Amber’s Story
Who’s Who
“Amber” - a survivor who alleges a childhood sexually abusive encounter with an older boy at Church of the Resurrection, compounded by an unsafe youth group culture that emphasized female guilt and identified sexual abuse as consensual sexual sin.
Church of the Resurrection - a large ACNA parish located in Wheaton, IL that serves as the Cathedral Church for the Diocese of the Upper Midwest.
Keith Hartsell - youth pastor at Church of the Resurrection when “Amber” began attending Rez Youth, later a priest in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest & a high-ranking leader of The Greenhouse Movement.
I attended Church of the Resurrection starting from a very young age. When I was 8 years old, I had a terrifying sexually abusive experience where a boy from Church of the Resurrection, who was several years older than myself, cornered me and coercively pressured me to take off my clothing, assuring me, “It’s important to talk about grownup things.” This boy then trapped me under a blanket and tried to initiate kissing and sexual touching. Although I was able to narrowly escape this situation without being physically molested, I was deeply impacted by it and was left feeling deathly afraid of telling anyone about what had happened to me.
Years later, when I was finally old enough to begin attending the Church of the Resurrection youth group, I was overwhelmed by the sudden change in social behaviors between the Rez Kingdom Kids (the elementary program at the church) and the youth group. I was disturbed and confused by what was and was not considered appropriate by the Rez youth leaders. Children were encouraged to play games which I found inappropriate and which made me very uncomfortable. For one game, a youth group version of musical chairs, the objective was to find someone’s lap to sit on, which included adult youth group leaders’ laps. In another game, kids and youth leaders would lean in close to another person's face and say, “Baby, if you love me, please won’t you give me a smile?” in a flirtatious and suggestive manner, in order to try to elicit a reaction. These games were made significantly worse by the fact that the boy who had abused me was also attending the youth group (at the time Rez combined junior and senior high students, so he was attending as an older high school student when I began in junior high). I would often be forced into close proximity to him or be required to sit on his lap or interact in other uncomfortable ways with him, other boys, and male youth leaders.
In addition to inappropriate youth group games, rowdy boys were regularly allowed to run wild and do whatever they wanted, with little supervision or boundaries. Rez youth were often left unsupervised for hours at a time and were allowed to wander away from adults and spend time in secluded areas of the church Ministry Center. This created an especially vulnerable and frightening environment for me, as I would occasionally find myself suddenly alone with the older boy who had abused me, despite my best efforts to avoid him entirely. Many youth group games and activities regularly created situations where I was out of sight and earshot of any youth leaders; when this coincided with being near this abusive boy, it was terrifying for me.
Because of my discomfort around this boy, I sought to remain near the Rez youth leaders whenever I attended youth group. This apparently annoyed the youth leaders, as two of them separately pulled me aside to lecture me on being too clingy and needy. Both the youth pastor Keith Hartsell and a volunteer youth leader separately told me that the youth leaders sometimes needed a break from kids and that we were responsible for keeping ourselves busy during those times. On one occasion I attempted to talk to Keith about this boy, to request that I be moved to a different small group so I wouldn’t be near him so often. I started to say, “So, there’s this boy in my group…” but Keith cut me off, said he didn’t have time to talk to me, and abruptly turned and walked away. For the rest of that evening, Keith avoided me and would not even make eye contact, so I gave up on trying to advocate for myself. I did not try to talk to Keith again about the boy and never told anyone how unsafe I felt during youth group meetings.
My overall experience at youth group was of boys running wild and doing whatever they wanted. In my personal experience, the underlying theme within the Rez youth group was that men and boys were superior and girls were secondary, valued only for their future biblical role as helpmates and supporters of their husbands. Girls were expected to dress modestly and control their behavior, but boys were not held to the same standard. Often rowdy boys’ behavior was shrugged off as “boys being boys.” One time a girl’s purse was stolen by a group of youth group boys who threw it around, eventually breaking open a bottle of nail polish which spilled out onto the floor. The girl was reprimanded by the youth pastor, not only for bringing nail polish to church, but for leaving her belongings unattended. The boys who had stolen and broken this girl’s personal property were not corrected in any way.
Throughout my years at Church of the Resurrection, the overwhelming message I constantly received was that girls were responsible for the behavior of the boys around them. In the youth group I was specifically taught that boys were incapable of controlling themselves if any amount of temptation was presented to them, so it was up to us girls to ensure the boys around us did not fall into carnal sin. After hearing this message enough times, I began to believe it.
This narrative strengthened and took root deeply as I grew older. I naturally filtered my abusive childhood experience with the older boy from church through this distorted lens. I thought I must have done something provocative or been dressed inappropriately and therefore had somehow encouraged this boy to pursue me sexually. Once I accepted that any sexual encounter a woman might experience, be it consensual or not, was her fault, I then told myself that at 8 years of age, I clearly must have done something wrong or this horrible thing would never have happened to me.
When I eventually left the church as a young adult, I struggled for years with feelings of inadequacy as a Christian. I went on to experience various sexual assaults and abuses over the years and because I had firmly accepted the Rez purity culture narrative, I blamed myself fully for every abusive sexual experience. These painful incidents only further reinforced that I must be a bad Christian, and I lived in constant shame and self-hatred because I believed I had somehow invited or allowed these horrible things to happen to me. This caused me to continually struggle with my sense of self-worth and my own sexuality. No matter how good of a person I attempted to be, I seemed to keep finding myself in sexually abusive situations, and my thoughts always went back to Church of the Resurrection and how, based on everything I had learned during my years there, this must all be my fault. I felt like I was somehow disqualified as a Christian, and that I was not good enough to go back to Church of the Resurrection because of everything I had been through. I was never even taught about the concept of consent until after my teen years, so it took me a very long time before I could even begin processing these experiences as anything other than my fault.
In my early twenties, a member of Church of the Resurrection convinced me to return to the church after I confided in her about a particularly traumatic sexual assault. It was Holy Week at Rez, and this person urged me not only to attend all of the Holy Week services with her, but to also go to confession with a priest, as soon as possible. I was not entirely comfortable with the idea of making a confession to one of the Rez priests (all of whom I had known since I was a young child), but this person urged me that confession was an essential and necessary step towards returning to church and recommitting my life to God. I decided that it was finally time to speak out and ask for forgiveness from a church leader for essentially protecting numerous abusers over the years. Not only had I never spoken up about the older boy from church, but I had also covered for and stayed silent about other boys and men who had abused, violated, and assaulted me.
At confession, I was very scared and physically shaking when Fr. Stewart Ruch invited me into his office, closed the door, and sat down across from me. I began to fumble with my words, explaining that I had never attended confession before, and that there was something I needed to disclose about a sexual experience that had happened to me, but I did not know exactly how to say it. Before I could explain further, I was interrupted by Fr. Stewart. He said confidently that he knew what I needed to confess and explained that if I did not know what to say, he had a confessional prayer sheet that I should follow. Before I could even voice my objection, he had already placed a piece of paper into my hands and instructed me to read through the entire prayer, start to finish.
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.
This experience during confession only further reinforced my belief that I was responsible for every sexual assault I had experienced. It took me nearly 10 years to find the strength to file a police report against one of my abusers. After finally reporting my sexual assault, I confided in a member of the Church of the Resurrection whom I trusted and was friends with, and told them what I had done. I was told by this friend that the most important thing was that my assaulter and I were no longer in contact with one another, regardless of what had happened between us in the past. This friend then went on to advise me that filing a police report was most likely an overreaction, and if I was able to, I should withdraw my accusation because there are two sides to every story and a person’s sin, real or not, is between them and God alone. Given the strength and courage it took for me to finally report this to the police, I was heartbroken that this friend, whom I deeply trusted and looked up to as a spiritual mentor, thought I was out of line for reporting a sexual assault to the police.
I have chosen not to name this individual because I do not blame them personally for this harmful and misguided response. I believe I would have been told the same thing by almost any church leader at Rez, based on the entirety of my childhood and adolescent experiences of how female sexuality is taught about and understood by Church of the Resurrection. This unsolicited advice was nonetheless deeply hurtful, and after receiving it I left Church of the Resurrection and never returned.
My story could have taken a very different trajectory. What if I had been listened to and protected when I tried reaching out to my youth pastor about what the older boy in the youth group had done to me? What if the youth volunteers had been trained to discern that my “clinginess” was actually a major warning sign that things were not okay, and that I felt in danger? What if I had been taught by the church that I was NOT responsible for the purity of the males around me? I could have learned to say no and to value my own judgment and voice, rather than believe I was responsible for the childhood abuse I had experienced. There could have been real accountability and healing for both the older boy and me, had the church not created an environment that supported the damaging worldview that boys have no control over their actions and that girls are responsible for boys’ sexually acting out. When attending confession years later, what if the pastor had been patient and receptive enough to truly listen to what I was trying so hard and so bravely to share? I could have had the opportunity to hear the words I and others like me so desperately needed to hear: “It wasn’t your fault. You are not responsible. I’m sorry this happened to you.”