Valuetainment - April 05, 2026


“Scandals Don’t Break Christianity” - Lee Strobel CHALLENGES The Crisis Of Faith

Topics
scandals in churches scandals don't invalidate faith accountability in churches
Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Richard Myers Mark Jimmy Swaggart Robert Morris Best Western John Morris Bill Hybels John Moore Jim Baker Bobby McCoy Mono
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Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

188.77

Word count

1,507

Sentence count

88

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Pastor Bill Hybels, author of The Case For Church, joins Ken Burns to discuss his new book, The Case for Church: How To Protect Your Faith in the Face of Scandals, and why pastors should be held accountable for the crimes they commit.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.000 Yeah, but it's not a new thing.
00:00:33.460 No, it's not a new thing.
00:00:34.520 I used to go to a church in L.A. called Los Angeles Church of Christ,
00:00:38.820 and their pastor eventually came out,
00:00:41.620 and there was a massive scandal with that as well.
00:00:43.380 But he came out and he said, look, their thing wasn't about women with him.
00:00:47.840 It was more the only way to go to heaven is through our church,
00:00:51.260 no other church because we're the right way and all this other stuff.
00:00:54.020 But you can go back and hear stories with Jimmy Swagger
00:00:59.640 That was the original one.
00:01:02.540 You hear the Jim Baker story, the Ted Haggard,
00:01:05.800 which was a story with a male escort and a lot of them,
00:01:09.660 even some of them right now that you look at.
00:01:11.400 The one locally was Bob McCoy and recently was, I think, is it John Morris?
00:01:14.860 He wrote a very good book.
00:01:16.460 Is that his name from Dallas?
00:01:18.160 Yes, from Dallas.
00:01:19.380 Not John Moore.
00:01:20.480 No, it's not.
00:01:21.020 It's a different Morris.
00:01:22.500 Richard Morris?
00:01:23.500 Robert Morris is what it is.
00:01:25.260 Yes, I don't know him, but yeah.
00:01:26.680 And he came out, and things that came back, and he accepted it.
00:01:31.360 Which was a great church.
00:01:32.540 I have friends who went to that church.
00:01:34.160 They loved the church.
00:01:35.180 They loved the church.
00:01:36.080 It's a great church.
00:01:37.100 And then to have that happen, it's like you have to tell people, yeah, it's a tragedy.
00:01:43.560 And yet it should not destroy your faith.
00:01:45.620 So for me, you know, I go back and I say, okay, so I'm going to Bible study with this guy, Mono. 1.00
00:01:54.300 and he tells me, he says, hey, your relationship is a vertical relationship,
00:01:59.120 not a horizontal relationship.
00:02:00.680 So in your book, The Case for Church, you talk about one of the points you make
00:02:04.680 in the book, which I love, is that scandals don't invalidate the truth, right?
00:02:10.660 Scandals don't invalidate the truth because, you know, these are human beings.
00:02:14.520 They're going to fall.
00:02:15.120 They're going to make mistakes.
00:02:16.540 But what is your position of what these men who come in,
00:02:20.340 because women are attracted to what? 1.00
00:02:22.780 A pastor who builds a very big church, the way you do it is you're either very good at one-on-one,
00:02:32.780 but typically you're very good in one in thousand.
00:02:36.340 Yeah, that's right.
00:02:37.440 Very good with one in thousand.
00:02:38.720 So to be good in one in thousand, you're very good persuading, you're charming, you're charismatic, you're convincing.
00:02:44.480 The conviction, you're like women want a man. 0.96
00:02:46.940 These are all attractive qualities, right?
00:02:49.100 Can be.
00:02:49.700 That get into play.
00:02:50.720 So, you know, one, as the attendee, how should an attendee look at that as devastating as it is and not cause them to lose faith in a man upstairs?
00:03:04.080 And two, what can senior pastors do to protect themselves against this common pattern that happens to many great men in history?
00:03:14.080 It's unfortunate that we're mentioning their names.
00:03:16.260 where I can go a list of history, you know, and we have thousands of names that we can give with
00:03:20.900 this. How do you? Well, I think first of all, for those who are quote unquote victims in the sense
00:03:26.420 that they're part of a church that a pastor falls and so forth, how do they not lose their faith?
00:03:31.420 I think number one is our faith is not in the pastor. Our faith is in Jesus. Our faith is in
00:03:35.740 God. And I mentioned to you earlier, the reasons why I became convinced that Jesus is who he claimed
00:03:42.120 to be through his resurrection from the dead. Historical data. I go back to that. I go back to
00:03:47.860 that. Yes, there are men of God who fall and who sin and who forfeit their pulpit because of
00:03:54.960 immorality. But I go back to the evidence. I go back to the, how do I know? How do I know
00:03:59.960 Christianity is true? I look at the four E's and say, yeah, Jesus did return from the dead. He did 0.86
00:04:04.680 prove he's the son of God. That has nothing to do with Bill Hybels. So I want to set that boundary
00:04:10.940 and say, I want to rely on, you know, it's called in the Christian world, apologetics,
00:04:16.840 defense of the faith, reasons to believe.
00:04:20.160 In terms of the pastors, there's got to be accountability.
00:04:24.440 There's got to be, you know, I see a lot of churches where the elders of the church are employees of the church.
00:04:31.280 They're, well, you can't hold the senior pastor accountable if he's your boss, right?
00:04:36.400 So you're getting paid, you got a salary, so your incentive is to protect them.
00:04:40.140 Exactly. So, you know, who are the elders of the church? How are they chosen?
00:04:46.500 And what access do they have to the pastor? Is a pastor willing to open up his life? Are there
00:04:51.720 people who he discloses to? Like my friend Mark. You know, I mean, we each, that's our accountable
00:04:58.720 relationship as followers of Jesus. We want to hold each other accountable. And if Mark ever
00:05:04.960 senses that i'm kind of going astray he'll pull me aside and if he doesn't hit me across the face
00:05:10.140 i know he's going to tell me hey strobel um listen what you did that's inappropriate you need to do
00:05:16.100 you know so there's got to be that kind of um accountability iron sharpens iron the bible says
00:05:21.700 yeah are you i'm assuming you're familiar with the the modesto manifesto that billy grant came
00:05:27.720 up with with his crew yeah uh what do you think about the modesto manifesto is this where you
00:05:32.840 are never in the presence of a woman that's right yeah i you know what 1948 he sat there and he says
00:05:38.260 hey guys it seems like he knew and look what happened to billy graham he lived a life of
00:05:44.020 authenticity and effectiveness until the end it's not easy it's not easy and i wonder is there a
00:05:49.180 cause and effect there they had a rule of three right because he told he tells a story i believe
00:05:54.360 one time where it's like he's in a room by himself a real attractive girl comes in i don't know if
00:05:59.800 It could have been a different pastor.
00:06:01.260 Rob, fact check me on this if he told the story.
00:06:04.140 And he runs out immediately.
00:06:06.300 He's like, I can't be in.
00:06:07.500 So they would travel in threes is what he would talk about
00:06:11.280 because he would break down the fall was based on four things
00:06:14.800 that would cause a church to fall. 0.67
00:06:16.660 One was women. 1.00
00:06:18.780 One was finances because you're not –
00:06:21.420 one was like it's getting to your head.
00:06:23.820 And he had four things that he would talk about.
00:06:26.240 Well, I personally travel with my wife wherever I go.
00:06:29.620 She's here on this trip to Fort Lauderdale, and she comes with me whenever I travel,
00:06:34.820 mainly because we're best friends.
00:06:36.800 And, you know, noting it since we were 14.
00:06:38.980 So we're always together.
00:06:41.240 And that's a blessing to me, to have someone like that.
00:06:44.620 It's not like she's a bodyguard or she's screening things, but she's there.
00:06:48.860 And I'm glad she's there.
00:06:50.100 I enjoy her being there.
00:06:51.300 But she also, that becomes a guard against any inappropriate actions that I might otherwise try to make.
00:06:57.900 yeah it's it's we're all susceptible i mean temptations of you know satan is very clever
00:07:04.040 and uh he will tempt us in ways that we don't see coming um we got to be you know bible talks about
00:07:10.680 put on the full armor of god um uh you can't do it alone though i mean it's the one thing that's
00:07:16.560 for sure you can't do it alone that's right when you're going through it alone it's going to be
00:07:19.980 uh it's going to challenge you in a big way hi i'm lee strobel atheist turned christian author
00:07:25.680 of several books including The Case for Christ and Seeing the Supernatural. You might have
00:07:30.420 questions about faith, about how we know that Jesus is who we claim to be, and that there really
00:07:36.100 is a realm beyond what we can see and touch and put in a test tube. So I'd love to chat with you
00:07:41.240 about that. Just go to Manect, and then we can connect and talk about these matters of faith
00:07:46.640 that are so important to our lives.
00:07:48.340 If you enjoyed this video, you want to watch more videos like this, click here.
00:07:56.220 And if you want to watch the entire podcast, click here.