“Joel said, ‘Gee, I wish we had done that,’ ” Mr. Olasky recalled. “We don’t want to leave it to the secular press to expose wrongdoing within the church.”

Mr. Olasky said that there is no contradiction between Christian faith and reporting on the dark side of Christianity. “We don’t have to cover up, because we do have faith that God forgives and saves the sinner.”

Mr. Belz is no longer editor, but he still writes a column for World. He said that he got the idea for a Christian newsmagazine from readers of a children’s publication that he had founded. After moving to Asheville to edit a small, failing magazine called Presbyterian Journal, he conceived the idea for a new venture, a Christian version of the old Weekly Reader that he had loved as a child in Iowa.

“I thought if we could do something like Weekly Reader for the growing Christian private-school market, there might be a real market for that,” Mr. Belz said. The children’s magazine he founded in 1981, then called It’s God’s World, was a hit, and is still published in several editions. “Then the parents got back to us and said, ‘We like this, we read it with our kids, and when will you do something like this for adults?’ So it was the child of the children’s magazine.”

When asked whether other evangelicals have criticized World for its investigative reporting, Mindy Belz, Mr. Belz’s sister-in-law and a top editor, recalled the response to a series about sexual abuse at a missionary school in Senegal run by New Tribes Mission.

“We were accused of hurting New Tribes, the teachers, and the people who had already dealt with the past,” Ms. Belz said — in other words, it was over and done with, or so some believed, so why make news of it? “People will say it’s not right for Christians to talk this way about other Christians,” she said. “We just think there’s a real truth-telling component to any journalistic enterprise.”

The members of the small staff at World are mostly evangelical Protestants, of varying denominations. But there is no statement of faith to sign, and at least one Roman Catholic writes for the magazine (he’s a music critic). Lynn Vincent, the evangelical ghostwriter behind the monster hit “Heaven Is for Real” and Sarah Palin’s autobiography, “Going Rogue,” wrote for World for over a decade, until 2009. One of her favorite World pieces was an article she wrote about sexual abuse of women by Protestant pastors — a story, she said, “directed by truths found in Scripture.”