CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Daily Herald
February 13, 2019
By Susan Sarkauskas
Thirty-one years after he founded it, Pastor James MacDonald has been fired as the leader of megachurch Harvest Bible Chapel.
The church announced the move Tuesday on its website.
The announcement said the elders had previously determined they were going to remove MacDonald but that they moved quickly after “highly inappropriate recorded comments made by Pastor MacDonald were given to media and reported.”
The elders fired him Monday, according to the announcement. MacDonald founded the church in Rolling Meadows, and it now has seven Chicago-area locations and one in Florida.
“This decision was made with heavy hearts and much time spent in earnest prayer, followed by input from various trusted outside advisers,” the elders’ statement said.
The comments attributed to MacDonald were broadcast by WLS-AM radio show host Mancow Muller, a former member of the church who said he was baptized by MacDonald in the River Jordan in Israel.
The clips purportedly are of MacDonald talking of a plan to put child pornography on the computer of Christianity Today magazine’s chief executive officer and about whether writer Julie Roys, one of the critics the church sued in October, was having an affair with Mark Galli, editor-in-chief of the publication.
The audio clips include an insult of Galli and an accusation that Roys had approached the houses of people who were victims in a DCFS investigation of a church worker and harassed them. There were also comments about MacDonald being able to raise $100,000 “in a minute.”
Roys, of Carol Stream, wrote on her blog that “Galli and I have never had anything but a professional relationship, and it’s repulsive that anyone — a pastor, no less — would make a joke about that.”
Christianity Today magazine, based in Carol Stream and founded in 1956 by the Rev. Billy Graham, published a story when Harvest filed the defamation suit last year against Roys, Ryan Mahoney of Wheaton, Scott Bryant of Geneva and the two men’s wives. Mahoney and Bryant write The Elephant’s Debt blog critical of the church.
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