Lawsuit: Sovereign Grace Ministry UPDATED
The third plaintiff was identified in this case as an adoptee before that was wiped from the internet.
“Three female plaintiffs claim in a lawsuit that an evangelical church group covered up allegations of sexual abuse against children.
The suit filed Wednesday in state court in Maryland alleges that Sovereign Grace Ministries failed to protect children from being sexually abused by church members.
The alleged incidents date back to the mid-1980s in Maryland and northern Virginia.
The plaintiffs claim church leaders did not report accusations of misconduct to the police and offered legal advice to suspected pedophiles.
The church said in a statement late Wednesday that it had not yet seen the suit and couldn’t comment on the allegations. But it said it considers child abuse “reprehensible and criminal.”
Sovereign Grace Ministries was founded in 1982 and has more than 80 churches around the world.”
Sovereign Grace Ministries, Evangelical Church, Hid Child Abuse Claims
[Huffington Post 10/17/12 by Erin Tucker/Associated Press]
The article originally stated the following (and now it has been wiped off the internet in the past hour and a half)
“”The third plaintiff says her adoptive father, a member of the church, sexually abused her older sister for three and a half years. She says
the church warned her mother not to pursue a prosecution, then kicked the family out of the church and denied the children reduced tuition to school. The man was ultimately prosecuted and imprisoned, the lawsuit says.”
REFORM Puzzle Piece
It is scary how fast the internet-scrubbing of adoption crimes is occurring these days.
Update: “The final of the three listed plaintiffs in the suit is Robin Roe, whose adopted father – named “Parental Pedophile” in the suit – is still a member of the church. He sexually abused Roe’s older sister for three and a half years, the complaint states, and Roe’s mother eventually reported him to Mays, who went on to report the incident to Ricucci and later to Loftness.
“The Church did not report the matter to the police or any other law enforcement authorities, as they were required to do,” the suit states.
“Instead, acting through Defendant Ricucci, the Church directed Robin Roe’s mother to let them ‘take care of everything.'” Roe is a plaintiff in the suit because she was allegedly no longer accepted by the church after she told a friend and fellow church member about her sister’s abuse. As a result of being considered an outcast, the suit claims, Roe was not cared for properly as a child, and eventually wound up in a juvenile half-way house for young criminals.
The church also allegedly helped Roe’s father with his legal issues, and told Roe’s mother to have sex with him more frequently to prevent him from “being tempted.” Those who might be included in the class action suit are those who were sexually assaulted or molested as a minor by Sovereign Grace Ministries church members between 1987 and the present.
The church’s neglect of the situation has allegedly led to multiple abuses over time. According to a statement released Wednesday by Tommy Hill, Sovereign Grace’s director of finance and administration, the church had not yet been served with a lawsuit and only heard of it through various media outlets.
“Sovereign Grace Ministries is not in a position to comment on the allegations of the reported lawsuit,” said Hill. ”
Sovereign Grace Ministries Accused of Covering-up Child Sexual Assaults
[Christian Post 10/19/12 by Jeff Schapiro]
Update 2: “Sovereign Grace Ministries — a church network that moved its headquarters to Louisville earlier this year — says in a recent statement that First Amendment religious-liberty protections would be threatened if a lawsuit succeeds in “allowing courts to second guess pastoral guidance.”
The church’s statement comes in response to a lawsuit filed Oct. 17 in Maryland — where the denomination was based for its first three decades until this year — on behalf of three plaintiffs the suit describes as victims of sexual abuse by members of Sovereign Grace churches in Virginia and Maryland.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of other victims, citing “a culture in which sexual predators were protected from accountability and victims were silenced.” It alleges elders at Gaithersburg, Md., and Fairfax, Va., churches intervened in cases in which members sexually abused minors. It alleges the pastors sought to minimize criminal penalties against the abusers and pressured victims to forgive their perpetrators.
The Sovereign Grace statement, issued by Director of Administration Tommy Hill, notes that no pastors are accused of abuse in the lawsuits and that the abuse did not take place on church property. At issue is how the church elders responded.
“SGM leaders provided biblical and spiritual direction to those who requested this guidance,” the church said. “This care was sought confidentially, as is a right under the First Amendment. We are saddened that lawyers are now, in essence, seeking to violate those rights by asking judges and juries, years after such pastoral assistance was sought, to dictate what sort of biblical counsel they think should have been provided.”
The church said that “allowing courts to second guess pastoral guidance would represent a blow to the First Amendment, that would hinder, not help, families seeking spiritual direction among other resources in dealing with the trauma related to any sin including child sexual abuse.”
It added that “child sexual abuse is reprehensible in any circumstance, and a violation of fundamental human dignity. We grieve deeply for any child who has been a victim of abuse.”
The statement said Sovereign Grace lawyers are preparing a formal response. “It appears the complaint contains a number of misleading allegations, as well as considerable mischaracterizations of intent,” it said.
Washington lawyer Susan Burke, representing the plaintiffs, declined to comment. The lawsuit alleges there were other cases of mishandled abuse besides those involving the three plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are young women who are not identified by name in the lawsuit. The lawsuit says two of the plaintiffs were sexually abused as young girls and that the third was shunned by her church, as was her family, for refusing to seek leniency for her sister’s assailant.
An advocate for victims of clergy sexual abuse contended that Sovereign Grace’s defense on First Amendment grounds is built on “sinking sand.”
Christa Brown of StopBaptistPredators.org, which primarily focuses on abuse in Baptist churches, said courts often give only narrow protections to clergy-penitent confidentiality in cases involving child sexual abuse.
“The courts typically consider that civil society has a compelling interest in protecting the welfare of children,” she said. “So, even if the counseling provided by Sovereign Grace Ministries were religiously motivated, the privilege would still not be absolute.”
She added: “Merely because something may be legally possible doesn’t make it morally right.”
Sovereign Grace’ headquarters — which has about 90 churches worldwide, most in Atlantic coast states — and its longtime president, C.J. Mahaney, came to Louisville after more than a year of controversies that are still playing out in the denomination. Critics, including former pastors, have accused the ministry leaders of probing into members’ personal lives and shaming and sometimes ostracizing them for real or perceived sins while those at the top avoided accountability.
Sovereign Grace also launched its first congregation in Louisville, meeting at Christian Academy’s English Station campus.
Mahaney has been prominent in the New Calvinist movement, popular in some Southern Baptist circles and other denominations. Mahaney and Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville – itself an epicenter of the Calvinist movement — have regularly shared podiums at conferences linked to the movement. The movement emphasizes God’s all-powerful role in human events, including determining who is saved. Other emphases of the movement include male authority in homes and churches and tightly disciplined congregations where preaching is central.
Sovereign Grace leaders said one reason for moving to Louisville was to strengthen its bonds with the seminary, and on Nov. 14 Sovereign Grace announced a cooperative agreement in which its pastors-in-training can apply some credits from the denomination’s own Pastor’s College, which also moved to Louisville, toward a master’s of divinity degree from Southern.
Earlier this year, a report by the independent conflict-resolution group Ambassadors of Reconciliation said that while many had benefited from involvement in Sovereign Grace churches, others had been hurt by the movement’s focus on correcting members’ sinfulness.
Estranged members saw an “over-emphasis of the teaching about sin without the balance of God’s grace,” leading some to be overly judgmental or despondent, the report said.
The lawsuit alleges that abuse was able to occur in an insular and authoritarian church culture in which members submitted to pastors’ instructions in how to parent and where to work and live. It was in that submissive environment, the lawsuit said, that that parents would turn to church elders for help when they learned their children were being sexually abused.
The lawsuit alleges the church taught “members to fear and distrust all secular authorities, and expressly directed members not to contact law enforcement to report sexual assaults.”
One of the churches identified in the lawsuit — Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md. — is the former flagship church of the denomination. Mahaney and his successor and one-time protege, Joshua Harris, have acknowledged a growing distance between them during the controversies, and Covenant Life spokesman Don Nalle said it has been evaluating its relationship with Sovereign Grace in a confidential, internal process.”
Sovereign Grace Ministries statement sees First Amendment threat in lawsuit over sexual abuse
[Courier-Journal 11/27/12 by Peter Smith]
Update 3: 5 more victims added to lawsuit
“A Montgomery County Circuit Court lawsuit accuses past and current leaders of a 100-church evangelical denomination of covering up sexual abuse of minors, forcing small children to “forgive” abusers and ostracizing families who wouldn’t hide the alleged crimes.
The lawsuit filed Friday adds more accusers and more accused to a complaint filed last fall against Sovereign Grace Ministries, a movement founded in the 1970s in Gaithersburg. Among those named now is co-founder Larry Tomczak, who was a key figure in the movement’s early years but split from it bitterly in the 1990s.
Eight alleged victims are named. Tomczak is the only alleged abuser named. He is accused of forcing a victim over a period of 25 years to strip “against her will” and assaulting her .
Tomczak became well-known with Sovereign Grace leader C.J. Mahaney years ago for launching what is now a thriving trend of neo-Calvinism. Neo-Calvinism teaches that people are steeped in sin and need strict spiritual oversight.
Tomczak is a pastor in Tennessee. Mahaney moved Sovereign Grace’s headquarters last year from Gaithersburg to Kentucky amid controversy within the churches over his leadership.
The movement’s flagship church, Covenant Life in Gaithersburg, became independent a few weeks ago after public disagreements over views of pastoral authority.
Tomczak said his family experienced “spiritual abuse” decades ago, at the hands of other clergy who publicly criticized his actions. In a Post story in 2011 about rifts in the Sovereign Grace movement, he called for more openness and contrition about behavior within the group.
In an e-mail Monday, Tomczak said he “had no participation or involvement in these areas that were cited” and plans to file a motion to remove his name from the suit.
Sovereign Grace spokesman Tommy Hill said the abuse of a child is “reprehensible and evil. We ask for patience as we carefully review and investigate these new allegations. We continue to pray for all those affected by this lawsuit,” he said in an e-mail.
The suit names Sovereign Grace churches and schools in Fairfax County and Gaithersburg, including Covenant Life. It also names various leaders of the movement and accuses them of covering up the alleged crimes.
“Defendants failed to report known incidences of sexual predation to law enforcement, encouraged parents to refrain from reporting the assaults to law enforcement, and interposed themselves between the parents of the victims and law enforcement in order to mislead law enforcement into believing parents had “forgiven” those who preyed on their children,” the complaint says.”
Suit accuses Sovereign Grace Ministries of covering up alleged child sexual abuse
[Washington Post 1/14/13 by Michelle Boorstein]
Update 4: “A Las Vegas man has been charged in Maryland with molesting boys in the 1980s while assisting with youth ministries at a church targeted in a child sex abuse lawsuit.
Nathaniel Morales, who had been working as a pastor in Nevada, is accused in an indictment of sexually abusing the boys when he worked with Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md.
That church until December was associated with Sovereign Grace Ministries, a Louisville-based evangelical church group accused in a lawsuit in Maryland last fall of covering up allegations of child sex abuse by its members.
The lawsuit was amended last month to name Covenant Life Church as among the new defendants.
An indictment returned in December charged Morales, 55, with 10 counts of either sex abuse or sex offense. The indictment says the sex acts involved four boys and occurred between 1985 and 1990, when police say Morales was helping the church with youth ministries, conducted Bible studies, teaching at a Christian school and hosting sleepovers.
Morales, who was arrested in southern Nevada and extradited to Maryland, is scheduled for a pretrial hearing on Friday in Montgomery County Circuit Court, online court records show. His lawyer did not return calls seeking comment and a telephone listing for Morales could not be found.
The criminal investigation began in 2009 when a man reported to police that he was sexually abused by Morales when he was between the ages of 12 and 20. The man told police that his parents had spoken to the church pastor but that no police report was made.
Several other men interviewed by police said they had been sexually abused by Morales as boys — sometimes in their own bedrooms or inside his apartment or his office at the school where he taught.
The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault.
Police interviewed a co-pastor at the church who recalled confronting Morales about the allegations. The pastor told police that “normally the church would appeal to the person to stop his criminal behavior and then, should it not stop, they would alert people that the person is not acting in a Christian manner. The person would need to show contrition,” according to a police report filed in the case. The pastor said going to the police was in the “realm of possibilities,” but that he took his cues from the families, the police report says.
Another pastor, Grant Layman, said he had communicated with Morales several years ago and that Morales had admitted to “alcohol abuse and homosexuality,” the police report says.
He said that Morales told him that he remembered having committed abuses and having confessed his past to an older pastor, but that Morales now said he was very ill and could not recall the specifics of anything that occurred.
Don Nalle, the communications director of Covenant Life Church, would not discuss the specifics of Morales’ criminal case, deferring to a statement posted last month on the church’s website. That statement says the church is investigating the allegations.
“We are sickened by the thought of such abuse — sexual abuse in any form is evil and unconscionable. We are grieved by these allegations. We also recognize that we don’t have all the facts. We would encourage everyone to withhold judgment until an appropriate legal process can be completed,” the statement reads in part.
A lawsuit filed last October accuses leaders at Sovereign Grace Ministries, a three-decade-old family of churches, of failing to report allegations of sexual abuse to the police and of shielding known sexual predators of children.
Sovereign Grace Ministries moved its headquarters to Louisville last year — and planted its first Kentucky congregation here — after three decades in Maryland.
It has struggled in recent years with fractured leadership and criticism over its discipline methods, especially the church’s emphasis on sins, discipline and repentance.
Susan Burke, the lawyer who brought the case, said in a written statement that the “indictment supports our lawsuit’s allegations of extensive wrongdoing by Sovereign Grace Ministries and its pastors. We look forward to our day in court.”
Sovereign Grace Ministries has said the suit contains “a number of misleading allegations, as well as considerable mischaracterizations of intent.”
It has also said that First Amendment religious-liberty protections would be threatened if the lawsuit succeeds in “allowing courts to second guess pastoral guidance.”
Police say they’re tracking the lawsuit and will conduct additional investigations if new information emerges.
Covenant Life is one of several congregations that have broken ties with Sovereign Grace in recent months. It had been the largest in the denomination and was long led by C.J. Mahaney, the president of the denomination.
Before the defections, the denomination reported having about 90 congregations with about 28,000 members.”
Nevada pastor faces child sex abuse charges
[Louisville Courier-Journal 2/5/13]
Update 5: “Church workers committed repeated acts of sexual and physical abuse on young children, conspired with their superiors to cover up such crimes and recruited juveniles to join in the abuse, according to a newly expanded lawsuit filed in Maryland against the Louisville-based Sovereign Grace Ministries.
The recently resigned chairman of the denomination, Maryland pastor John Loftness, is among those newly accused. Two plaintiffs — identified by name in the lawsuit, even as some plaintiffs remain identified by pseudonyms — allege that Loftness repeatedly sexually and physically abused them as young girls in past decades. A third plaintiff alleges that when he reported to Loftness that he was molested as a boy by an adult male member, Loftness allegedly told the boy to re-enact the alleged molestation, then later required the boy to meet with and forgive the abuser.
Loftness denies all allegations.
The 46-page lawsuit is the second amended version of one originally filed last year, seeking class-action status and accusing the denomination of systematically covering up sexual abuse in its ranks right up to the present. The church and its leaders allegedly permitted “the abuse of children to occur in church buildings, [a] school building and during church retreats and other events,” the lawsuit says.
Eleven plaintiffs are suing. The case was filed in Montgomery County, Md., longtime base of the denomination. Many of the incidents allegedly occurred in Maryland and Virginia.
Many of the allegations center on actions in what were once two of the largest congregations in the denomination, Covenant Life Church of Gaithersburg, Md., and Sovereign Grace Church of Fairfax, Va. Both recently left the denomination amid controversies over its leadership,
Claims in a lawsuit give only one side of a case. This one recounts a litany of horrors, allegedly perpetrated both by church leaders and members, whose actions were allegedly known to church leaders who nevertheless are accused of allowing them continued access to children.
“Without minimizing the serious nature of these allegations nor the grievous harm individuals may have experienced, we understand that it is possible for people to be wrongly accused,” its statement said. “We thank God for the judicial system where these allegations can be brought, a defense made, and a verdict rendered through a fair and just process.”
In a statement, Loftness, pastor of Solid Rock Church in Prince Georges County, Md., said he has never physically or sexually abused anyone or “sought to shield someone I knew to be a pedophile from legal consequences for his actions.” His statement gave no indication of stepping down either temporarily or permanently.
Sovereign Grace Ministries is a network of dozens of churches and is influential in New Calvinist circles — a multi-denominational movement with emphases on such things as God’s power, church discipline and the authority of male pastors over churches and fathers over families. The denomination has lost numerous churches in the past year amid controversies over its leadership, as we’ve written about here.
The denomination opened its first Kentucky church in Louisville last year and has none in Indiana. It has had long ties to Kentucky, however. Its longtime former president, C.J. Mahaney, has spoken at large conferences here connected to the Calvinist movement. Sovereign Grace leaders have worked with faculty at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in such areas as conferences and training.
The lawsuit alleges molesters associated with Sovereign Grace Ministries — individually and in tandem — raped and beat young girls and penetrated them with foreign objects including a plastic rod. It alleges a gang rape occurred at a church retreat when members were staying at an Indiana University of Pennsylvania dormitory. [Update: Not to be confused with any IU campus in Indiana.]
Some of the alleged abusers have already been convicted or face pending criminal charges, according to the lawsuit.
The suit alleges that church leaders — including Mahaney, who recently ended his long tenure as president — knew of abuse and conspired to cover it up. It alleges church leaders obstructed criminal investigations and failed to alert other church members to the presence of abusers with access to their children.
The lawsuit alleges one abuser instructed reluctant boys to beat a girl who was their friend to demonstrate males’ dominance. It alleges church leaders sought to minimize the criminal consequences of another abuser in order to return him to his role as head of his family.
Sovereign Grace recently filed motions seeking dismissal of the lawsuit on various grounds, including First Amendment protections for religious organizations.”
Brutal sex crimes, cover-up alleged in church lawsuit
[Louisville Courier-Journal 5/15/13 by Peter Smith]
“A Calvinist church-planting network with ties to Southern Baptist leaders faces new allegations of covering up sexual abuse of children in a 46-page amended lawsuit filed May 14 in Maryland.
The new court document includes graphic descriptions of molestation of boys and girls at churches affiliated with Sovereign Grace Ministries and accuses pastors of conspiring to cover up the alleged abuse.
One of the alleged perpetrators, former SGM board chairman John Loftness, denied ever abusing a child or shielding a known pedophile from arrest. The ministry website said an internal review of the allegations “has not produced any evidence of any cover-up or conspiracy.”
Sovereign Grace Ministries is best known in Baptist life for ties between founder C.J. Mahaney and leaders in a movement sometimes called “young, restless and Reformed,” a resurgent interest in Calvinism gaining ground at Southern Baptist Convention seminaries.
Mahaney, who recently resigned as SGM president, planted a church in Louisville, Ky., last year when the ministry headquarters moved there from Gaithersburg, Md., in part to strengthen ties to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Seminary President Albert Mohler has worked with Mahaney on projects including Together for the Gospel, a conference for young pastors, and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which has offices on the Southern Seminary campus. Podcasts by Mohler are offered in the Sovereign Grace Ministries Store.
The Sovereign Grace website includes Mahaney’s 2009 interview with Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. In January, Akin brought Mahaney to the seminary campus in Wake Forest, N.C., to speak at this year’s 20/20 Collegiate Conference, an annual event for college students from the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area known as North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
Mahaney spoke recently at a conference in South Africa called Rezolution that he headlined with Calvinist leaders Kevin DeYoung, Ligon Duncan, Bob Kauflin and Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington and president of 9Marks Ministries.
Mahaney penned the foreword to the 2009 book Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches, authored by Russell Moore, a Southern Seminary administrator and professor recently named president-elect of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
In February, a former SGM leader turned whistleblower accused Baptist and other evangelical leaders of enabling sin by continuing to promote Mahaney while questions about his fitness for ministry remain unanswered.
The second amended lawsuit adds three new plaintiffs, making a total of 11. Five plaintiffs are now using their real names, and the rest are pseudonyms. It accuses church leaders of conspiracy, negligence, misrepresentation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It requests a jury trial.”
Sex crimes, cover-up, alleged in lawsuit
[ABP News 5/15/13 by Bob Allen]
Update 6: “A judge has dismissed most of a lawsuit alleging child sexual abuse and conspiracy to cover up at a large church in Maryland.
But the ruling by Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Sharon V. Burrell didn’t address the allegations of abuse. She ruled that the plaintiffs had to sue within three years of turning 18 and that date has passed for most of the alleged victims.
Two of the plaintiffs recently turned 18, but they live in Virginia.
The pastors and churches charged in the lawsuit could still face criminal charges because there is no statute of limitations on felonies.
Renee Palmer Gamby was just a toddler when she says she was molested by a male babysitter from her church. Covenant Life in Gaithersburg was the flagship church of the Sovereign Grace Ministries denomination until this past December, when it pulled out.
Renee’s mother said that when she called their pastor about the abuse, he told her not to call police. Instead, Renee said she was required to meet with her alleged perpetrator and forgive him.
Renee and her mother said they thought they were the only victims. But years later, they found story after story on the “Sovereign Grace Ministries Survivors” blog. And now several are going public in what they hope will be a class-action civil lawsuit.
“We are alleging that a group of men, pastors, conspired together to cover up ongoing sexual abuse of children,” said Susan Burke, civil lawsuit attorney.
The suit alleges decades of brutal sexual and physical abuse of young children–boys and girls– from the 1980s on, at both Covenant Life Church, and Sovereign Grace Church of Fairfax.
The Covenant Life plaintiffs allege beatings, rapes, including a gang rape, and molestations at the church-run elementary school and at other church functions. During the abuse, the school was housed at the Frost Center in Aspen Hill, and Sunday services were then held at Magruder High School.
One alleged abuser is Stephen Griney, a former Bible studies teacher who also headed the children’s ministry. The suit details a gang rape where adults wore masks and the victim was an 8-year-old girl.
The lawsuit also names four current officials of the Fairfax church, again, alleging an orchestrated cover-up of child sex abuse incidents and failure to report them to police.
The accusations also say children were forced to meet and forgive the accused, and pastors failed to notify other families– so the perpetrators went on to prey on other children.
One of those alleged perpetrators is Nathaniel Morales, a Covenant Life member currently jailed on criminal child sex abuse charges in Montgomery County.
“The pastors were on notice. He had other victims,” explained Burke. “They had been told by the victims that Morales had molested them and they did nothing about it.”
Another of the accused predators was then-Covenant Life pastor and school principal John Loftness. The suit claims he repeatedly molested two young girls, one a 5-year-old. Loftness is now the pastor at Solid Rock Church in Riverdale, Maryland, which is not named in the suit.
ABC7 went to Solid Rock Church, but were told Loftness was out all week. Loftness did post a letter to church members, denying ever abusing a child, or shielding any pedophile.
Dara Sutherland said in 1987, when her then 14-year-old sister accused their father, David Adams, of having molested her for three years, their mother went to police. And she says the pastors punished the family instead.
“Basically threw us out of the church, supported the pedophile and provided him with an attorney,” said Sutherland.
Today, Sutherland says David Adams, who did serve jail time for child abuse, is still active at Covenant Life, and manages a children’s music band.”
Sovereign Grace Ministries, class-action civil lawsuit involving child sex abuse
[WJLA 5/16/13 by Greta Kreuz]
See the Survivors of SGM website here for more details.
Update 7:”The February issue ofWashingtonian Magazine featured an exposé of long-buried sexual abuse of children in a prominent evangelical church network, Sovereign Grace Ministries. Freelance journalist Tiffany Stanley, a 2015 National Magazine Award finalist, spent 10 months uncovering reports of child rape and molestation in Sovereign Grace churches over the last three decades, particularly at the then-flagship Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Her investigation, “The Sex Scandal that Devastated a Suburban Megachurch,” chronicles the inside story of crimes against children in D.C.-area Sovereign Grace churches, explores how church leaders including founder C.J. Mahaney did and did not respond, and recounts how victims’ mothers joined forces to seek justice.
Unlike the hierarchical Catholic Church, evangelical churches often function independently. But their influence is widespread—as Stanley points out, Wayne Grudem, an evangelical theologian at Phoenix Seminary, once described Sovereign Grace Ministries “as an example of the way churches ought to work.”
Stanley shares some insights from her investigation with TIME. Her reporting was subsidized in part by a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant.
TIME: How did you decide to investigate the sexual abuse in Sovereign Grace Ministries?
STANLEY: More than one church leader assumed the victims and lawyer Susan Burke brought this story to me, as a kind of trial-by-media stunt. That assumption isn’t true. I had seen some local news reports about Sovereign Grace, and I approached Burke, asking if she would put me in touch with any of the plaintiffs she represented. It took months to establish trust with those involved. Many of them had been anonymous in their class-action lawsuit, and I wanted the survivors to have agency in deciding whether or not to talk to me. I started with one family, and then I met with another, and from there, I was able slowly to gain introductions to others.
Your investigation focuses on sexual abuse in one evangelical network, but it begs the question: how widespread is sexual abuse in evangelical churches more broadly?
The Catholic Church has been taken to task over abuse for decades now. Evangelical ministries are now facing their own abuse crises. In the media, we’re hearing more about these stories. Some of these allegations confront abuse that is decades old. From just the past year, I’m thinking of reports about Josh Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting and Bill Gothard, a Christian homeschooling advocate. I’m also thinking about Buzzfeed’s recent story on Jesus People USA and Kiera Feldman’s 2012 investigation of abuse in a Tulsa megachurch. (Of course, other religions are not immune from sexual abuse scandals either.)
The sad reality is that sexual abuse is widespread everywhere, not just in religious communities. The statistics I saw were one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys will be sexually abused before the age of 18. The experts I spoke to didn’t say these statistics are worse in evangelical churches, but they did say that abusers could prey on trusting religious communities, which give them access to children. That’s why churches need policies in place to protect children and handle abuse when it happens. That means reporting suspected abuse to authorities immediately, instead of handling it internally. Abuse is a sin, but it’s also a serious crime.
What challenges did you face getting the reporting?
Trauma reporting is challenging by its very nature. You take care not to re-victimize victims. And this was a complicated story to unravel and tell.
A lot of the reporting involved spending hours in courthouses around the D.C. suburbs, digging through case files, a process that I actually enjoy. But in these types of cases, which deal with minors and abuse, some court files are sealed, which is another obstacle.
The churches, for the most part, declined to cooperate. A lawsuit complicates who is willing to talk to you, and I am sympathetic to that. I talked to the churches in Maryland and Virginia very early on in my reporting process, letting them know I was doing the story, and I kept in touch with them about my progress until the very end, giving them chances to respond to my findings.
Some church leaders expressed that they wanted the story to go away, so the community could move on. They were tired of rehashing it. On one level, I understood that, but I was also talking to victims who had their lives irrevocably changed—they couldn’t just move on. These survivors are women and men in their twenties, thirties, and forties, whose marriages have been affected, who have been in psychiatric inpatient treatment, who live in terror of their own kids going to a sleepover. I’m sure they wish it could all just “go away” too. But it doesn’t.
What has the reaction from the church community been to you, and to your story?
The feedback from the victims and their families has been overwhelming positive, and I’m thankful for that. Right up until the article went to press, I was getting negative emails from some church members, but those messages seem to have dissipated. Others from the Sovereign Grace flock were grateful the story was being told. Since its publication, I have also been hearing from people who want to share with me stories of abuse from other ministries. The day after the magazine hit newsstands, I got a card from Covenant Life Church, signed by some of the elders, saying the pastors prayed for me that morning. That was a first for me.
Some of the leaders at Sovereign Grace Ministries had outsized influence in evangelicalism at large—Joshua Harris, one of their former pastors, wrote a book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which as you point out is an evangelical cult classic and shaped how evangelical millennials grew up understanding sex. What observations can you share now about the state of sexual ethics in the evangelical church more broadly?
I can’t speak to all of evangelicalism, but I can say there are troubling messages sent to sex-abuse survivors in church cultures that prize abstinence until heterosexual marriage. What does a young girl make of her “purity” if her father molests her? What does a young boy think if a male church member sexually assaults him? Churches that advocate a conservative sexual ethic should address those messages.
Does this kind of circumscribed sexual environment give way to more sexual abuse? Some people I talked to say, yes, this is repression and it leads to abuse and acting out sexually. All the perpetrators from my story were male—several were teenage boys—and they were members of a ministry that advocated strict sexual mores. Books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye promote courtship. Modesty is important. Abstinence is too. Underpinning much of these teachings is a patriarchal understanding of Christianity, where men are in charge. In a perfect world, those power dynamics would not be abused, but as Christians teach: We’re not living in a perfect world.
How does the legal system currently help or hurt victims of child sex abuse? You wrote that Susan Burke, a leading abuse litigator who is defending the Sovereign Grace victims, has called this case “the toughest” she’s ever worked on.
I was surprised how much the laws vary from state to state. Statutes of limitations—which put time limits on when you can file charges or sue—can be an issue for victims. In Maryland, unlike some states, there is no statute of limitations for bringing criminal charges in felony sexual abuse cases, which is why Nate Morales went to jail decades after he abused boys at Covenant Life Church. But Maryland limits when you can sue over child sexual abuse; you can be no older than 25. In reality, victims often don’t realize the long-term damage they have suffered from sexual abuse until they are much older. And as I found out in my reporting, civil lawsuits aren’t just about the money. They are a tool to see if there was a cover-up. It’s difficult and rare to criminally prosecute religious leaders who covered up abuse, so lawsuits are an avenue to get transparency and justice from the institution, not just the abuser.
About half of U.S. states specifically require clergy to report child abuse, but still others exempt them, through what’s known as clergy-penitent privilege. I think there are real problems with these exemptions. This is an oversimplification, but basically, if a church member confesses abuse to a pastor, or the knowledge is received from a victim in a pastoral capacity, the minister may not be legally obligated to report the abuse. The information may be privileged, as it would be with an attorney. I can understand that pastoral confidentiality is important, and so are religious freedom considerations. But it seems to me that a workable compromise would be to do what states like Texas and West Virginia and North Carolina do: Clergy-penitent privilege exists, but not in cases of child abuse.
What happens next for the victims? For the church? Is justice possible?
Susan Burke, the lawyer for the victims, has said she wants to file another lawsuit in Virginia. That suit wouldn’t involve all the original plaintiffs because some are too old to file suits. So it would likely involve only two of the survivors from my story. Above all, I think many of the families want Sovereign Grace to acknowledge publicly that mistakes were made. A little more transparency might go a long way. They want that accountability. It’s galling to them that Sovereign Grace leaders like C.J. Mahaney are still revered, still headlining conferences, and still running churches, with powerful evangelical allies on their side. Some of the parents, like Pam Palmer and Sarah and Richard, have become activists around these issues. They know it may be too late to get justice for all of the Sovereign Grace plaintiffs, but they want the laws to change for future victims. And they want churches to better handle abuse in the future.”
http://time.com/4226444/child-sex-abuse-evangelical-church/
[Time 2/16/16 by Elizabeth Dias]
Recent Comments