Ravi Zacharias - "What Ravi did and Where Where Do We Go From Here"

[aron]

Originally Posted by aron

..this wasn't consensual. The power imbalance between Philip Lee and the secretary was enormous.

The power relations between PL and the female help was grossly imbalanced, so what Max Rapoport in 1978 saw was not consensual. Then witness MR was run off and the victim’s family got shipped out, to quiet things down. Then another witness came upon PL and the help a decade later. We can assume these weren’t the only two instances, but that it went on for years, enabled by WL and his inner ring of associates.

Then, add that to Timothy Lee and the Daystar Motor Home venture of the early ‘70s, you can see a pattern: a family that preyed on the church over the span of 20+ years. And that’s only what little we know, because people don’t talk in the Local Church out of fear and intimidation. The inner ring created a wall of silence. “We only talk about positive things” was the quoted comment to the Santa Ana Register.

But we do know that hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions of dollars, were siphoned from the captive churches. We don’t know how much of it disappeared or where, but we do know of accounting irregularities. I believe that training fees were charged and donations made to a non-profit (LSM) to cover losses at a for-profit (Phosphorus/Daystar). We do know that Daystar Treasurer Terry Risenhoover saw illegal money-laundering before he spoke up and was run out of town.

And the LSM will say, “So what? This is all old news.” Why discuss matters that happened 50 years ago? First off, you’re selling books that were written 50 years ago, so why do those still matter? We all celebrate what occurred 2,000 years ago, because its effect has carried forward to this day. The righteousness imputed to Christ at his resurrection is ours to today; the efficacy of his blood; the Spirit poured out on Pentecost is still at work. Likewise, the crimes of the Lee family decades ago, and the enabling by the inner ring who still run LSM today. I don’t think it’s wrong to call it out. In fact it’s wrong not to call it out.

And I'll end with Terry Mattingly’s quote in post #28. Ministries and ministers who are “radically independent” with no oversight or accountability are asking for trouble. I won’t speak of RZ but with WL we all believed that he was personally transformed and incapable of such continual, heinous activities. Yet the warnings were already there, and now here we are.