Ravi Zacharias / RZIM (Ravi Zacharias International Ministries)

Ravi Zacharias (1946–2020) was born in Chennai, India, emigrated to Canada as a young man, and built Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM, founded 1984) into one of the most-influential evangelical apologetics organisations of the 1980s–2010s. RZIM had offices in 16 countries at its peak, an annual operating budget exceeding $30M, and trained generations of evangelical apologists at its Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (founded 2004, in collaboration with Wycliffe Hall, Oxford). Zacharias's books — Can Man Live Without God? (1994), Jesus Among Other Gods (2000), Has Christianity Failed You? (2010) — were widely cited across evangelicalism.

Zacharias died of cancer on 19 May 2020. Within months of his death, Christianity Today's Daniel Silliman published a September 2020 investigation surfacing prior accusations by Lori Anne Thompson (a 2017 lawsuit settled with a non-disclosure agreement) and additional women. Under public pressure RZIM commissioned a formal independent investigation by Miller & Martin LLP, whose February 2021 report found credible evidence that Zacharias had sexually abused multiple women across multiple jurisdictions over years, that he had used RZIM-funded massage-therapy businesses (Touch of Eden and Jivin Life — businesses Zacharias personally invested in and frequented) as venues for the abuse, and that he had used his apologist celebrity to recruit and groom victims. RZIM's board then commissioned a separate September 2021 Guidepost Solutions investigation into the institutional failures that had allowed the conduct, which found that multiple RZIM officials had been aware of complaints but had not acted.

The combined investigations produced one of the most-significant evangelical institutional reckonings of the 2020s. RZIM apologised, returned approximately $7M to victims, and effectively dissolved as an active ministry through 2021–2023; successor entities (the Lighten Group, Vincent Vitale's Solas Centre) continue at greatly reduced scale. Christianity Today's ongoing reporting (Silliman, Bailey), The Roys Report (Julie Roys), Steve Baughman's Cover Up in the Kingdom: Phone Calls, Letters, and Lies in the Bizarre World of the Late Ravi Zacharias (2021), and the Lori Anne Thompson interviews provide the canonical journalistic record. The Zacharias case is now a foundational case study in evangelical-organisational-abuse-coverup literature alongside Bill Hybels / Willow Creek and Mark Driscoll / Mars Hill.

The CLCI 24 (High) score reflects the documented institutional cover-up pattern but is lower than Extreme because RZIM operated as a publicly-attending apologetics ministry, not a high-control cult-of-organisation: there were no compound, no severance enforcement, no membership-based control of personal life. The harm pattern is the celebrity-pastor power-abuse architecture and the institutional cover-up — substantial, but not the full BITE profile of an Extreme-band entry. The 'religious narcissism' framing (Diane Langberg) and Sarah Stankorb's analysis in Disobedient Women place the case in the broader celebrity-pastor power-abuse genre.