content and email-based relationships with girls. In reviewing his digital units, they discovered the cellphone numbers of greater than 200 therapeutic massage therapists and greater than 200 selfies, a few of them nudes, from a lot youthful girls. Mr. Zacharias additionally used the nonprofit ministry to financially help a few of his long-term therapists. The report additionally reveals that he owned two residences in Bangkok, the place he spent 256 days between 2010 and 2014. One in every of his therapeutic massage therapists stayed within the different residence.
Mr. Zacharias mentioned in 2017 that in 45 years of marriage, “I’ve by no means engaged in any inappropriate conduct of any sort.”
The report is a devastating blow for the fame of a person who was for many years a extensively admired evangelical chief. Born in Chennai, India, and boasting spectacular educational credentials, he had a fame amongst many evangelicals as a cosmopolitan and winsome mental. His ministry’s motto is “Serving to the thinker imagine. Serving to the believer assume.”
Mr. Zacharias specialised in apologetics, a convention that focuses on making logical appeals for the reality of the Christian religion, and equipping evangelicals to interact non-believers in conversations about religion.
“Individuals within the pews in evangelical church buildings, after they consider a Christian mental, they might have considered Ravi Zacharias,” mentioned John Fea, a historian at evangelical Messiah School. “He had an immense affect on the way in which rank-and-file American evangelicals considered easy methods to defend their religion.”
He additionally constructed RZIM, which by the point of his loss of life employed greater than 100 full-time audio system all over the world. The ministry appealed to Christian donors who noticed Mr. Zacharias because the uncommon evangelist who might attain atheists and intellectuals within the academy, company boardrooms and different elite areas. As his well being failed final spring, public tributes poured in from high-profile followers together with the soccer and baseball participant Tim Tebow and the Christian rap artist Lecrae.
Because it turned out, Mr. Zacharias’s educational fame was constructed partially on exaggerations. Although he typically known as himself a “professor” or “analysis fellow” on the College of Oxford, for instance, he had solely a unfastened honorary affiliation with a Christian faculty there. He had equally inflated his relationship with the College of Cambridge. And although he used the title “Dr. Zacharias” in lots of contexts, together with in his 2006 memoir, “Strolling From East to West,” his solely doctorates had been honorary, as RZIM conceded in 2017.