“It’s really tragic that things had to come to this point,” said Vonda Dyer, who once led the church’s vocal ministry and accused Mr. Hybels of luring her to his hotel room in Sweden in 1998, touching her stomach and kissing her unexpectedly.

[Read more about the church employee who accused the Rev. Bill Hybels of groping her repeatedly]

“This is not the outcome I would have ever wanted. My hope was that Bill Hybels would have admitted his sins, and that Willow Creek leaders would have come to repentance voluntarily, not through pressure from the national media,” Ms. Dyer said, crying in a telephone interview. “This is a sad day for Willow and for me personally.”

Mr. Hybels, the two pastors he chose as his successors and his board of elders have all been brought down by a gathering storm of allegations that ended in a thunderclap. It began more than four years ago, when the elders were told privately about a woman who said she had had a lengthy affair with Mr. Hybels. But Mr. Hybels denied it, and when the elders questioned her, she insisted she had been lying.

Then the elders learned that several women employed by the church, including Ms. Dyer, had accused Mr. Hybels of making inappropriate comments about their appearance, giving them uncomfortably long hugs and in one case an unwelcome kiss, and inviting some of them to his hotel room for a drink. The elders conducted their own investigation and commissioned another by an outside lawyer, all of which cleared Mr. Hybels.

The congregation learned of the allegations only after some of the women told their stories to The Chicago Tribune and Christianity Today last spring. The elders and the church’s two pastors stood by Mr. Hybels in March as he appeared before the congregation and said that the women were lying, and that their advocates, former Willow Creek staff members, were colluding to bring him down. However, he stepped down in April, six months ahead of his planned retirement, saying it was for the good of the church. He denies all the accusations against him.

Finally, on Sunday, Mr. Hybels’s former executive assistant Pat Baranowski alleged in an article in The New York Times that Mr. Hybels had broken her down emotionally, groped her repeatedly and once insisted on oral sex while she worked for him and lived in his home in the 1980s. Ms. Baranowski left her job and spent more than 25 years struggling with depression, unemployment and homelessness.