Kentucky church shuts down after pastor charged with child sex abuse

LexCity Church in Kentucky said it had "lost the ability to remain financially viable" after Executive Pastor Zachary King was arrested

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Last week, LexCity Church, a megachurch in Kentucky, announced that it was shutting down for good. In a statement posted on Facebook and its own website, it blamed the “financial situation our church inherited several years ago and the impact of the ongoing investigation of a former staff member.”

That actually downplays the reason the church is closing.

The real reason is that Pastor Zachary King was just charged with sexually abusing a child. Specifically, he’s charged with “first-degree rape, third-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, third-degree sodomy, first-degree sexual abuse and procuring or promoting the use of a minor by electronic means.”

Court documents say King admitted to raping a 15-year-old child repeatedly since the start of 2023—at his home, at the child’s home, and at church. He communicated with the child through Snapchat and WhatsApp, where the two send illicit images of themselves to each other.

According to local report, King was actually confronted about all this by church staffers and soon resigned. His arrest by secular authorities came after that. The timeline isn’t perfectly clear about all this, but the church’s YouTube channel showed King preaching as recently as March. So all of this happened relatively quickly.

Pastor Zachary King (screenshot via YouTube)

To be clear, there’s no evidence that other church leaders knew about the alleged crimes any earlier and it appears they took action as soon as possible. The only reason the church is shutting down, then, isn’t out of shame or because they believe it’s a hotbed of sexual abuse. It’s shutting down because King’s arrest led to donors ditching them en masse. The church even said in its announcement that it was closing because “we have lost the ability to remain financially viable.”

Which suggests they would absolutely remain open if everyone kept giving them cash.

Closing up, then, is actually disappointing because it means there won’t be a long-term reckoning about any of this. The other church leaders will never be forced to confront what they did—or didn’t do—that allowed at least one child to be placed in harm’s way. They won’t have to answer to their own congregation. There’s nothing stopping the same leaders from starting up a new church, with a new name, a few blocks over in due time. (In fact, this church only came into being after the previous one in the building closed down because its pastor was caught having an affair with another pastor.)

Without a come-to-Jesus moment, so to speak, what lessons are they really going to learn? Right now, it’s all too easy for everyone to just blame the church’s downfall on one bad apple. As if no one else deserves any blame for what happened.

And as I write this, the church has already started scrubbing the internet of old sermons and references to King. Hell, even Vanderbloemen Search Group, a firm that connects churches with potential pastors, deleted a page in which it cited Zachary King as a success story. (Thank you, Internet Archive.)

The Metropolitan Baptist Church in Houston, TX has been a great partner of the Vanderbloemen Search Group over the last several years. Since the first project that we were able to walk through with the Met, we have successfully helped the church with hires in Student Ministry, Worship, and Executive Leadership. In our first engagement with the church, we were able to help them connect with their Student and Teaching Pastor Zach King. Zach has served at the Met now for several years, the Student Ministry is flourishing, the church overall has grown to over 4000, and plans are being drawn up for the new campus of the Metropolitan Baptist Church.

The whole incident is also a reminder that conservative Christians, who regularly blame everyone else for being a threat to children, are often the biggest threats themselves. Linda Blackford, a columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, pointed this out in very blunt terms:

Zachary King, 47, is facing charges of first-degree rape, third-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, third-degree sodomy, first-degree sexual abuse and procuring or promoting the use of a minor by electronic means, according to court records.

Not a drag queen.

No, that was clergy.

Yet again.

Someone, usually a man, in a position of power in a church, has once again been accused of abusing their power, their Christianity and their congregants.

Incidentally, a lot of news reports and even the church itself claim King was a “former staff member” or “former pastor.” That’s technically true because he was no longer working at the church when he was arrested, but it’s misleading in a way because he was definitely a pastor when he was (allegedly) committing those crimes. By using the word “former,” it allows church leaders to act like there was a meaningful distance between them and King—like he was fired 10 years ago and only recently did something horrible. That’s not the case at all.

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