Megachurch pastors have never been more influential than they are today.

They have massive social media platforms, media empires, and even entire colleges under

their control.

But the churches these men pastor have also never been more prone to abuse and hurt.

It seems monthly, if not weekly, there's a new story of a powerful church harming innocent congregants or staff.

In Gods of the Smoke Machine, award-winning journalist Scott Latta goes inside America's largest churches to uncover the hidden stories of trauma happening behind closed doors.

He also looks at why these churches have become this way, hinting at possible solutions.

Stay tuned. My live interview with Scott Ladin, myself, exploring the abuse and hurt so prevalent within America's megachurches.

I'm Julie Roy's, and in just a minute, I'll be introducing Scott.

But first, I want to thank everyone.

We exceeded our $20,000 goal and raised a whopping $25,000 in one day.

This is an amazing start to our December campaign. We need to raise $140,000 in one day. This is an amazing start to our December campaign. We need to raise $145,000 by the

end of the year. That's an ambitious goal, but it's what we need to meet our annual budget of $700,000.

Now, you may be wondering why the Roy's report needs that kind of money, and the answer is that we're expanding our staff so we can expand our reach and do more investigations and more podcasts and provide more resources to restore the church.

Just two days ago, we added veteran investigative journalist Daniel Silliman to our staff.

Daniel is the former senior news editor at Christianity Today and did amazing work there during his time.

You may remember that he broke the story about Ravi Zacharias's abuse of spa workers.

He also uncovered allegations that a fuller seminary professor secretly practiced polygamy.

And during his time at CT, Daniel was trusted to independently report on sexual harassment within the publication itself.

So we are absolutely thrilled to have Daniel join us, and I think you can expect great things from Daniel in the days to come.

Daniel joins an already amazing staff. It includes our senior editor, Julia Dean.

Julia is the former religion correspondent for Newsweek magazine, but she's also worked as a reporter

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