In pursuing stories on the 'evangelical industrial complex,' Julie Roys sees journalism as a 'sacred calling'
For a country that over the last 25 years has come to associate religious scandal with the Catholic church, Julie Roys is here to tell us something:
Other Christian churches also have their fair share of failings, whether involving sexual abuse, financial misconduct or some other hypocrisy running counter to Jesus’ teachings.
The proof is Roys' news web site called Roys Report that regularly publishes articles — many investigative in nature — on troubles in evangelical Christian congregations and organizations.
“There are wonderful pastors out there,” Roys said. “But there are a lot of bad ones, too.”
“It’s not just a few bad apples — it’s a system.”
One of her news site’s recent journalistic focal points has been Wheaton College, an evangelical school in the far west suburbs that’s sometimes referred to as the “Harvard of Christian colleges.”
Roys Report published a series of blistering stories this year about Dennis Massaro, a former Wheaton administrator who has been accused of sexually abusing male students years ago, and who was at the school when Roys was an undergraduate in the 1980s.
“Massaro, who served as the director of Wheaton’s Office of Christian Outreach for 19 years, was dismissed by Wheaton in 1998,” Roys recently wrote. “But two Wheaton administrations — under both Presidents Duane Litfin and Philip Ryken — kept Massaro’s alleged criminal sexual assault hidden until 2024.”
“Wheaton’s silence... enabled Massaro to continue serving in church ministries for decades, giving him access to unsuspecting young men,” according to another story by Roys.
Massaro has not been charged with a crime and could not be reached for comment.
Wheaton’s president since 2010, Ryken has come under additional scrutiny as Roys’ web site reported he’d once been censured by the Presbyterian Church in America for allegedly “limiting the investigation into” another minister’s alleged sexual misconduct “and withholding information about the abuse.”
A Wheaton spokesman said that Ryken “stood with the elders and victims before members of the congregation and others to ask for and receive forgiveness by apologizing publicly for failing to take additional necessary steps of pastoral oversight when he first learned of the abuse.”
The school also released a statement about Massaro, saying “we are deeply sorry for Dennis Massaro’s sexual abuse of students in the 1990s — conduct for which he was forced to resign. We have also apologized for not enforcing more effectively his restriction from campus and for the pain experienced over the ensuing years by the victims and his family.”
But that subject is just the tip of the ecclesiastical iceberg, with Roys Report recently writing unrelated stories about a “young Baptist missionary with a large TikTok following” who has been accused of molesting boys in Haiti, an Oklahoma youth pastor facing criminal charges for allegedly abusing “teenage girls under his care” and a “popular Christian writer” confessing to “a sinful affair with a married woman.”
Serving the ideal of truth
Roys, 61, said the intent of her site’s news stories isn’t to tear down faith or organized religion, but rather to serve a shared ideal at the core of journalism and Christianity: truth.
“Ironically, my Intro to Journalism professor at Wheaton College, the late Paul Fromer, taught me that journalism was a sacred calling to pursue and report the truth,” Roys said. Fromer also edited books by the college's most famous graduate, the late evangelist Billy Graham. “He pointed to the Gospel writer Luke as the first journalist. Luke was not a first-hand witness to the events he documented.”
“Instead, he interviewed the first-hand witnesses and ‘carefully investigated everything from the beginning,’ so he might ‘write an orderly account... that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.’ This understanding has been foundational for me and guided my work.”
Beyond that, there is a strong element of advocacy with Roys Report — harnessing that truth to reform and cleanse. Consider the catchphrase for Roys Report, a nonprofit that relies on donations: “Reporting the Truth. Restoring the Church.”
Roys said a “major donor noted a couple years ago that we were doing a great job reporting the truth, but challenged us to do more to restore the church. We host a Restore Conference for survivors of church hurt and those concerned about church reform about once every 18 months to two years. But other than that, we haven't had the resources to do much more.”
“This donor gave us a significant gift to launch restoringthechurch.com... that will provide resources for survivors to heal, for church leaders to cultivate healthy faith communities, and for donors to follow best practices to ensure their money is used wisely. I’m very excited about launching this new initiative to provide solutions to the problems our reporting exposes.”
“Beyond this, we are expanding our staff as resources allow to ensure the Roys Report (RR) continues after I’m gone.”
“When I started RR, I didn’t recognize the enormity of the problem in the church and especially evangelicalism. Now I recognize that it's not just a few bad apples but systemic rot fueled by money, power and unchristian leadership models. And, just like the Protestant Reformation took 130 years to undo church abuses, it will likely take at least several decades of reporting to bring about meaningful church reform.”
Roys said her news site — which also now includes a YouTube channel — reports many stories “that Christian media is afraid to touch and that secular media often ignores.”
Roys Report’s global reach
While Roys lives in West Chicago, and her web site is based locally, her coverage extends around the country and, around the globe.
A married mother of adult children who’s also a grandmother, Roys was partly raised internationally. Her parents were Christian missionaries. “I was born overseas, in Zimbabwe, in what at the time was Southern Rhodesia,” Roys said.
It was common that locals would die from very treatable ailments because there simply weren’t enough physicians, medical facilities and drugs. Her father, a doctor, was a “medical missionary” who not only helped treat Africans with medical needs, he trained others on certain procedures. Roys’ mother would be “his scrub nurse.”
Roys’ father was part of the Brethren in Christ denomination, whose “preaching and teaching is shaped by four emphases within the wider Christian community: Anabaptism, Pietism, Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism,” according to a church web site.
“This Anabaptist strain within our Church’s ‘theological DNA’ shows itself most particularly in our emphases on the community of faith, serving compassionately, living simply and pursuing peace.”
Roys’ mother was Wesleyan, and the “Wesleyan movement in America — also known as the Holiness movement — emphasized conversion as a conscious acceptance of God, as well as the empowerment of the Holy Spirit and daily growth in holiness,” according to the Brethren in Christ web page.
“My parents were never really tied very strongly to a denomination,” Roys said. “They were much more tied to the essentials of the faith.”
“On both sides of my family there was this really strong” belief “that Christians should behave,” Roys said. “That was just built into me.”
While still young, her family moved back to the U.S. She was mostly in Pennsylvania, until attending Wheaton College where she worked at the student newspaper. She earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Northwestern University.
Later, she worked for mainstream media outlets, and was a national host for Moody Radio — part of the Moody Bible Institute, an evangelical college based in Chicago and founded in the late 1800s by pioneering evangelist and publisher Dwight L. Moody.
Roys also maintained a personal blog and in 2018 “published a series of articles on her web site, exposing corruption and mission drift at the Moody Bible Institute," according to her official biography.
“This led to the exit of three top officers at Moody. It also ended Julie’s relationship with Moody and changed the focus of Julie’s web site — from a blog offering cultural commentary to an independent Christian media outlet exposing corruption, abuse and what’s been termed the 'evangelical industrial complex.'"
At first, a local focus
Roys Report’s coverage was initially quite local — with a series of stories focusing on alleged “bullying, deceit and financial abuse” by preacher James MacDonald and the Harvest Bible Chapel megachurch based in Rolling Meadows.
MacDonald was later fired and church elders resigned.
As the Religion News Service later reported, amid the controversies Harvest sued Roys and “a pair of bloggers who were critical of the church,” though the church “later apologized for the lawsuit.” The church also reached a settlement with Roys paying for her legal fees in that dispute.
MacDonald, who still disputes much of Roys’ reporting, asserted that Roys’ reporting too often resembles “tabloid journalism” that, in his case, “basically used gossip” to “destroy” his ministry.
Roys said she stands by the facts of the reporting.
In 2019 Roys Report’s revenue was around $137,000. In the fiscal year that just ended, it was more than $600,000. The organization began with just Roys and now has four full-time employees, including former Christianity Today writer and editor Daniel Silliman. Roys Report has had more than 12 million views on the site so far this year.
Roys Report stories, and impact, have expanded across the country. And Roys said her news site’s coverage was a factor in numerous actions, including:
- The Ravi Zacharias International Ministries commissioning a report that determined the group’s namesake, a well-known evangelist who died in 2020, sexually and spiritually abused women.
- The International House of Prayer in Kansas City parting ways with founder Mike Bickle after church officials say they “learned of allegations and testimonies of sexual abuse and manipulation.”
- Truett McConnell University, a Baptist college in Georgia, firing the school’s president in 2025 over his handling of sexual misconduct accusations against an administrator.
The college president, Emir Caner, sued the school this year saying he was wrongly fired, according to a Washington Post story that cited Roys Report’s reporting.
The Guardian also cited Roys Report earlier this year in its reporting on Michael Tait, ex-frontman of the Nashville-based Christian rock band Newsboys who has been accused of drug use and “predatory” sexual behavior dating back decades.
Newsboys and affiliates subsequently sued Roys Report in federal court for defamation, but Roys stood by the articles, saying in April: “The threat of this kind of ungodly retaliation is precisely why the truth about Michael Tait and the Newsboys remained buried for so long.”
“But The Roys Report has never refused, and will never refuse, to report a story due to fear. Our coverage was carefully reported, based on multiple independent sources and corroborated before publication.”
A number of other defendants were named in the suit, which alleged there was a conspiracy in which news stories were fueled by “competitors” in the lucrative Christian music business “with anti-competitive motives.”
Roys Report’s stories also often expose problems in sprawling evangelical congregations.
Locally, perhaps the best-known megachurch is Willow Creek Community Church, based in South Barrington and founded decades ago by Bill Hybels. As the Chicago Sun-Times recently reported, a former member recently sued Willow Creek saying she was sexually abused years earlier, as a teen, by a man employed by one of the church ministries.
Speaking generally, Roys said such venues — with their stages, auditorium seating and emphasis on entertainment-style services — too often seem to attract “narcissist” pastors who crave the limelight rather than embody the humility that Christianity emphasizes.
Too many ministers are “manipulating scriptures for their own selfish ends,” and too many faith groups have essentially become businesses, Roys said.
Roys’ ‘house church’
“I have a real tough time with a lot of churches,” Roys said, with her reporting making it difficult at times to feed her own spiritual needs. “I know too much.”
But she said she has found a “house church” in the suburbs that she’s part of now and includes a number of people who meet in someone’s home.
“We don’t have a pastor but we have plenty of people who are shepherds,” Roys said. “I wouldn’t know where my faith would be without them.”
Since the initial Roys Report articles, “it’s been nonstop story after story,” Roys said. “We’re filling this niche... we believe that truth is restorative.”
Even so, Roys Report wasn’t something Roys plotted out, or at first wanted to do. “I don’t feel like I volunteered, I feel like I got drafted,” she said. Given the content of much of the coverage, “it’s been awful,” but in telling the truth, and often making an impact, “it’s also wonderful.”
- Woman alleges in new lawsuit she was sexually abused as a teen in 1990s at the Willow Creek megachurch
- Did suburban megachurch pastor ever report suspected child sexual abuse by a youth leader to authorities?
- Suburban megachurch sued over alleged sexual abuse by youth leader; pastor accused of cover-up
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