Tullian Tchividjian

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Who Tullian Tchividjian Is

Tullian Tchividjian is an American pastor and author, a grandson of the evangelist Billy Graham, who served as senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from 2009 until 2015. He became widely known for preaching a strong doctrine of grace, for books including Jesus + Nothing = Everything and One Way Love, and for a public argument with other Reformed teachers about how grace and Christian obedience fit together. In June 2015 he resigned from Coral Ridge after acknowledging an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the congregation, and in 2016 a further undisclosed relationship came to light and cost him a subsequent church post and his standing as a minister.

The conduct at the centre of this page rests on his own public admissions. He did not deny that the relationships happened, he described them in his own statements, and he has written and spoken about the aftermath at length since. That makes it possible to set out the sequence with more precision than most cases of this kind allow, and it makes the difference between what he admitted, what others alleged, and how the events were characterised worth keeping straight.

This page covers one man: where he came from, what he taught, what happened in 2015 and 2016, what the record shows about how the churches involved responded, and what a Catholic reading of the case looks like. It offers no verdict on his standing before God, which belongs to God alone.

The Graham Family Connection

Tullian Tchividjian is a grandson of Billy Graham and Ruth Bell Graham through their eldest daughter, Gigi Graham. His full name is William Graham Tullian Tchividjian. His father, Stephan Tchividjian, is of Armenian descent, which is where the surname comes from, and the family settled in south Florida.

The connection matters for two reasons and no others. First, it explains part of the platform. A young Reformed preacher with the Graham name attached attracts attention that another man with identical gifts would not receive, and publishers, conference organisers and denominational bodies notice the name. Tchividjian himself referred to the lineage frequently in his preaching, often to make a point about the limits of inherited faith. Second, the story he told about himself was shaped by the contrast: a rebellious grandson of a globally known evangelist, brought back by grace he had not earned. That narrative was the engine of a great deal of his public appeal.

The connection is not a criticism of anyone else. Billy Graham died in 2018, and nothing in this account touches his conduct or the conduct of any other member of the Graham family. Adult children and grandchildren answer for themselves. Scripture is explicit that a son does not bear the guilt of his father, nor a father the guilt of his son (Ezekiel 18:20). Any reading of this page that treats the family name as an indictment of the family is reading something that is not here.

Early Life and Conversion

Tchividjian was born in 1972 and grew up in south Florida in a family saturated in evangelical ministry. By his own repeated public account, he rebelled hard against it as a teenager, left home before finishing school, and spent several years living in a way he later described as directionless and self-destructive. He has told the story in sermons, in interviews and in print, and the details as given here come from his own telling rather than from any independent investigation.

He described a conversion in his early twenties that turned him back toward the faith he had left. He went on to study for ministry, took a degree in philosophy, and completed theological study in the Reformed tradition. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative American denomination that holds to the Westminster Standards and that separated from the mainline Presbyterian body in the 1970s. Our page on the Presbyterian Church in America and what it believes sets out that denomination in its own terms.

The tradition he was formed in

Presbyterianism holds that the Church is governed by elders, that ministers are ordained and disciplined by a regional body called a presbytery rather than by a single congregation, and that doctrine is bound by a written confession. The PCA's confession is the Westminster Confession of Faith, which we cover in detail on our page about the Westminster Confession and its teaching. That structure matters later in this account, because it is the presbytery and not the congregation that holds a PCA minister's credentials.

The theological system behind that confession is Calvinism, with its emphasis on the sovereignty of God, human inability to save oneself, and salvation by grace alone through faith alone. Our pages on Calvinism and what it teaches and the five points of Calvinism lay out that system as Reformed Christians themselves state it, before any Catholic response. Tchividjian's whole later argument about grace is unintelligible without it.

New City Church

Before Coral Ridge, Tchividjian planted and led New City Church, a congregation in the Fort Lauderdale area that he founded in the 1990s and led until 2009. It was a young church with a young congregation, and it gave him the reputation of a church planter rather than an inheritor.

That reputation is the reason he was considered for what came next. Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church was one of the best known congregations in American Protestantism and it had just lost the only senior pastor it had ever had. A search that produced a man in his thirties who had built a church from nothing, and who carried the Graham name, was always going to be a talking point.

In 2009 New City Church merged into Coral Ridge and Tchividjian became senior pastor of the combined congregation. The merger is a detail that many summaries drop, and it matters: a body of people loyal to Tchividjian arrived at Coral Ridge with him, into a congregation that had spent decades under a very different kind of leadership. The friction that followed had a structural cause as well as a personal one.

Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church

Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale was founded and built by D. James Kennedy, who led it from the 1950s until his death in 2007. Kennedy was a national figure in American evangelicalism: a televised preacher whose program reached a wide audience, the founder of the Evangelism Explosion training program, and a prominent voice in conservative Christian public advocacy. The church's large campus and its broadcast ministry were built around him.

Tchividjian arrived into that. He preached differently, dressed differently, and steered the congregation away from the political and cultural advocacy that had been part of Kennedy's public identity, toward a message centred on grace and the sufficiency of Christ. A section of the membership objected. Reporting at the time described an organised effort by some members to remove him within roughly a year of his arrival, and a congregational vote in which he survived. Members left. The broadcast ministry associated with Kennedy separated from the congregation and continued as its own organisation.

He remained senior pastor from 2009 until June 2015. In that period Coral Ridge became identified with his preaching rather than with Kennedy's, and Tchividjian's own national profile grew through books, conferences and a teaching ministry he ran under the name Liberate.

Sourcing note: the account of the conflict at Coral Ridge in this section reflects contemporaneous reporting in mainstream and religious press outlets covering the congregation between 2009 and 2015. This page gives no membership figures, attendance numbers or budget figures for Coral Ridge, because no single published figure can be verified here. Where you see a specific number quoted elsewhere, check which organisation published it and when.

What He Taught About Grace

Tchividjian's teaching centred on the claim that the gospel is an announcement of what God has already done rather than a set of instructions for what the Christian must now do. He argued that Christians characteristically believe they are saved by grace and then live as though their standing with God is maintained by performance, and that the cure is to preach justification to Christians as relentlessly as it is preached to unbelievers.

Stated in his own vocabulary, the argument runs roughly like this. The law shows a person what God requires and exposes the failure to meet it. The law has no power to produce obedience. Grace, received as pure gift, produces the love that produces obedience. Therefore the pastoral task is to keep announcing the finished work of Christ, and any attempt to motivate Christians by pressing harder on the imperatives will produce either despair or self-righteousness.

He drew on Martin Luther more than on Calvin, particularly Luther's distinction between law and gospel, and on the Lutheran-influenced strand of American Reformed preaching that emphasises the ongoing need of the believer for justification. The audience for that message was large. Many of the people who followed him were exhausted evangelicals who had grown up under intense pressure to perform, and the message that God's verdict over them was already settled landed on them as relief.

The pastoral appeal, stated fairly

Whatever follows in this account, the appeal was real and it was aimed at a real problem. Moralism damages people. A church culture that measures a Christian's worth by quiet time completion, volunteer hours, and visible respectability produces anxious people and hypocrites. Tchividjian named that dynamic sharply, and the readers who wrote to him about it were describing genuine spiritual exhaustion. A Catholic reader should recognise the problem, because Catholic parishes produce their own version of it.

The Books and the Platform

Tchividjian wrote a series of books between roughly 2008 and 2015 that carried his message beyond his congregation. The best known are Jesus + Nothing = Everything, an exposition of Colossians written during the conflict at Coral Ridge, and One Way Love, subtitled as inexhaustible grace for an exhausted world. He also wrote Glorious Ruin on suffering, Surprised by Grace on the book of Jonah, and earlier titles on discipleship and cultural engagement.

Alongside the books he built a conference and resource ministry called Liberate, which held annual gatherings in Fort Lauderdale and published his material. He was a regular conference speaker, a blogger with a substantial following, and for a period a contributor to The Gospel Coalition, a large Reformed evangelical network that publishes and organises across denominational lines.

The platform is worth naming precisely because platforms of that shape recur in these cases. A single teacher, a personal brand, a conference circuit, a publishing contract, a following that is loyal to him rather than to an institution: that combination concentrates a great deal of trust in one person and disperses accountability. Our page on megachurches and the questions they raise works through the structural version of the problem.

The Sanctification Debate

Between roughly 2012 and 2014 Tchividjian was at the centre of a public theological argument inside Reformed evangelicalism about sanctification, meaning the process by which a justified Christian actually becomes holy. The dispute was conducted in blog posts, articles and conference talks, and it ended with a formal parting of ways between Tchividjian and The Gospel Coalition in May 2014.

What his critics said

Critics within confessional Reformed circles argued that his emphasis flattened the Bible's commands. Their case, stated as they made it, was that Scripture addresses real imperatives to Christians, that the moral law continues to guide the believer as a rule of life, that effort in the Christian life is commanded rather than optional, and that a preaching diet consisting almost entirely of assurance risks producing people who never grow. Some used the word antinomianism, the historic label for a teaching that treats the law as having no continuing claim on the Christian. The Westminster Confession itself teaches the continuing use of the moral law for believers, so the objection was a confessional one and not merely a matter of taste.

What he said in reply

Tchividjian rejected the antinomian label. He said he affirmed the commands of Scripture and the necessity of obedience, and that his point concerned the engine rather than the standard: obedience is real and required, and it is produced by grace received rather than by pressure applied. He argued that his critics were confusing an emphasis with a denial. He also said, more sharply as the dispute wore on, that the reflex to guard against too much grace was itself a symptom of the problem he was describing.

The dispute was never resolved on the merits. It ended administratively, with his departure from The Gospel Coalition in 2014 and a mutual statement about parting ways. Both sides continued to publish their positions afterwards.

June 2015: The Resignation

In June 2015 Tullian Tchividjian resigned as senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church after acknowledging what he described as an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the congregation. The resignation was announced publicly by the church, was reported immediately across mainstream and religious press, and was accompanied by a written statement from Tchividjian himself.

The sequence of that week, so far as the public record shows it, was short. The relationship came to the attention of the church leadership. Tchividjian was confronted. He resigned rather than contesting the matter. The church issued a statement confirming that he had resigned following the admission, and his own statement was released alongside it. Within days he had no pulpit and the Liberate ministry that carried his teaching was wound down.

The form of his statement

His public statement said that he had learned some months earlier that his wife was in a relationship with another man, that he had sought comfort in a friendship, and that the friendship had become inappropriate. He used direct moral language about his own conduct, described it as sin, and asked for prayer for his family.

The statement drew immediate criticism for its structure. Commentators, including writers sympathetic to him, said that beginning an admission of adultery with an account of his wife's conduct had the effect of distributing responsibility, and that a wife who had not chosen to make her own situation public had been made part of a national story without any comparable ability to respond. That criticism is part of the record and belongs in any honest summary. Whether he intended that effect is not something this page can determine.

What He Admitted and What Was Alleged

The distinction between admission, allegation and characterisation is the part of this case most often blurred, and the three are separated here deliberately.

What he admitted

Tchividjian admitted, in his own published statement in June 2015, an inappropriate relationship with a woman in his congregation, and he named it as sin and as the reason for his resignation. In 2016 he acknowledged a second relationship, earlier in time, after the church that had employed him disclosed it. He has spoken and written since about his own conduct in terms of adultery and moral failure. The conduct at the centre of this page therefore rests on his own admissions rather than on any contested account.

What was alleged by others

Beyond the admitted conduct, several further characterisations were put into public circulation by other people. Some accounts said the relationships arose in a pastoral or counselling context. Some said that the disclosure in 2015 was incomplete. Some raised questions about what other people in the church or the denomination had known and when. These were published claims made by identifiable parties, and this page reports that they were made rather than treating any of them as established.

What was never established

No criminal charge arising from these events has been reported. No civil judgment against Tchividjian arising from them has been reported. There has been no published finding by any court on any of the contested characterisations. The consequences he faced were church consequences: loss of his pulpit, loss of a subsequent post, and action by the body that held his ordination.

2016: The Second Disclosure

In 2016 Tchividjian was dismissed from a staff position at Willow Creek Presbyterian Church in Winter Springs, Florida, a PCA congregation that had taken him on after his resignation from Coral Ridge. The church stated publicly that it had learned of an earlier inappropriate relationship with a different woman, that the relationship had occurred before the one disclosed in 2015, and that it had not been disclosed to them when he was hired. The church made the reason for the dismissal public rather than letting him leave quietly.

That disclosure changed the shape of the case. A single admitted failure, followed by resignation, is one kind of story. A second relationship that surfaced only when a later employer found out about it raised the question of whether the 2015 account had been complete, and it is the reason much of the subsequent commentary treated the 2015 statement with suspicion. Tchividjian acknowledged the second relationship after the church disclosed it.

Why a church going public matters

Willow Creek Presbyterian Church could have released him without giving a reason. Choosing to say publicly why a man had been dismissed, at obvious cost to its own reputation for hiring him in the first place, is the behaviour that protects the next congregation he might have approached. The pattern in these cases is usually the opposite: a quiet separation, a neutral reference, and a man who turns up somewhere else with a clean account of himself. Naming the reason is the exception, and it deserves to be recorded as such.

Sourcing note: the 2016 dismissal and the church's stated reason were reported at the time by religious news outlets and mainstream press covering the case, and the church issued its own public statement. This page does not name the women involved. None of them is described here beyond what is necessary to state the sequence, and no personal detail about any of them appears on this page.

The Presbytery and His Ordination

In the Presbyterian Church in America a minister's credentials are held by a presbytery, a regional body of ministers and elders, and not by the congregation he serves. A pastor who resigns from a church does not thereby cease to be a minister. Removing a man from the ministry is a separate act, taken by the presbytery, ordinarily after a process under the denomination's Book of Church Order.

Reporting after the 2016 disclosure said that the PCA presbytery holding his credentials acted to remove Tchividjian from the ministry, ending his standing as an ordained minister in that denomination. This page states that as reported rather than reciting the internal steps, because the detailed procedural record of a presbytery is not a public document and cannot be verified here.

The distinction between resigning a pulpit and losing ordination is worth understanding, because it recurs whenever a Protestant minister falls and readers ask whether anything actually happened to him. Our page on Presbyterianism and how Presbyterian churches govern themselves explains the structure, and the Catholic parallel is set out below.

The Catholic parallel

In the Catholic Church a priest who has committed grave misconduct may be removed from all public ministry, and in the most serious cases dismissed from the clerical state, a process governed by canon law. Catholic teaching holds that ordination confers a permanent character that is not erased, so a dismissed priest is still validly ordained even though he is forbidden to exercise ministry (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1583). Our page on the Catholic priesthood and what ordination means explains that teaching. Presbyterian polity has no equivalent doctrine of an indelible character, so deposition from office in the PCA is a cleaner break in principle. In practice both traditions face the same problem, which is a man who is out of office and still has a following.

Affair or Abuse of Pastoral Position

A substantial body of published commentary argued that the word affair was the wrong word for what happened, and the argument deserves to be stated properly rather than summarised away.

The case as its advocates made it

The argument runs as follows. A pastor and a congregant are not equals. The pastor holds spiritual authority, often holds confidences given in counselling, and in many cases is the person the congregant has been taught to trust with her interior life. Where a sexual relationship develops out of that setting, describing it as a mutual affair imports an assumption of equal footing that the situation did not contain. Advocates writing on clergy sexual misconduct argued that the correct category is abuse of pastoral position, that the language of affair protects the pastor and burdens the woman, and that congregations reflexively adopt the softer word because the pastor is the person they know. Several US states have written some version of this reasoning into law by treating sexual contact between a member of the clergy and a person receiving pastoral counselling as a criminal offence, though laws differ widely and no charge in this case has been reported.

How Tchividjian described it

Tchividjian used the language of adultery, sin and moral failure about his own conduct. He did not adopt the framing of abuse of position, and he has continued to speak about the events in the vocabulary of personal moral failure and its consequences.

What this page concludes

This page reports both framings and adopts neither as a finding, because no adjudicated determination exists on the point. Two things can be said without overreach. First, the general principle that a pastoral relationship carries a real power imbalance is sound, and Catholic norms for clergy conduct assume it. Second, applying a general principle to a particular case requires facts about that case that are not in the public record here, and this page will not manufacture them. Readers who want the general framework rather than one man's story will find it on our page about scandals in the Church and how they are handled.

What Followed

Tchividjian remained a public figure after 2016. He wrote and spoke about the collapse of his ministry, about depression and about what he had learned, and he retained a readership that had followed him before. Reporting indicates that his marriage ended in divorce and that he later remarried. Those are matters of the personal record that this page notes without detail, because the details are private and are not relevant to public ministry.

He later began leading a congregation in Florida called The Sanctuary, an independent church rather than one under PCA jurisdiction. His return to a pulpit was itself controversial, and the objection made publicly at the time was straightforward: a man removed from the ministry by the body that ordained him can start an independent church the next day, because nothing in American church life prevents it. That objection is about a structural gap that reaches well past him.

This page does not track the current state of that congregation, his present activities, his publishing, or anything that has happened recently, because none of it can be verified here. Readers who want the current position should consult primary sources and current reporting directly.

The restoration question

The recurring argument in Protestant circles after a case like this is whether a fallen minister can be restored to the pulpit and on what terms. The positions are genuinely held on both sides. One view holds that Scripture requires an overseer to be above reproach (1 Timothy 3:2) and that the qualification, once lost publicly, is not recoverable in the same way that forgiveness is. Another view holds that repentance is real, that Peter denied Christ and was restored to leadership (John 21:15 to 17), and that a permanent bar treats grace as insufficient. A third position separates the two: full forgiveness and full welcome into the life of the Church, with no return to office. Catholic practice in serious cases has moved toward the third position, and the reasoning is set out in the next section.

What This Page Does Not Claim

The record in this case is open in several places, and the honest thing is to name where.

• This page does not claim any criminal conduct. No criminal charge arising from these events has been reported, and none is asserted or implied here.
• This page does not claim to know the full facts of either relationship. What is stated is what was admitted publicly and what was reported publicly.
• This page does not adjudicate between the language of affair and the language of abuse of pastoral position. Both framings are reported. Neither is adopted as a finding.
• This page does not claim to know what any other person at Coral Ridge, at the subsequent church, or in the presbytery knew or when they knew it. Questions about that were raised publicly and have not been resolved in any published finding.
• This page does not recite the internal procedural steps of the presbytery, which are not public documents. The removal from the ministry is stated as reported.
• This page does not state membership figures, attendance figures or financial figures for any congregation named, because no such figure can be verified here.
• This page does not track events after mid-2026, or the current status of Tchividjian, his family or any church he is associated with.
• This page makes no claim about anyone's salvation, and no claim whatever about any member of the Graham family other than the fact of the relationship.

A thinner account that is correct is worth more than a fuller one that guesses. Where a date, a figure or an outcome could not be confirmed, it has been left out rather than approximated.

The Catholic Response

The Catholic response to this case has two parts: what the Church teaches about a minister who sins gravely, and what the Church must admit about its own record before saying anything about anyone else's.

What the Church teaches about a fallen minister

Catholic teaching separates two questions that are constantly confused. The first is whether a sinful minister's ministry was real. The answer is that the grace of a sacrament comes from Christ and does not depend on the holiness of the person who administers it (CCC 1128). A person who was baptised, absolved or given the Eucharist by a priest who was living in grave sin received the sacrament. Applied to this case by analogy, a congregation that heard the gospel preached truly from Colossians did in fact hear the gospel, and the preacher's later failure does not retroactively unsay it.

The second question is whether the man may continue in office. The answer is that forgiveness and office are separate. The Church teaches that grave sin is forgiven through repentance and sacramental confession (CCC 1440 to 1449), and it also removes men from ministry whose sins it believes God has forgiven. Holding both is the point. Our page on confession and how the sacrament works explains the first half; the removal of a priest from ministry is the ordinary discipline that follows the second.

The Church's own record, stated first

A Catholic account of a Protestant pastor's fall that carried any tone of superiority would be dishonest. The Catholic abuse crisis involved the same mechanism, over a longer period, at a far larger scale, and with far worse conduct: authority treated as beyond question, complaints handled internally, and reputation weighed against the people harmed. We deal with that record directly on our page about scandals in the Church. Where a Protestant congregation named the reason for a dismissal publicly and quickly, as Willow Creek Presbyterian Church did in 2016, the accurate thing for a Catholic to say is that this is a standard many Catholic dioceses failed to meet for decades.

Testing teachers without becoming a prosecutor

Scripture gives tests rather than a rule of deference. Jesus warns about false prophets and says they are known by their fruits (Matthew 7:15 to 16). John tells believers to test the spirits, because many false prophets have gone out into the world (1 John 4:1). Paul tells the Thessalonians to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Our pages on false prophets and how to recognise them and wolves in sheep's clothing work through those tests in detail, and our page on what separates a cult from a church sets out the structural markers of a group that has gone wrong.

Applying the tests here needs care. Tchividjian was not leading a cult, was not teaching a novel revelation, and was preaching within a recognised confessional tradition that disciplined him when he failed. The category that fits is a minister who fell, which is an old and ordinary category with an old and ordinary answer: removal from office, and the hope of repentance. James warns that teachers are judged more strictly (James 3:1), and Paul warns that anyone who thinks he stands should take heed lest he fall (1 Corinthians 10:12). Both verses are addressed to the reader as much as to the man being read about.

Grace, Law and the Catholic Answer

The theological question Tchividjian pressed is one the Catholic Church has a developed answer to, and the answer is neither the caricature his critics feared nor the caricature Catholics are often accused of holding.

What the Church actually teaches about grace and works

The Catholic Church teaches that no one merits the initial grace of justification. It is a free gift, unearned and unearnable, and any human cooperation with God is itself the effect of grace already given (CCC 1996 to 1999, 2010). A Catholic who believes that good works purchase God's initial favour has misunderstood the Church's own teaching. Where Catholic teaching differs from the strand Tchividjian represented is on what follows: the Church holds that justification really changes the person, that grace makes charity possible, and that the works which follow are genuinely the person's own even though they are entirely gift. Our page on faith and works and what each tradition actually teaches sets both positions out in full.

The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, found a substantial consensus on this question after four centuries of argument, while leaving real differences in place. Our page on the Joint Declaration on Justification covers what it settled and what it did not. Anyone who thinks the law and grace question is a live wound between Catholics and Protestants should read what the two bodies were actually able to sign.

The specific thing Catholic practice adds

Catholic practice answers the exhaustion Tchividjian was preaching against with a sacrament rather than with an emphasis. The person who has failed does not have to work out for himself whether he has been forgiven, or generate assurance from within, or wait for a feeling. He confesses, and he is told out loud by a priest acting in the person of Christ that he is absolved. That is the concrete form the announcement of grace takes in Catholic life, repeatable as often as needed, and it is available to a person who has failed in exactly the way this page is about.

Neither the doctrine nor the sacrament prevents anyone from falling. Priests who hear confessions fall. The Church's claim is about where forgiveness comes from and how a person knows he has it, and that claim is unaffected by the failures of the people who administer it, which is the point of CCC 1128.

What the Case Shows About Church Structure

The practical lesson here is about structure rather than about one man's character, and it generalises to Catholic parishes as readily as to Presbyterian ones.

The parts that worked

Several things in this case functioned as they should. The congregation acted on the disclosure rather than absorbing it. A subsequent employer told the truth publicly about why it had dismissed him. The presbytery held his credentials, which meant there was a body with the standing to remove him from the ministry and it did so. A denomination with a written constitution and an external disciplinary body has something a purely independent congregation does not have, and that difference is visible here.

The parts that did not

Two failures are visible. The first is the concentration of a ministry in one person: a personal teaching brand, a conference ministry, a publishing career and a congregation, all resting on one man's reputation, so that his failure took all of it down at once and left a large readership with a shelf of books they no longer knew how to read. The second is the exit. A man removed from the ministry by his denomination could and did begin an independent congregation, because nothing in American church life prevents anyone from doing so. Denominational discipline reaches only as far as the denomination.

What a churchgoer can actually do

The usable conclusion is small and it holds regardless of tradition. Know whether the man teaching you can be disciplined by people he did not choose. Know whether the finances of your congregation are reviewed by anyone outside it. Know the faith well enough from Scripture and from the Church's own texts that no single teacher is the sole channel through which it reaches you. People who leave church after a leader falls very often discover that their faith had been built on a person rather than on Christ, and our page on why people leave the Church and what brings them back deals with that experience directly.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tullian Tchividjian?

Tullian Tchividjian is an American pastor and author, a grandson of the evangelist Billy Graham, who served as senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from 2009 until 2015. He was known for preaching a strong doctrine of grace and for books including Jesus + Nothing = Everything and One Way Love. He resigned in June 2015 after admitting an inappropriate relationship, and a second undisclosed relationship came to light in 2016.

Is Tullian Tchividjian related to Billy Graham?

Yes. Tullian Tchividjian is a grandson of Billy Graham and Ruth Bell Graham through their eldest daughter, Gigi Graham. His father, Stephan Tchividjian, is of Armenian descent, which is the source of the surname. The family connection is a matter of public record that Tchividjian himself discussed often in his preaching and writing. Nothing on this page is a claim about the conduct of any other member of the Graham family.

Why did Tullian Tchividjian resign from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church?

Tchividjian resigned in June 2015 after acknowledging what he described as an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the congregation. His resignation statement said that he had learned his wife was in a relationship with another man and that he had then sought comfort in a friendship that became inappropriate. The church confirmed the resignation. He did not contest that the relationship had occurred, so the conduct rests on his own public admission.

What happened to Tullian Tchividjian in 2016?

In 2016 Willow Creek Presbyterian Church in Winter Springs, Florida, which had given Tchividjian a staff role after his resignation, dismissed him. The church said publicly that it had learned of an earlier inappropriate relationship with a different woman that he had not disclosed to them. Reporting at the time said the presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America that held his ordination then acted to remove him from the ministry.

Was Tullian Tchividjian accused of abuse rather than an affair?

Yes, that framing was raised publicly. Women connected to the case and advocates writing about it said in published accounts that a relationship between a pastor and a person he was counselling involves a power imbalance and should be described as an abuse of pastoral position rather than as a mutual affair. Tchividjian used the language of adultery and moral failure about himself. No criminal charge arising from these events has been reported, and this page does not assert one.

What does the Catholic Church teach about a pastor who falls into serious sin?

Catholic teaching holds that the grace of a sacrament comes from Christ and does not depend on the personal holiness of the minister (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1128). Grave sin is forgiven through repentance and sacramental confession (CCC 1440 to 1449). Forgiveness and fitness for public office are separate questions, so the Church both offers absolution to a repentant man and may permanently remove him from the exercise of ministry.