Community Grooming in the Church
As more and more survivors of abuse in church settings tell their stories publicly, Christians must reckon with the heartbreaking reality that their faith communities have harbored abusers and granted them access to victims. On top of this, many survivor stories reveal secondary betrayal and injury: beloved church leaders and whole church communities, after failing to recognize the signs of grooming and predatory behavior, refuse to believe survivors and often join the abuser in vilifying or slandering the victims who come forward.
How is this possible?
How can pastors and other church leaders, tasked with roles that require discernment, character, and spiritual care, be so incapable of identifying abusers, safeguarding the vulnerable, and responding appropriately to disclosures? How can entire communities that are in many ways safe havens for hurting people fall in lockstep behind these leaders, ostracizing victims who rallied the courage to come forward, seek help, and try to prevent their abuser from harming others?
One key reason is that churches are often ignorant about something called community grooming.
“Grooming” is the process “by which the offender gains access to the [victim/s] in order to develop a trusting and/or authoritative relationship.” In its narrowest definition, grooming is an intensive campaign by the perpetrator to target, manipulate, abuse, and silence the victim. But in order to maintain this predatory regime, abusers in institutional settings must also cultivate numerous other relationships, build trust, manipulate authority, and control the community narrative about themselves.
In this article we’ll explore the process of community grooming in the church using examples from the abuse mishandling situation that led to the creation of ACNAtoo: the case of Mark Rivera, a lay leader in the ACNA Diocese of the Upper Midwest (UMD) who is alleged to have groomed and abused victims in at least two UMD churches, spanning over two decades. Mark held numerous ministry roles at Church of the Resurrection (Rez), the UMD’s cathedral church, starting in the late 1990s. He later served for about 5 years as Catechist in Christ Our Light Anglican (COLA), a now-defunct UMD church planted by Rez members in 2013. Mark is currently serving consecutive prison sentences after being convicted of felony sexual assault against an adult and multiple counts of felony child sexual abuse.
In many ways, the Mark Rivera situation is a textbook case of both sexually predatory behavior and community grooming. Examining Rivera’s relationships within Rez and COLA as a case study, we'll ask: How do abusers groom communities, and how can we stop them?
1. Abusers take advantage of church culture and positive ideals.
The underlying motivations for predatory behavior can be complex, but they always result in perpetrators intuitively, proactively, and methodically targeting and securing access to victims. In the same way that abusers have an “ideal” victim — for example, psychologically vulnerable adults, isolated children, or the developmentally disabled — abusers also look for their “ideal” communities: places that grant them access to victims and offer them opportunities to charm and influence the people surrounding those victims.
Churches need to understand that abusers are masterful at exploiting the positive qualities of their victims in order to groom and control them. Friendliness, openness, benefit of the doubt, and an innocent desire for connection are all potential avenues for an abuser to prey on an individual — and grooming communities is no different.
Our victim-blaming society encourages us to believe that abuse victims tend to be weak, stupid, or morally inferior when compared with the rest of the population. It makes us deeply uncomfortable to admit that this is not true: that, in fact, abusers exploit our good character and good intentions just as opportunistically as they prey on our flaws and weaknesses.
Because churches welcome everyone and prioritize building personal relationships, a church’s weekly activities provide a prime opportunity for abusers to gain access to potential victims and build trust with their surrounding communities. In the absence of a clear understanding of grooming and abuse, even generally positive ideological commitments become reasons churchgoers overlook warning signs of predatory behavior. For instance, because Christians value grace and reconciliation, the church’s explicit and implicit teaching may lead people to set aside internal red flags, excuse away someone’s bad behavior, or give that person multiple “second” chances even when suspicious behavior warrants strong boundaries or exclusion from the community.
Given that abusers exploit our most cherished values to devious ends, we’re left with no choice but to cultivate deeper discernment around the dynamics of abuse — becoming, as Jesus says in Matt. 10:16, “as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.”
2. Abusers exploit distorted theology and misplaced priorities.
It is rare to find a church that draws a hard boundary and says: “While your behavior can never exclude you from access to Jesus, it does exclude you from participation in the life of our community; you are not welcome here.” Instead, churches commonly attempt to reintegrate people who have demonstrated a pattern of predatory behavior. In fact, they often go to extraordinary lengths to allow dangerous people to participate in the life of the church. For instance, in churches with triumphalist theology, known predatory behavior may be “washed away” by something like healing prayer or an exorcism, after which congregants believe they must trust the “reborn” predator.
Chris Lapeyre delivering a scripture reading at Church of the Resurrection
When a distorted theology of healing becomes a core tenet in a church’s teaching and practice, this tends to result in a pattern of misplaced trust and unsound judgment. Consider how Church of the Resurrection quietly made arrangements for a registered sex offender to attend regular worship, entrusted a man with a confessed history of grooming minors with additional lay leader positions, offered leadership roles to a man with a criminal history of violent domestic abuse, and ordained another who had served time for soliciting prostitution. In these four publicly documented instances, the perpetrators abused people and/or committed crimes during times when they held public ministry roles as pastors or lay leaders with visible spiritual authority.
Rez has repeatedly positioned itself as a church that is “committed to being a place where sinners, even notorious sinners, can belong and encounter Jesus.” This phrase first appeared in a May 2022 update to parishioners about Rez member and former worship leader Chris Lapeyre, written in response to ACNAtoo’s second published survivor account of Chris’s predation. In a December 2022 update, Rez responded to ACNAtoo’s report that convicted serial sexual predator and former Presbyterian minister John Hays was attending Rez without the community being notified of his abusive past:
At Rez we remain fully and deeply committed to two crucial gospel values and practices. First, we are aware that Rez has many parishioners who are themselves survivors of abuse. We are committed to their care and protection, and that of the most vulnerable in our midst, our children. Second, we are also committed to being a place where sinners, even notorious sinners, can belong and encounter Jesus (with appropriate safeguards in place).
While Rez’s two public announcements speak of “appropriate safeguards,” in neither case was the church community informed of the danger these men posed to their children until ACNAtoo exposed the situations publicly. Instead, leadership knowledge of the perpetrators’ abuse and the designation of unidentified “chaperones” to accompany the two men were considered sufficient safeguards against community grooming, even as parents remained unaware that admitted sexual predators were at large in their place of worship.
This determination to offer dangerous people ministry roles in group worship settings, or simply grant them anonymity to blend into the congregation at the expense of possible future victims, means abusers know they will find easy access at churches like Rez. No matter what they do, no matter whom they injure, even if they are criminally prosecuted (which is incredibly rare), there will be a place at church for them. Abusers have learned, often by long experience, that the power and trust they can cultivate in the community means that they will be believed over victims and that even when they are confirmed to be predatory their behavior will not result in meaningful consequences.
For many abusers, the abuse itself is a demonstration of their power, and their power increases exponentially when they control the community’s response to them. In the rare instance that a church does send an abuser away, that abuser can simply move on to a new vulnerable church, leaving a trail of victims in their wake. They will intentionally look for a church that unduly emphasizes healing, forgiveness, and spiritual discernment, because such communities are susceptible to an abuser’s tactics as well as the hubris that imagines they won’t be deceived like previous communities were.
Distorted theology can also make churches vulnerable in other ways. Particularly dangerous are teachings that emphasize the God-given authority of leadership, prioritize “unity” over truth-telling, misapply the conflict resolution process of Matthew 18, or treat disclosures of abuse of power as dangerous gossip.
For instance, Church of the Resurrection requires all members to sign a Membership Covenant, including a Unity Pledge that requires parishioners to commit to ignoring disclosures, keeping concerns private, and unquestioningly trusting leaders. This is incredibly dangerous because a person might see red-flag behavior and tell themselves, “I must think the best about this person.” Or they might feel they need to go privately to an abuser rather than report their concerns. If the predator is a church leader, they have committed to “not take seriously or respond to [accusations against leaders] unless they are brought by two or three witnesses.” It goes without saying that this is an impossible standard to meet for most instances of abuse and will directly result in the dismissal of abuse allegations — if they are even brought forward in the first place.
Distorted teaching around sexuality also frequently flattens all extramarital sexual contact into the category of “sexual sin.” Abuse survivor “Amber” described how she attempted as a young adult to disclose abuse to Fr. (now Bp.) Stewart Ruch, who ignored the non-consensual nature of her account and instead directed her to read a prayer that forced her to relive her trauma while reframing the abuse as equally her fault:
I tried to explain that I thought this was the wrong prayer for what I needed to confess, but Fr. Stewart dismissed my concerns and told me just to read through all of it first, assuring me that if I still had questions we could discuss them afterwards. This particular prayer was one intended for the confession of sexual sin and Fr. Stewart instructed me to repeat the portion where I was to name each person I had ever had any form of sexual contact with. Reading through the prayer, I was not able to provide any context for the sexual contact that had occurred. Under pressure from Fr. Stewart, I followed the prayer sheet and named and forgave each person who had abused and assaulted me and then proceeded to beg God’s forgiveness for allowing them to violate my sexual purity. By the time I was finished, I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I did not even attempt to explain again that this was not what I had needed to confess. As soon as I got out of Fr. Stewart’s office, I immediately sought out an empty room and cried alone for nearly an hour because I was so mortified and embarrassed.
Abuse survivor “Carol” experienced a similar dynamic as a child when Fr. Keith Hartsell confronted her about her abuse by an older boy in the church, treated the abuse as a consensual act, and pressured her to apologize to her own abuser:
At one point in our conversation, I remember Keith specifically asking me whether any penetration had occurred between me and this boy. Not really understanding what this meant, I answered that it had not. I naively thought that penetration referred only to outright sexual intercourse (which this boy had actually attempted on at least one occasion). Of course, this boy had first violated me with digital penetration and this was something that was forced on me on numerous subsequent occasions. As a sixteen-year-old child at the time Keith questioned me, I was in no way equipped to answer these inappropriate and violating questions in a way that spoke truth to what had really happened. Far from giving me any freedom from my guilt and humiliation, Keith seemingly affirmed my abuse as sexual sin and drove me further into shame and silence.
After questioning me, Keith asked me to attend a meeting at the Resurrection Ministry Center. I do not remember exactly when this meeting was scheduled, but I would estimate it was a few days to a week after the one-on-one meeting at Coldstone. I was not told what this second meeting would entail. When I arrived at the Resurrection church building, Keith ushered me into the Rez Youth Room, where some other minor children from the youth group, including the older boy who had molested me, were already waiting. Keith was the only adult in the room; everyone else was a minor. At this meeting Keith instructed and pressured me to apologize to and forgive the boy who had molested me, and made the boy do the same to me. Looking back now, I am fairly certain that this meeting took place in the same room where this boy first molested me.
When church teaching emphasizes purity and ignores consent, the church signals to abusers that their victims will be blamed and their abuse downgraded to “sexual sin,” creating an environment where abuse proliferates while victims suffer in silence.
3. Abusers seek out ministry roles to bolster their community legitimacy.
In order to succeed in long-term predation, abusers must groom both the individual and the community to see the relationship between abuser and victim as desirable and unquestionably safe. One of the surest pathways to gaining trust and influence in a church community is by serving in a visible ministry role. While a reasonable parent will inevitably balk if an unknown adult offers their child a ride home after church, they might welcome the same offer from a trusted volunteer, lay minister, or even a person in an unvetted but visible role like church greeter. And while churches often require some kind of screening for individuals working directly with children, this usually does not extend to all roles. Additionally, the baseline background checks upon which most churches rely don’t show a history of allegations or criminal charges, and do not always even turn up criminal convictions.
In many high profile cases of abuse of power in religious settings, the perpetrator holds a role such as ordained clergy, ministry founder, seminary professor, or youth pastor. But these are far from the only positions abusers use to cultivate spiritual legitimacy and access victims. And when lay leaders or volunteers perpetrate abuse, their church superiors often rush to downplay the abuser’s authority in the community. For instance, when UMD Bp. Stewart Ruch finally informed the diocese of some of the allegations against Mark Rivera in 2021, two years after first learning of the allegations, his public announcement stated that Mark was “a volunteer lay leader (with the title of Catechist).” Bp. Ruch's announcement goes on to assure the congregation that “[t]he only information we have regarding Mark’s involvement with our children or youth was as a youth volunteer for one summer. He also served as a prayer minister. Mark has never held a paid position of any kind in our diocese.”
Screenshot from the now-defunct Christ Our Light Facebook page.
In fact, Mark Rivera had held numerous lay ministry roles over his quarter century in Church of the Resurrection and its offshoot, COLA. Survivors and advocates provided Bp. Ruch with an extensive list of these roles, each of which served to situate Mark as a legitimate and longstanding spiritual authority in the eyes of children and adults alike. In addition to omitting most of Mark’s ministry roles, Bp. Ruch’s statement downplays even the position mentioned by emphasizing that Mark was a volunteer, unordained, not paid by the church, and therefore not a person in a “real” position of authority. This message ultimately disregards how lay people, including children, perceive and experience spiritual authority. In Mark’s case, his overlapping church communities witnessed him wearing vestments, leading church services, serving Communion, preaching sermons, serving as a prayer minister, co-leading small groups in a healing ministry, and engaging in spiritual mentoring relationships with vulnerable teenagers, among other visible leadership roles.
Communities must remember that visible leadership of any kind equals a real form of community endorsement and borrowed credibility. If the pastor trusts an individual to take on even “minor” positions of authority, the congregation unconsciously presumes that individual to be trustworthy.
Any kind of ministry role increases an abuser’s means of gaining access to victims and decreases the likelihood of a victim coming forward, because the victim knows that the community sees their abuser as trustworthy. They may ask themselves: Am I the problem? Did I misread his/her intentions? Was I too sensitive? The fact that a trusted, credible person assaulted, abused, or harassed the victim is incredibly disorienting, because effective grooming makes it difficult to believe a church leader could ever act in a way that warrants those labels. Even victims who can overcome their own cognitive dissonance about the abusive leader’s actions will wonder if anyone else will believe their story. In many cases, their abuser has already told them no one will believe them. All too often, that is proven accurate when faith leaders and the broader community refuse to believe victims, as Mark Rivera’s communities did.
4. Abusers groom victims publicly to test the community’s boundaries.
Abusers are often charismatic and likable and can deftly employ their social skills such that anyone raising concerns will be swiftly dismissed. For instance, even though abusers might be notoriously touchy-feely or act in other unconventional ways in public settings, effective community grooming results in people telling themselves and others: “oh, she’s always been that way” or “that’s just how he is.”
Katie Robichaud, a longtime parishioner at Church of the Resurrection, described how she experienced this dynamic when interacting with Mark Rivera years before victims came forward about Mark’s abuses:
When Mark Rivera and I were involved with Bird & Baby Theater, he made a sexually inappropriate comment to me about my body. I was 30 years old. It was in a group setting. Others sitting at the same table blew it off/laughed it off/pushed past it because no one knew what to do. I remember sitting there, a bit shocked, and debating in my head ‘how big a deal to make’ (as I have each and every time I've experienced sexual harassment). No one wants to blow something out of proportion and sometimes there are just men who are still boys, making careless remarks in search of a laugh.
Other times, you have a definite predator on your hands. In the moment, I let it go – I followed up with a couple friends after, people who knew Mark better than I did, who were there that night, to gauge how concerned/wary I should be around him. They downplayed it, basically because ‘Mark is Mark,’ so I continued to let it go. But something in me knew what Mark said was wrong and creepy and without question crossed a boundary. So how much does it reveal that when a 30 year old woman, with a good backbone and sense of self, questions her own gut...how much steeper a climb is it for a minor, A MINOR, to not question themselves and to call a spade a spade?
Katie’s experience is corroborated by numerous survivors who experienced years of Mark’s inappropriate public behavior being brushed away as “just Mark being Mark.” Grooming victim “Lily” recounted how Mark repeatedly violated physical boundaries with her and other teenage girls in full view of the church community:
Mark Rivera could frequently be seen with his arms around young girls’ waists, giving them long drawn out hugs, and kissing their cheeks for prolonged periods of time. He would give very tight, affectionate hugs, rub girl’s backs, invite them to sit on his lap, and would cross numerous physical boundaries constantly. This all happened at COLA and Church of the Resurrection, at church events and with church leaders and plenty of adults around, as well as in his private home. Everyone trusted Mark; because of this, he was able to get away with behaviors that would not have been permitted by any other person. The more I got to know Mark and the more he violated physical boundaries with me, the more uncomfortable I felt around him. I continued to push the feeling away though, because everyone trusted Mark and I thought my intuition must have been wrong and the problem must just be me.
Another survivor, “River,” explained how Mark used his dual roles as Communion minister and prayer minister to groom her when she was a college student attending Rez. As a Communion minister, writes River, Mark would consistently overpour the wine for the Sunday service, invite young people up after services to finish the remaining wine, then use the increased vulnerability of alcohol consumption to perform further grooming:
After we finished drinking the communion wine in the front of the church, he would ask me to sit with him in the front row of the auditorium to talk further about my “prayer needs.” During these conversations, he began to pull me onto his lap and wrap his arms around my waist.
To be clear, Mark was giving me long hugs and kisses and pulling me onto his lap in a crowded auditorium, in clear view of church leadership. I remember feeling uncomfortable at the time, but thinking, “everyone around me seems to think this is fine, so it must be.” There were always scores of children running around the front of the auditorium, and I remember thinking, “Mark would never do something bad in front of all these kids, especially not in front of his own children!”
Once abusers have normalized their public grooming behaviors and assured themselves that they will suffer no consequences, they are often emboldened to abuse victims more directly in the presence of bystanders. In fact, many abusers experience an additional feeling of power when they can get away with abusing their victims in group settings. People are often shocked to discover that sexual abuse commonly occurs near bystanders or even family members. While some abusers select spaces that have a blocked line of sight, such as a room with an alcove that can’t be seen through a window, others will simply abuse in the midst of their community-approved role. Dr. Larry Nassar abused girls in his office while their parents were standing next to them. Josh Duggar abused one of his victims while reading Bible stories to a group of children. An elementary school athletic director molested over a thousand children — sometimes in the back seat of a car while the unsuspecting parents sat in the front seats. Mark Rivera abused his first reporting victim while her parents were in the room.
When church leaders are ignorant to the brazenness of abusers, they are more prone to respond as the leaders in the UMD did when they disbelieved that victim’s account:
Philbrick [the diocesan chancellor] described the allegations as hard to believe because the child was saying she was touched with her parents and siblings in the room. — Husch Blackwell investigation report, p. 24
As Katie, Lily, and River’s accounts demonstrate, public grooming of victims is a form of community grooming. Mark Rivera groomed two church communities to accept his wildly inappropriate behavior, and this in turn normalized that behavior to the victims themselves. Anyone involved, if they did have concerns, looked around the room and saw everyone else appearing unconcerned. The abuse continued unabated and intensified, with victims and bystanders alike caught in a vicious cycle of normalized boundary violation.
5. Abusers are masters of spin and experts at DARVO.
Abusers expend great effort to manipulate the perception of those around them. They groom the community to believe they are trustworthy, and they spin any rumors or disclosures to their advantage. For instance, a documented case of domestic violence can become a testimony moment where an abuser opines about how hard things were for them during the abuse and how God has transformed them and called them to continued ministry. If people express alarm about a too-touchy volunteer, the abuser can minimize concerns by painting themselves as the victim of harsh criticism, a misunderstood person who just loves people so much. Allegations of sexual harassment can be swept aside as an interpersonal misunderstanding. “That’s just the way that person is,” becomes the refrain of a community that is hard-wired to believe the best about their members, especially ones that are skilled at charming people.
Abusers are further helped by the fact that church reporting structures are often woefully inadequate, such that there is frequently no formal record of past allegations against them. If word of prior concerns does reach a community that has been groomed, an abuser can spin their past into a testimony of triumphal healing or paint a picture in which they are the true victim. Abusers will also often “confess” their failures, including when they realize they are at imminent risk of being exposed, eliciting pastoral attention and cultivating opportunities to emotionally manipulate church leaders by presenting a sanitized version of the abuse story and a convincing display of remorse.
Abusers are also experts at DARVO, a term coined by Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd that stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” This tactic can easily turn any allegation or complaint about problematic behavior into a means of garnering sympathy and trust for the abuser. When the first victim accused Mark Rivera of abuse in 2019, Mark flatly denied the accusations and proposed that the community was under attack by dark spiritual forces. By positioning the actual victim as a tool of Satan, Mark was able to frame himself as the ostensible victim in the situation. Mark Rivera survivor Joanna Rudenborg recounted this DARVO example to Bp. Ruch in a January 2021 letter calling for an investigation into Mark’s abuse and community grooming:
From day one, Mark mangled spiritual concepts in order to create his alibi. On May 18, when Cherin sat down with Rand, Chris, and Mark, to confront Mark about [Cherin's daughter]’s allegations, Mark did not simply say, “I didn’t do it.” He denied ever molesting [Cherin's daughter], then went on to tell Cherin that [redacted] and [redacted] were actually not surprised that [Cherin's daughter] had said these things, because, he said, [redacted] had been acting strangely for some time, to the point that [redacted] and [redacted] had to ask her if someone had been touching her inappropriately. He implied that [redacted] had concluded that both [redacted]’s struggles and [Cherin's daughter]'s allegations against Mark were a spiritual attack against Mark and against the church, and that Cherin and everyone else should dismiss them as such.
In other words, Mark acknowledged that two little girls to whom he regularly had unsupervised access were acting like they were being abused / claiming he abused them. He then told his church that the reasonable explanation for this was that Satan was attacking the community. Satan, by extrapolation of this logic, was torturing or manipulating two [redacted] children, in very specific ways, in order to frame him, Mark, as a child abuser.
Importantly, effective community grooming creates a DARVO ripple effect. While Mark himself denied the accusations and reversed victim and offender, he could not outright verbally attack his victim, a 9-year-old child. However, his years of grooming the community naturally directed them to take this role on themselves. In order to believe Mark’s adamant denial of his abuses, the community had to attack his victim’s credibility by framing her as either confused or a liar. Joanna recounts witnessing this community DARVO process firsthand in the same 2021 letter to Bp. Ruch:
This is roughly what the COLA community narrative-building looked like, in the wake of [Cherin's daughter]’s allegations:
[Cherin's daughter] told a lie once, in some dispute among children, [redacted] remembered. Yes, [Cherin's daughter] comes from a “broken home,” contributed someone else. Her moral compass is off; it’s no fault of her own, but we can’t trust her. She has that weird feeling about her, don’t you agree? a bit of a sociopathic tendency? And Cherin is divorced, [redacted information]. She is damaged, and she's untruthful, too; she lied to [redacted] and [Mark’s wife] about calling the authorities. Also, pointed out by someone else, [Cherin’s husband] seemed to have something against Mark, so there’s a good chance he influenced [Cherin's daughter] to turn on Mark and tell lies about him. And, have you noticed how [Cherin’s husband] is suspiciously uptight about people giving hugs and being physically affectionate? He clearly has issues there, so he is probably overreacting to Mark’s natural effusiveness and connection with people, and sexualizing it, in his own dirty mind. [Cherin's daughter] probably picked up on this and is pandering to her stepdad by making Mark out to be a bad guy. … [redacted identifying information], and she is just confused, or under [Cherin’s husband]’s influence, and told the stories about Mark, instead of the real abuser?
I listened to all of this go down, in scattered bits, over the end of May and beginning of June. I watched this basic story coalesce, and take hold in the community consciousness, until some version of it became COLA’s gospel truth. And Mark watched, too, carefully feeding it as he needed to, to protect himself and get rid of [Cherin’s family].
In the wake of Cherin’s daughter’s allegations, other young victims came forward alleging grooming, indecent exposure, inappropriate touching, and attempted sexual abuse by Mark Rivera. Diocesan leaders failed to follow up on these accusations, while Mark’s close community members brushed them off as exaggerated, impossible, or as Mark having bad boundaries but not being an abuser. When older sexual abuse victims came forward in 2020, Mark was unable to deny their stories outright, but was able to reframe them as “affairs,” despite the vast power differentials clearly at play in each situation.
While Bp. Ruch himself indicated that he believed these newer allegations against Mark, it required the direct petition of survivors and advocates, two months later, to convince him to take further action. Bp. Ruch did not inform the congregation of the allegations against Mark until almost two years after receiving the first allegation in 2019. It is worth considering how the community’s long-time inoculation to Mark’s demonstrably inappropriate behavior may have contributed to these and other leadership failures documented in the Husch Blackwell report, whatever the intentions and ideals of the diocesan leadership.
6. Abusers leverage church leaders to reinforce community grooming.
Church leaders are not immune to abusers’ charms, which is one of several reasons they often immediately discount a victim’s story. Abusers are also very aware that the threat of abuse allegations to a church’s reputation will work in the abuser’s favor to influence leaders to consciously or unconsciously downplay the allegations or sweep them under the carpet. A clever abuser takes a deck that is already stacked against survivor disclosure and stacks it still further, long before the allegations begin to roll in. This often involves grooming church leaders to view the abuser as trustworthy and any allegations against them as a threat to leaders’ reputations and even to their self-identity as spiritually discerning people.
Successful abusers have, by the time a victim comes forward:
–targeted a vulnerable community
–gained access to victims
–secured some kind of position of trust and influence
–tested and overridden boundaries of acceptable community behavior without consequence
–intentionally groomed individual victims
–perpetrated abuse
–manipulated and coerced victims to maintain silence
When a victim comes forward, then, it is not into an objective vacuum but to a community and leadership structure with its own distinct culture and practices that has also been preyed upon, often for years.
Family members, leaders, and parishioners cannot believe that their trusted ministry partner, relative, volunteer, or friend of many years could have done this evil thing. They would rather believe a victim is lying than reckon with the reality of their individual failure to discern, their group susceptibility to being deceived, and the betrayal of the abuser.
This is exactly how abusers expect it will go when they insinuate their way into communities. Their historic trust and positions of influence enhance their ability to further manipulate and coerce their community victims. They know the right spiritual language to invoke, and the catchphrases and culture of the community that helped enable them to abuse will now help them discredit survivors and defend themselves.
After Mark Rivera was first exposed in May 2019 and before he was arrested and taken to jail a few weeks later, he wrote a series of emails grooming select community members towards sympathy and support. Note how Mark uses spiritualized insider language accepted in the community to title this email and closes with a request for prayer in a continued appeal to shared religious values:
Note also how Mark leverages the support of Diocesan Chancellor Charlie Philbrick to further legitimize his case to the community. Charlie’s assistance in finding Mark discounted legal representation signals to the email recipients that Rez is behind Mark. Meanwhile, COLA leaders had already pressured the victim’s mother, in the presence of her child’s abuser, not to report the abuse to authorities, citing Chancellor Philbrick’s erroneous legal opinion on mandatory reporting. According to the Husch Blackwell report, during this same time period Bp. Ruch gave COLA priest Fr. Rand York permission to try to convince the victim’s mother to drop the charges against Mark. Fr. York, a close personal friend and mentor to Mark Rivera for 25 years, would go on to attend court hearings in support of Mark.
The spiritual culture of the Rez community, including leaders’ understanding of what fairness and “ministry” to an alleged perpetrator should be, plus the relationships Mark had already cultivated with key UMD leaders over the years, resulted in an outcome that underscores the power of community grooming: The perpetrator received markedly more pastoral care and attention than the first victim to come forward, a child who was not believed and whose family was neglected by church leaders and socially rejected by the church community.
L-R: Chris Lapeyre, Mark Rivera’s wife, Mark Rivera, Stewart Ruch, Rand York, and Rand York’s wife
Mark Rivera so effectively groomed his church leaders that they did not even take measures to prevent this victim from encountering her alleged abuser at Sunday services — a decision that forced her parents to immediately stop attending COLA for their daughter’s protection. Meanwhile, Mark received personalized pastoral care and continued to attend church, while people within his church community insisted that he “may be immature, but he’s not a child abuser.”
After Mark was convicted in late 2022 of felony child sexual assault, a longtime Rez member wrote to the Kane County judge on Mark’s behalf, begging for leniency in sentencing and insinuating that the “hostile” courtroom environment and public allegations against Mark had scared away other church members from attending the trial in support of him.
In Mark’s case and in many others, manipulating the sympathies of church leaders is the linchpin of community grooming. Visible leadership support of a perpetrator sends a clear message to the community, the victims, and any other survivors watching that the benefit of the doubt belongs to the perpetrator, not their victims. Four years since the first allegations against Mark, and even after his two criminal convictions, the church leadership and the Rez community continue to ignore this victim’s family.
How do we address community grooming in the church?
First and foremost, we must listen attentively to survivors who come forward. This allows us to offer appropriate care to those most directly harmed, and their stories also hold keys to unlocking the ways the community itself has been groomed, exploited, and manipulated. This is one reason impartial external investigative and assessment agencies like GRACE and others provide such an important service to churches. Because they are well-versed in the dynamics of abuse, grooming, enabling, complicity, and failed responses, they can help identify the elements that first made the community vulnerable to a predator. They can also help the community come to terms with their own complicity, reckon with the ways they have enabled abuse, and make amends should that be welcome.
Communities that have discovered an abuser in their midst should be first in line for this kind of analysis. Only by systematically identifying their specific vulnerabilities can they learn to operate in new ways that will communicate their commitment to protect vulnerable people and send an unequivocal message to potential predators: Abuse of any kind will not be tolerated here.
So what are some practical ways for churches to do this?
Educate the community. Any individual in a church can grow their own awareness of the realities of grooming and abuse by engaging with firsthand abuse accounts and expert analysis of abuse dynamics. Every educated individual in a church is one more person who will be less susceptible to an abuser’s tactics and more likely to identify red flag behavior for what it is. Churches can also coordinate annual training for the entire community in addition to required regular training for all staff and volunteers. Caring Well is a free curriculum and GRACE offers accessible online training.
Prioritize having disclosure and response policies in place. Churches should have adequate insurance and additional funds that could be used for immediate external consultation, investigation, and trauma-informed care should victims come forward. Every church should also establish and publicly document a child protection policy and a set of detailed, trauma-informed response procedures before allegations occur, and have an external consultant review these procedures.
Take every concern and disclosure seriously. Churches that operate by a “see something; say something” rule and take complaints seriously will have accessible avenues for reporting and concrete action steps for follow-through. These responses will provide maximum support for those bringing allegations, including closely guarded confidentiality and real protection against retaliation from the alleged abuser, the community, or church leadership. This not only creates an environment that equips victims and whistle-blowers to come forward but also signals would-be predators that this community is not an easy target.
In addition to these very basic steps, church communities must be attentive to the ways in which their theology and culture can lead to abuse or be manipulated by abusers. We hope the examples in this article provide a starting point for this examination.
For too long churches have operated as though abuse is an anomaly, meaning many leaders and lay people still lack even a basic comprehension of how abusers groom individuals, let alone how they groom communities. As a result of more survivors and whistleblowers speaking up publicly in recent decades, denominations large and small are reckoning with multiple disclosures of abuse and failed institutional responses. Still, community grooming is often overlooked as a vital piece of the abuse puzzle.
The tightly interwoven layers of community grooming described above mean that churches must investigate not only accusations of abuse, but their entire community structure and the misconceptions they are likely to hold about how abusers operate. When an abuser grooms a community they create an army of enablers, most of whom do not intend to enable abuse and are horrified to discover later that they have done so. The only way we can hope to build healthier church communities is through a clear, honest, and humble reckoning with the psychology of abusers and the dynamics of community grooming.
