“To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?”
— 1 Corinthians 6:7
In October 2025, Apologia Church and several of its elders — including Jeff Durbin — filed a civil defamation lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court against former congregant Hailey Merris, her husband Cameron Merris, and Sarah Young, editor of the Christian watchdog site Check My Church, along with her husband Joe Young.
Durbin, Luke Pierson, and Zach Morgan accused the defendants of defamation per se and false light. After a thorough analysis of the original complaint (full disclosure: I’m not a lawyer, even though I’ve represented myself in federal civil court), I’m shocked that they found a lawyer willing to file such a legally absurd complaint, but knowing what I know about these guys, I’m not surprised that the complaint exists.
Rather than issue a public rebuttal to accusations made about their ministry — or even decline comment — a group of pastors “founding elders” chose instead to file a civil lawsuit seeking damages and an injunction against further speech.
The suit arose after Merris publicly described her experience seeking pastoral counsel at Apologia, alleging that deeply personal information shared in confidence later appeared in private group text messages involving family members of church leadership. Young subsequently reported on Merris’s account, publishing commentary and documentation while explicitly inviting Apologia Church to respond, rebut, or correct any alleged factual errors before publication.
According to Young’s correspondence with Durbin, she wrote:
“Please review the following allegations being made by Hailey and share any comments, corrections, or clarifications you would like for my report.”
She further offered:
“If I am misrepresenting these events and Hailey’s allegations are verifiably false, please correct the record for my report. Otherwise, if you’d like to provide a comment, I will include it in my article for a balanced report.”
Durbin declined.
Instead, after a few additional back-and-forth emails, he warned that publishing the allegations would result in litigation and promised “dramatic and embarrassing consequences” through depositions and court proceedings. He also wrote that he was prepared to share more confidential information from Hailey’s counseling, and “look[ed] forward to [Sarah] finally facing justice for your choices in this life,” apparently desiring that Sarah would die unsaved and be thrown into hell.
The lawsuit soon followed, alleging defamation, false light, and civil conspiracy, and requesting that the court prohibit the defendants from continuing to speak about the matter publicly.
That request alone is remarkable, and telling about what Durbin and Co. apparently expect: demands for silence are met.
Because courts almost never issue injunctions prohibiting speech in defamation disputes. Such orders function as prior restraints on speech, something American courts treat with extreme skepticism.
Yet that is precisely what Apologia asked the court to do.
When Criticism Is Automatically “Slander”
One dynamic that repeatedly appears in controversies surrounding Apologia’s leadership is the reflexive labeling of criticism as “slander.” In public responses to critics over the years, Jeff Durbin has often framed disputes in stark moral language — describing criticism as “lies,” “false witness,” “abuse,” or “slander.”
But the biblical and legal definitions of slander are far more precise. Slander is not simply criticism. It is not disagreement. It is not harsh rhetoric.
Slander is false statements of fact made with the intent to harm reputation.
That distinction matters.
Much like constant and reflexive claims of “racism” and “sexism,” when every criticism is immediately labeled “slander,” the word stops functioning morally and becomes a whiny rhetorical cudgel. If public criticism is always presumed sinful (and the Apologia’s ecclesiology grants this special dispensation to its elders), then critics become categorical sinners.
The discussion is no longer about whether the allegations are true. It becomes about punishing the people who raised them. This punishment can be excommunication. Or anonymously releasing secretly recorded phone calls. Or in this case, attempting to sue a congregant into silence.
Jeff Durbin Is a Public Figure — By Any Reasonable Measure
American defamation law also distinguishes between private individuals and public figures. Private individuals generally must show that a false statement was made negligently. Public figures, however, face a far higher bar established by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan: they must prove “actual malice,” meaning the speaker either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it was true. The Apologia plaintiffs have also alleged defamation per se, a category of statements that are presumed to cause reputational harm — such as accusations of criminal behavior, professional misconduct, or sexual immorality. But even in cases of alleged defamation per se, public figures must still prove actual malice, meaning the constitutional standard for public-figure defamation remains the central hurdle in cases like this one.
In other words, even when a plaintiff alleges defamation per se, the Constitution does not allow public figures to sidestep the actual-malice requirement simply by asserting that criticism of their conduct is inherently defamatory.
Apologia’s own complaint describes a ministry that reaches more than one million people per month through livestreams, social media, and online distribution.
Durbin himself is:
- a national conference speaker
- a prominent anti-abortion activist
- a media personality
- a figure who has appeared in national media coverage
- someone who regularly injects himself into public political and theological controversy
At minimum, that makes him a limited-purpose public figure.
Public figures operate under a different legal standard. They do not receive defamation law as insulation from criticism. They receive scrutiny. That is the constitutional trade-off.
We Have Seen This Pattern Before
This is not the first time Jeff Durbin has responded aggressively to critics.
Years ago, Pulpit and Pen and Protestia reported that Durbin secretly recorded a private phone conversation with Christian apologist Tim Hurd during an online dispute, where Hurd had apologized and asked for forgiveness for his sinful motivation in critiques of Durbin, and Durbin had purportedly forgiven him.
Yet in August of 2019, in response to a mild critique of Durbin’s evangelistic method, Durbin gave the audio recording to JD Hall (who at that time hosted Polemics Report on Tim Hurd’s Bible Thumping Wingnut Network), telling Hall that he was only sharing the audio with him for now, undoubtedly assuming the veiled threat to share the audio further would convince Hall to pressure Tim Hurd into either apologizing again or ceasing further criticism. Hall declined, saying he was not going to listen and would rather mind his own business.
Apparently not satisfied with the lack of cooperation from Hall (and any others Durbin sent the recording to), Durbin released the recording on a new, anonymous YouTube channel on November 11th, 2019. Hurd reportedly found the anonymous “Tim Hurd Confession” YouTube channel with the single video containing the audio from the May 2017 phone call. Hurd confronted Durbin, asking to discuss Durbin’s release of the call, but was met with a veiled threat from Apologia pastor James White, who, through mutual friend Nathan Todd Fischer, said, “Tim, I have listened to the phone call” on November 19th. Notably, James White was not part of Apologia in 2017, making Durbin’s sharing of the call with White nothing but gossip.
In response to being called out for the utterly disqualifying behavior of secretly recording penitent phone calls and releasing them years later for retaliatory purposes, Durbin, Pierson, and White released a 3-hour-long podcast attacking Hurd. I discuss it on Protestia Tonight here:
Arizona is a one-party consent state, meaning the act of recording a phone call without both parties consenting was not illegal.
But the controversy was never primarily about legality.
It was about the ethics of secretly recording penitent conversations and releasing them publicly during disputes with critics and offering forgiveness only to withdraw it the moment the forgiven person does something you don’t like — particularly for church leaders who exercise pastoral authority over members.
Hard Shepherding for Thee, Civil Courts for Me
The present-day lawsuit intersects with longstanding criticism of Apologia’s leadership structure (as discussed in the above Protestia Tonight).
Apologia doesn’t practice Baptist-style congregationalism (despite Jame White’s Baptist self-description). It doesn’t even practice biblically-ordained elder plurality. Rather, it practices a cult-like model often described as hard shepherding, under the unilateral spiritual control of so-called “founding elders.”
Interestingly, the publicly published ministerial requirements that vest unilateral control in the “founding elders” do not seem to appear on the church’s website until 2021, years after White became an elder at the church.
The term “founding elder” itself is revealing in its hierarchical utility. In historic Baptist polity, authority flows from the congregation. Elders serve the church; they do not constitutionally rule it. A permanent class of “founding elders” exercising enduring authority represents a very different model of church governance.
Under such systems:
- elders adjudicate disputes
- elders define discipline
- elders determine credibility
- criticism is expected to be routed through the same authority structure being criticized
This is why Durbin and fellow Apologia elder James White have repeatedly insisted that Christians who raise concerns online should not do so publicly but instead bring complaints “elder to elder.”
In other words:
Criticism must pass through the authority structure it is criticizing. No priesthood of all believers, but rather good old fashioned clericalism.
Picking on Women Is Not Courage
There is also an ugliness to this lawsuit that deserves to be acknowledged plainly. Durbin did not sue seasoned male critics who have publicly excoriated him for years — myself included.
We have published harsher things about Jeff Durbin than either Hailey Merris or Sarah Young ever did.
Yet I was not sued. They were. Two women.
One is a former congregant, and one is an independent watchdog journalist.
That is not bravery. That is not strength. That is not pastoral leadership or making oneself of low reputation. It is dominionist bullying — cloaked in a thin veneer of “postmillennial dominionism “justice.”
And it is precisely the kind of self-gratifying lawfare Arizona’s anti-SLAPP statutes are designed to restrain.
When Forgiveness Becomes Conditional
In the three-hour whiny screed defending himself against Tim Hurd, Durbin argued that forgiveness granted under Matthew 18 can be rescinded if the forgiven individual is later accused of similar offenses. The Christian Indian giver model Durbin and co-founding pastor Luke Pierson argue for is diametrically opposed to the nature of Christian forgiveness itself, to the point where it distorts the unconditionality of the gospel itself.
Under such a framework:
- forgiveness is be granted
- repentance is accepted
- reconciliation supposedly occurs
…but if the forgiven individual later sins again — or (in the case of Hurd) isn’t even biblically accused of doing so — prior conflicts can be reopened, prior forgiveness pulled back, and Matthew 18 discipline simply escalated from the point where it stopped.
As any Awana 1st-grader will tell you, this is not how Jesus describes forgiveness. Rather, He commands believers to forgive “seventy times seven.” The point is not arithmetic. It is permanence. Forgiveness is not probation or purgatory, where the forgiven sinner has to either work off sin or avoid it until the forgiver is satisfied.
A supposed believer in Christ whose forgiveness is conditioned on future sinlessness drops squarely into the category of those whom the Father will not forgive either (Matt. 6:14-15). When this kind of Christ-rejecting nonsense is taught by supposed pastors, it doesn’t matter what they think they founded – they are utterly disqualified from ministry.
Placed alongside Apologia’s willingness to pursue civil litigation against former congregants and critics, the theological pattern becomes difficult to ignore. Church leaders who exalt themselves above the rest of the Body, and who treat forgiveness as conditional on compliance, will inevitably treat personal offense not as persecution to be endured but as sacrilege to be avenged (yes, this naturally leads to a broader discussion of the practical implications of pre vs postmill, but we’ll leave that to another day).
Again, the video clips and receipts for this disqualifying teaching are in the video above.
The Lawsuit and Arizona’s Anti-SLAPP Law
Arizona, like many states, has enacted an anti-SLAPP statute. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
These laws exist to prevent individuals or institutions from using litigation itself as a means of deterring or punishing speech on matters of public concern.
As court records show, Durbin claimed in a church meeting some time after Hailey Merris’s accusations were publicized that his daughter overheard him discussing the particulars of the Merris’s counseling. He argues that this proves that there was no intentional breach of confidentiality, thus Hailey’s claims of intent are defamatory. The problem for Durbin is that the admission that confidentiality was broken renders Hailey’s claims understandable, whether or not they are provable. And this is all it takes to disprove malice, which is required to defame a public figure like Durbin.
The fact that the church meeting occurred before the lawsuit was filed bolsters the defense’s appeal to SLAPP, as Durbin clearly knew confidentiality had been breached (and therefore, Hailey’s claims were not clearly malicious) prior to filing suit.
Many of the statements described in the complaint also fall into the category of opinion or interpretation, such as describing conduct as “abusive,” “spiritually manipulative,” or similar characterizations. Courts generally treat those kinds of statements as protected opinion, especially when they arise in debates about religious leadership or church governance.
Add to this the fact that Durbin was given ample opportunity to respond in kind and offer rebuttal but chose not to (while threatening legal action), and the lawsuit begins to look like a textbook example of the exact kind of lawfare that results in plaintiffs not only losing, but paying the defense’s costs under SLAPP.
Yes, you read that right. If a court determines that a lawsuit was filed primarily to deter protected speech, it can dismiss the case early and require the plaintiffs to pay the defendants’ legal fees.
The defendants’ pending motion argues that several elements of this case point in that direction:
- the speech concerns a public figure and public ministry
- the allegations involve pastoral conduct
- the defendants relied on firsthand testimony and documentation
- the plaintiffs were offered an opportunity to respond and declined
- the lawsuit seeks to restrict future speech through an injunction
Whether the court ultimately agrees remains to be seen.
Implications of McRaney vs NAMB
Interestingly, the recent 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to dismiss Will McRaney’s defamation case could be used by the defense to render this case moot, even if the Maricopa County Circuit Court does not grant the defense’s SLAPP motion. The decision establishes, at least for the foreseeable future, both an affirmative defense against defamation and a jurisdictional subject matter disqualification for legal disputes where the subject matter is religious in nature. In other words, because the North American Mission Board and Will McRaney were voluntarily involved with one another, and the involvement was religious in nature, the court determined that juducial review would categorically encroach on religious subject matter particulars, and therefore the First Amendment protected NAMB from defamation liablity. It is hard to see how – if NAMB’s potential defamation against McRaney is out of bounds based on the religious subject matter of their relationship, why the Merrises’ and the Youngs’ potential defamation against Apologia remains in bounds.
The Irony
Durbin says the lawsuit is about defending the truth. But truth does not require silence. Truth does not require injunctions against speech. Truth invites scrutiny.
Litigation invites something else. Discovery. Emails. Text messages. Internal communications.
If this case proceeds, the lawsuit filed to defend reputation may expose far more information than any TikTok video ever could. It is not unreasonable to suspect that this is the reason Zack Morgan voluntarily removed himself as a plaintiff was that his daughter’s involvement in the text thread may have created a discovery vulnerability.
What Happens Next
If the court grants the anti-SLAPP motion:
- the case will be dismissed
- discovery will never open
- the defendants’ speech will remain protected
- the plaintiffs could be ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees
Not as punishment. As deterrence. Anti-SLAPP laws exist precisely to discourage the use of litigation as a tool for suppressing speech on matters of public concern.
Defamation law is not church discipline or reputation management, and it’s not a substitute for public rebuttal. It can be a weapon wielded by those who know they are in the wrong and are concerned that admitting it will harm their carefully curated reputation.
When a public-figure pastor responds to criticism not with transparency but with litigation, he risks strengthening the very criticism he hoped to silence. If the court concludes this lawsuit was an attempt to deter protected speech, Jeff Durbin and Apologia will not be an example of Christians witnessing to Caesar, but of Christians so far away from righteousness that they had to be rebuked by Caesar.
