A Retrospective on 40 Years: John MacArthur with Rick Holland

Rick Holland

RICK: Forty years...for ten years of those 40, the church was embroiled in a very significant law suit that made it very far in the court system, the Nally case. Talk about what that was and the impact it had on the church.

JOHN: There was a young man named Ken Nally who was a student at UCLA at the time. He was a well-rounded young man, very, very fine student, I think he played on the baseball team also at UCLA. He was...he came to Christ out of an Irish-Catholic family. His father had married...his father had gone to the war and married a Vietnamese lady, I think, or some lady from the east and came back and he was Irish/Catholic. His father had deep resentment for Protestantism, for the Christian gospel. And Ken came to Christ and this created a tremendous conflict in the home, tremendous conflict.

So much conflict that many of our pastors here at Grace Church were embroiled in trying to work with Ken and help with Ken. He was very troubled because the conflict, it reached epic proportions at home. I mean, it was really, really serious. It was dangerous for him to be in that home.

I remember, Patricia and I tried to rescue him on one occasion, we took him in to our home. And he lived with us for a while during the trauma of those experiences. The conflict such epic proportions that he took his life. And we were all devastated by that because he had felt the call of the Lord in the ministry, which the ministry only escalated everything.

Well, the media hit us with the idea that we were...this is when psychology was really big, and psychology had all the answers and they were trying to shut down churches from doing counseling. And so they were saying, you know, this...they were digging into the archives of this church trying to find out how many people came to this church and killed themselves and there were articles about three people who had gone to that church and killed themselves. So the church came under this tremendous scrutiny. And the father found some lawyers who would take on the case of suing the church for exacerbating a pre-condition toward depression and pushing him to suicide by saying so much about sin. And so they put a lawsuit on us and took us to court in what really was a first in America. There was no prior case of clergy malpractice, that’s what the case was.

It started in 1980 and this was an amazing case because I knew immediately when threatened us this was first amendment because the first amendment gives you the right to practice your religion. That’s what we were doing. We were not licensed counselors, we were just practicing our religion by a constitutional definition.

Immediately the psychological community embraced the lawsuit against us because they wanted to put churches out of the counseling business so they could get it all. And so they had co-belligerence on their side, namely the whole psychological world. We immediately found that the rabbis and the Roman Catholic priests were joining us and they were threatened by this as well.

Well as God would have it, at the time Sam Ericsson was on our staff. Sam is a Harvard lawyer and a dear friend who now is the center of a great ministry to lawyers around the world. Sam was here, Sam took it personally. We had about 25 attorneys in the church who joined him and the whole thing, ten years, never cost us one cent. There was a little clause in an insurance policy we had that protected us against any law suit and whatever costs there were, were absorbed by the insurance company. Ten years of litigation either done voluntarily by the men who are attorneys in our church. And first it went to trial in the Glendale courts and the strangest thing, they...I’m sitting there and myself and other pastors who were named in this have our future destiny in the hands of a jury. And the people presented their case, the plaintiff presented the case and they just dragged us through the mud. All kinds of things were said. Psychological experts were brought in and they presented their entire case.  Watch, Listen or Read the entire Q and A session HERE