The Way

For years, the message of Ian Harber has been one of love, hope, compassion, and the Gospel of Christ. Supported by friends and family, he pursued the ministry both in high school and college. It was passion. It was life. It held meaning for him to stand in front of audiences time and time again to offer a message of the good news he’d found in his own life. 

It is no surprise that people found him so compelling and convicted by his message. Ian is a natural-born speaker, artist, motivator, and writer. At least that much he comes by honestly in his genes.

Ian has always had a message of comfort for those hurting, hope for those seeking, and a reputation for living it real. He knew how to draw people into his narrative and move them to a living experience with faith.

His ability to keep life real, open, out there for people to see the struggles and triumphs of his life was only made more powerful by the pursuit of and eventual marriage to a young lady with such inner beauty she is now his only link to any kind of love, hope, compassion, or—one can hope—the Gospel of Christ.

The shame is that Ian’s message is a lie and covers a rot that he has hidden well from his adoring acolytes.

The Truth

Ian has many outstanding insights into the heart of darkness that can rip individuals and families apart. He uses the mental illness of his late mother quite regularly to drive home his compassion for those with debilitating disorders—only to turn around and repudiate the mental health field in the most ignorant of exposés. Most, if not all, of his stories are true—to an extent. He never quite gets around to telling the whole truth about his mother, his parents, the past, or even his own grandparents.

It’s just another part of the illusion of his message that he uses to reach people in a dramatic and personal way. The truth is much, much worse and less noble than he presents.

Ian was born into a dysfunctional family that consisted of a father who worked nights and then stayed up half the day with him as an infant so that his mother could go to school. That his mother was clearly sociopathic was evident early on in their marriage and became so obvious toward the end of her life that rumors still abound that she was provided the means to kill herself by an intimate family member just so others could finally be at peace in life. Ian’s grandfather said, “Both sides of the family started to breathe again when we all found out.”

During their separation, his mother routinely beat Ian, attacked his father (including once fracturing his jaw with a broom handle before snatching up Ian and unmercifully beating him as well), and delusionally made up stories and incidents that never took place.

That she was the epitome of evil incarnate was the opinion of his father until she killed herself.

The story doesn’t stop there, however. His father, in an attempt to protect him, refused to return him the same weekend they were both attacked. Given there was no visitation order in place, and divorce was already started, his father was finished with the abuse of both himself and his son.

But that instigated two unusual events.

The first was the legal threat by his grandmother that required his father to return Ian to his mother. Without knowing his rights, his father reluctantly complied. That set off a bit over a intense year of abuse of Ian including being threatened by his mother with scissors to slit his throat.

Eventually CPS intervened, the second unusual event occurred, and life would never be the same for anyone. That second event was a phone call to his father, letting him know that CPS had stepped in to halt the abuse of his son and that he needed to come retrieve his son as soon as they removed him from his mother’s “care.”

His father did something that would set the stage for Ian’s life to reach the success it is today: he said “no.”

The Life

Ian’s life with his grandparents has been, outwardly, one of great privilege and comfort. He was spared no expense to ensure he had everything he wanted. The financial burden of his grandparents was incredible to raise him, on top of funding the fight against his grandmother’s leukemia that was discovered about the same time as they were granted custody of Ian.

The phone call to his father resulted in a second phone call that provided access to him for his grandparents to rescue him from the clutches of his sociopathic mother. Little did his father know that he was sending his son from the fire back into the frying pan.

Finding out decades later that he had sent his son to the woman who insisted he return Ian into a pit of horrific abuse only to take him back later and continue the abuse was sickening.

What has come to light is the fact—witnessed by those who came into contact with Ian and his grandmother—was that Ian continued to exist within a cycle of abuse. His grandmother was determined to raise him “better” than she had his father, to ensure that he would not turn out how she perceived his father had turned out [despite his father already having multiple academic degees and a successful post-addiction/recovery life], even if she had to beat it out of him.

His grandfather, beaten down from years of emotional abuse from his wife and continuing to feel the escalating abuse as she grew sicker by the years, did very little to intervene. Her ranting is infamous. Her sadistic approach to children was well-known and documented by family as early as the pre-teen years of Ian’s own father.

Then she finally died.

His grandfather struggled with a rebellious teenager while still continuing to support the education of Ian’s father and younger, autistic brother. Ian even made inroads of reconciling with his father over the years, both of them finding solace in the rekindling of their relationship. He finally completed college, got married, and made a lot of people (including his father and grandfather) very proud.

Then he fell into darkness.

The Illusion of Faith

In June 2017, Ian’s life changed dramatically.

His grandfather’s life was cut short by a tragic airplane accident while out of state. That life has been eulogized in depth by Ian’s father elsewhere.

The day after his grandfather’s death, he messaged his father, “We’re gonna get through this. We got each other and [Ian’s great aunt from his grandmother’s side of the family] and lots of amazing people around us supporting us. This is gonna be the worst thing you and I have ever been through but we’re gonna get through [it]”.

Those would be the last words he spoke to his father before the next evening when he stood in his grandfather’s house while his great aunt lied to police officers, defamed his father’s character in front of witnesses, and then vocally declared his agreement and allegiance to a lie perpetrated against his own father.

Ian stood there in his grandfather’s house and explicitly sided with the bearing of false witness against his father. He lied to police officers that evening in front of witnesses. And he perpetrated the most insensitive refutation of his Christian values and ministry that he had spent years building.

Honor your father and your mother, indeed. Having been raised by his grandparents—and knowing the values of his grandfather specifically—and having a father of his own, Ian showed a callous and unchristian betrayal of his grandfather’s legacy.

And then he proceeded to go through life as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

By all witness accounts, he gave an unmoving and unemotional eulogy for his grandfather, causing some to exclaim how much he must have disliked his grandfather to be so heartless in his words. After the memorial, he ignored his younger brother to the point that his own compassionate wife had to turn him around to speak to his brother. And even then, witnesses attested to the fact that he acted as if he didn’t even have a brother.

Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen 4.9)

And we all know how that turned out.

As to Ian’s future, only time will tell if he will find his way back to the grace of God and the fruitful message of love, hope, and compassion that he once preached from stages across Dallas. Only time will tell if he will feel the conviction of Christ take hold of his life and shake it to the foundations once again.

For the rest of us, we will have to make our own judgment as to the nature of Ian’s message. It’s a false message now by his own behavior. But redemption is possible for everyone. 

Even Ian.

Update: Apparently not …

Apparently, Ian decided to lean into the illusion that he was a God-fearing husband—and finally father himself.

In 2025, just over seven years after the death of his grandfather, Ian released his first book into the wild. It’s a wonderfully written book. It comes highly recommended—even by this author!

Except that he couldn’t make it past page six without a bald-faced lie [that has been already removed in the second printing due to negotiations with his publisher to avoid court procedings against them both].

Ian has an amazing story despite all the turmoil he’s caused in other people’s lives, despite the lies he regularly tells about his past, and despite the betrayal of everything his grandfather stood for in life. 

But then he had to lie about it so brazenly.

He waited—as best anyone can figure—until nearly everyone who could invalidate his lie was dead. And he assumed that his father would sit back and do nothing out of some imagined guilt for having ensured he grew up in a life of privilege and comfort. 

If only he’d stuck to the facts.

As already mentioned, Ian’s mother was severely abusive across the board, both to Ian and his father. This was a documented fact. Ian’s paternal grandmother was uninvolved in anyone’s life. His parents did not separate their living arrangements when they separated their marriage arrangements pending divorce. That was a mistake, and his father accepted responsibility for that poor choice. It was an unhealthy situation for everyone, but mostly for Ian.

The whole story that is only hinted at above is that his father started hanging around a group of friends with children about Ian’s age (one of those friends eventually became his stepmother-in-absentia and gave birth to his autistic brother, whom he explicitly refuses to acknowledge even exists—such charitable Christian behavior on Ian’s part, but so often the phrase ‘Christan Virtue’ is an oxymoron, especially among those Christians who write books about Virtue). His father spent weekends and many evenings with them, took Ian with him, and returned Ian to their apartment for his mother to watch during the weekdays since she did not work, and his father did. One morning, when returning him, she physically attacked his father and then physically attacked Ian, after which she poured urine over both of them.

With both of them covered in blood and urine, his father removed him from the apartment and did not return with the intention of keeping him pending the outcome of a more forceful move for custody and divorce, which his father was determined to win given her mental instability and years of documented violence. His father had a support system in place for Ian, and he was well loved. As his stepmother (though they’re now divorced as well) said when this was all shared with her, “That boy was wanted.” They did everything at the time to provide for him.

His grandmother had it in her head that Ian’s mother could do no wrong despite police and medical reports to the contrary and spent a great deal of time and money making every attempt to suggest his father was lying about the abuse until it was too inconvenient for her to deny it was happening. At one point, his mother moved to six hours away after he had been removed from the home and not returned. Several months later, his grandmother threatened his father with legal action if he didn’t take Ian back to his mother. Not understanding his own rights as a father and unable to fight on two legal fronts, he acquiesced to her demands and returned him to his mother. His father never saw him again until after CPS rescued him from his mother, contacted him to retrieve Ian from CPS, and he then begged his father to take custody of Ian for reasons that are irrelevant to the narrative here today.

But it was CPS that had to forcefully remove Ian from his mother’s clutches after her continued abuse and threat to murder him. They called his father first to retrieve him from CPS custody. But ultimately, it was his grandfather who agreed, at his father’s request, to rescue Ian and file for custody intervention.

It never made sense as to why his grandmother spent so much effort to force him back into the home of a known abuser until after her death. His grandfather finally admitted how abusive she had been throughout their marriage, but especially in the last years leading up to her death. She blamed him for not saving her life, for not trying hard enough, for giving up on her. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The man spent a small fortune on every possible cure—including a lot of quackery—trying to extend her life. But it makes sense when one puts all the pieces together with Ian’s life, his father’s own childhood memories, and the circumstances surrounding the events that led to Ian’s custody battle and intervention. Abusers cover for other abusers, and she wasn’t about to admit that Ian’s mother was an abuser until the evidence was going to make her look poorly in the face of her own social circles.

Ian and his father only became estranged after the death of his grandfather in 2017. Up until that time, they had been working on a relationship steadily past the death of his grandmother, who had been gaslighting him his whole life and grooming him to follow in her wretched footsteps of petty insults and behaviors. Both his grandfather and father were unaware of the extent to which Ian was molded by his grandmother’s abuse.

But for Ian, his story was never about the abuse by his mother or some imagined abandonment by his father. He was too young to even remember the majority of those events. The reality is that Ian is little more than a spoiled, upper-middle-class kid of privilege who had a rough start in life for about a year and a half as a toddler. Horrific, to be sure. Homicidal and terrifying that would never be wished on anyone. But after the age of four, he reads like the above-average suburban kid of privilege who had divorced parents and then inherited a small fortune from his grandfather.

He’s built a social media brand on the lie of a past that only happened in his gaslit dreams and semantic games with his followers to hoodwink them into thinking he’s deeper than he is. it would appear that he preaches one message while living a fraud against the teachings of the Church and the values of his grandfather. He squandered the good fortunes of his grandfather and created such a lie of disrespect toward his father that no minister in their right mind should endorse him without repentance and restitution per scripture.

His father chose the path of forgiveness and grace in dealing with his publisher. He chose to try to cover one lie with merely a restatement of the lie. Ian preaches that those who have “deconstructed” from the Church should return and reconcile with the faith; and yet Ian is unable to live that truth and faith in his own life, unable to find reconciliation with the betrayal he perpetrated and the family origins he denies and about which he lies. Those who trust in the words of someone that cannot live their faith but claims to have a market on preaching that faith are only fooling themselves.