Gary Walter

Gary Walter is a minister and was president of the Evangelical Covenant Church, a denomination with ~129,000 members, from 2008 to 2018. Currently he works with the Urban Outreach Foundation, and he and his wife are founding members of DeerGrove Covenant Church in Palatine, Illinois.

At Evangelical Covenant Church's Midwinter Conference in 2017, Mr. Walter interviewed Mr. Hybels from the Conference's main stage. He expressed his deep appreciation to Mr. Hybels and publicly honoured him.

Later, through a profoundly opaque process, Mr. Walter was one of four people named to Willow Creek Community Church's so-called "Independent Advisory Group" (IAG) which was tasked with "investigating" the accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against Mr. Hybels. Mr. Walter perpetrated a cruel and obvious ethical violation by accepting a position on this supposedly "independent" group, given his past publicly expressed admiration for Hybels. He and his fellow IAG members listened to many hours of cruelly retraumatising testimony from the many victims of Mr. Hybels, then they essentially buried all this testimony, boiling it all down to exactly one half-hearted line in an extremely short report they issued, thereby viciously perpetrating Institutional Betrayal of the many woman so vastly harmed by Mr. Hybels. Mr. Walter never once even publicly owned his severe conflict of interest in this matter.

References

Evangelical Covenant Church. (2024, May 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evangelical_Covenant_Church&oldid=1225117102

Lyon, J.O., Diddams, M., Walter, G., & Anderson, L. (2019). Report. https://globalleadership.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IAGReport_022819.pdf

The Evangelical Covenant Church. (2017, January 30). Midwinter 2017 // Monday night // (1 30 17). https://youtu.be/_P35M5wtZI8?si=pimXvbXWDaNs56i9

Urban Outreach Foundation. (n.d.) Our team. https://urbanoutreachfoundation.com/our-team/

Weber, J. (2018, September 18). Here’s who Willow Creek chose to investigate Bill Hybels. Christianity Today. https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2018/september/bill-hybels-willow-creek-investigation-advisors-iag.html