Episode 7

Transcript

They’re afraid that if people know about what happened, it will negatively impact the work they are doing. Instead of processing that fear—it’s a very human and understandable reaction—and dealing with it appropriately, they give it free reign and lash out at survivors.

They can’t accept any responsibility or honestly engage with questions because they believe they’re being threatened. Survivors are the enemy, or at best, a distraction from their divine mission. They forget that survivors are the mission. The mission is to bring light to those living in darkness; only the truth can do that.

This is the Wall of Silence podcast, the ACNAtoo story. An account of church abuse and cover-up in the Anglican Church in North America. Of things done and left undone and why we should care about it. This is Episode Seven: Survivors are the Mission, with Kelley Goewey.

In this episode we will move away from the stories of a direct abuse survivor in the ACNA and instead turn to the account of a parishioner, Kelley Goewey, who once attended Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, cathedral of the Upper Midwest Diocese, lead by Bishop Stewart Ruch.

What would it have been like to be attending Resurrection as you began to hear about the abuse of Mark Rivera and how it was handled at the church plant Christ Our Light Anglican (or COLA), by the diocese, and how and when police and civic authorities were informed? 

Of course numerous people learned of the abuse, were satisfied by the response of church leadership, and then decided to stay at Resurrection. But not everyone did, and here Kelley offers us her story, how it is wrapped up in her own experience of being an abuse survivor, why she decided to leave Resurrection, and why she is now speaking out about how they handled what happened to Cherin’s daughter, Joanna, and others.

I do not know Kelley, though we have emailed back and forth a number of times, and so I wanted one of her friends, someone who knows her well, to offer an introduction for her. Here is Audrey Luhmann, a member of ACNAtoo who has appeared on previous episodes already.

Audrey:

Kelley Goewey has been an ACNA member since 2013. She and I met as nursery volunteers at Church of the Resurrection in 2019. We were both relative newcomers to Rez; we barely scratched the surface of our introductory conversations as we built block towers with our toddler charges between us. My husband and I left Rez in 2021, and I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to Kelley, but just six months later, we were reconnected by our mutual friend, Conor Hanson. To my surprise, Kelley had left too!

When I stepped out to advocate for Cherin’s daughter and for Joanna during the summer of 2021, I was sure that I would be joining many from my former church. I naively thought that the church leaders’ poor responses to disclosures of sexual abuse by a leader would be everyone’s priority. To my surprise, I quickly learned that this would be a lonely journey. What I didn’t know at the time was that Kelley was on that same lonely journey herself. She had experienced personally the mishandling by leadership of her own abuse allegations during her collegiate years, and her internal alarm bells went off as she watched the Rez leaders image manage and attempt to do damage control after Joanna and Cherin went public online with church leaders’ mishandling of sexual abuse reports. She knew their response was wrong, and she decided she could not continue attending Rez.

Upon reconnecting with Kelley, I found her finishing my sentences. She had read all of the survivors’ public stories. She was following the responses of leaders on both the diocesan and Provincial levels. She too could pinpoint inaccuracies in public messaging by leaders. She could name specifically what actions leaders were doing that were wrong. Kelley didn’t miss a thing, and she made predictions that now, in retrospect, were devastatingly spot-on. It demonstrated to me how well she knows the dynamics and patterns of power and organization mismanagement.

That’s the survivor-advocate side of Kelley, but there’s another important thing you should know. Kelley was diagnosed over a decade ago with Essential Thrombocythemia (or, ET), a rare form of cancer where the body’s bone marrow produces too many platelets. This means that Kelley suffers around-the-clock from debilitating migraines and body pain. Sadly, the ET has not responded to chemotherapy. In her case, it is terminal. Kelley has already defied doctors’ predictions for life expectancy, and since 2021, survivors and advocates in the ACNA have received Kelley’s support and encouragement. She has been a rock when few were to be found.

It’s a strange thing, people who seem best able to identify abuse and mishandling and respond well are almost always those who are themselves survivors. Kelley’s personal experience of suffering – both in her physical body and at the hands of poor leadership – gives her an abounding compassion and an astute awareness that many of us will never hold. Her wisdom is a gift to us. Kelley Goewey is a gift to us.

In an article that Kelley wrote for ACNAtoo, titled “Loving the abused with the love of Christ,” Kelley quoted 1 John 3:18. Dear Children, let us not love with word or tongue, but with actions and in truth. It would do us all well to listen to Kelley. She is both a compass and a lighthouse.

Kelley:

I was sitting in Rez’s sanctuary on May 9, 2021, when the abuse was first disclosed to the congregation. We were assured that everything was handled legally and appropriately, the police were called, the survivors were being cared for. I prayed that Bishop Ruch and any involved clergy would continue to do the right thing in a devastating situation. I prayed for the abuse survivors without knowing any of their names or stories.

I was sitting in Rez’s sanctuary on June 27, 2021, when Steven Williamson disclosed to the congregation that the abuse had actually taken place two years prior, and that none of the involved clergy had contacted the police to report the abuse. These monumental adjustments to the initial disclosure were presented casually. The impression was that the announcement wouldn’t even be necessary except for one tiny wrinkle: some survivors had gone public on Twitter to share their perspectives of the situation. Many people in the congregation laughed. “You can’t believe everything you read online,” was the clear implication.

I looked around the sanctuary and realized I couldn’t keep attending Rez, though it took me some time to fully admit it to myself. I am also an abuse survivor, and I recognized the signs of an organization trying to protect itself, rather than survivors. I felt very sure that no one could have possibly missed what had happened between the two announcements, and that I wouldn’t be the only one to leave.

After a lot of prayer and deliberation, I sent emails to Deacon Val MacIntyre, who I was seeing for pastoral care, and Kevin Sheehan, the children’s pastor. I explained that, due to my personal history of abuse that was perpetrated and badly mishandled by staff and faculty of the religious university I attended, I had to stop attending Rez during this crisis.

I believed it was a misstep. I believed they would course-correct. I didn’t know then about the uncounted hours Joanna and Cherin had already spent, educating and imploring Rez leaders to choose a better, safer way forward. I couldn’t bear to think that the leaders I trusted at Rez would betray the survivors in the same way my professor and deans betrayed me. I apologized to Kevin Sheehan for being unable to continue volunteering in the nursery. I tried to leave the door as open as possible, because I hoped Rez would make the necessary changes to protect congregants from predators. I naively imagined it would take a year at most.

Kevin Sheehan told me not to worry, to take care of my spiritual and mental well-being. He offered to have a clergy member reach out to me in a few months. I didn’t respond, because I couldn’t think of a way to say that was too frightening for me to contemplate at the moment, as I didn’t know which clergy were involved in mishandling Cherin and Joanna’s cases.

The flood of public departures that I expected didn’t materialize. The more I watched Rez’s posture and communications, and the more I read correspondence between Rez clergy and survivors, the more I realized that the narrative and impressions within the diocese were being carefully and intentionally managed.

Every announcement would have something slightly off that no one would bother to correct, so the overall picture was vague. For example, the first statement that all clergy had behaved appropriately when informed about the abuse of Cherin’s daughter was later adjusted to communicate that well, clergy actually hadn’t called the police, but only because Cherin had already. Later still, leaders acknowledged that clergy actually had broken mandatory reporting laws, but it wasn’t their fault because they were given bad advice by a lawyer. Another explanation was put forward stating that mandatory reporting didn’t actually apply, for a host of reasons that don’t hold up to even the briefest examination of Illinois’ mandatory reporting laws.  

Over time, with weeks in between statements, different messengers, and different modes of communication, the differences don’t seem that big of a deal, especially when emphasis is continually placed on the fact that the police were called, so what’s the big deal who did it or when it happened? An attendee might think, “didn’t they say they called the police?” but then remember that announcement was in an email weeks ago, it’s probably deleted by now, and why would the clergy lie? There’s an instinct to tell yourself you must be remembering wrong, especially when you want to believe what you’re hearing and you want to trust the people who are speaking. It’s hard to recognize how the differences add up over time. But consider the first statement compared to what actually transpired:

Abuse of a child was reported to diocesan clergy, who responded appropriately and informed the authorities,

Vs.

Abuse of a child was reported to diocesan clergy, who refused to do their legal duty as mandatory reporters, questioned the validity of the child’s report, encouraged the child’s parent that they didn’t need to go to the police, and canceled the baptism of the child’s sibling when the parent reported to the police anyway. Church leaders then hid the situation from the diocese for two years, withholding vital information about a predator in the community from parents with vulnerable children. 

That’s a world of difference. Precision about the details matters. But if church authorities had told the full truth from the time they were forced to be publicly transparent, they would have had less control over the perception of their response. Instead, they gave a more palatable version of events, then slowly adjusted details over time, trying to play catch up as Joanna and Cherin released correspondence contradicting the official story.

The constant pushback and haggling about the details could be communicated to make Cherin and Joanna’s stories seem inconsistent and blown out of proportion to anyone who is unfamiliar with abuse and the tactics used to cover it up. And I watched Rez take full advantage of that unfamiliarity to manage their public image. Every announcement seemed to say, “We’re correcting this detail because the survivors are complaining again, but does it really matter if Father Rand called the police or if Cherin did it? The police were called! It’s so unfortunate that survivors are complaining about these little things instead of trusting us and letting us focus on the important things!”

I watched the person who abused me incrementally shift their narrative from, “You don’t understand what happened and you’re overreacting, but I’m sorry you’re upset and hurt,” to “I never did any of it and you’re persecuting me,” over the course of three years’ worth of emails, hearsay, and meetings. I watched the deans of my university allow and even facilitate the shift. I sat across too many tables from authority figures who were legally and morally and spiritually accountable for my safety, and I heard them tell me I was attacking the mission of the school. That I was stirring up trouble, that I was bitter and vengeful. In truth, I was grieved and angry that I had been abused, and I was scared that it might happen again. Especially since I knew I wasn’t the first.

And now for three years I’ve been watching it happen again, at an intensity I couldn’t have imagined. I’ve met Joanna and Cherin and many of the advocates of ACNAtoo. I’ve listened to them share their stories and their deep desire for the ACNA to do better and be safe. I’ve heard so many of them say what I wish I could have articulated back when I was in college being interrogated by various deans: “I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

The last bit of hope I had for Rez leaders to change voluntarily died at their “family meeting” on November 10, 2022. They said they were back on track, they were going to set the record straight and answer questions and concerns about the bishop’s leave of absence connected to the abuse mishandling. I wanted to go. I did have questions and concerns. The abuse was the reason I wasn’t able to attend the church anymore. I wanted to be there to hear if it was safe again. I went with Audrey Luhmann; we first met at Rez and frequently served in the nursery together. And Father Matt Woodley and Meghan Robins stopped us at the sanctuary door, backed by police officers.

The next few minutes are flashes in my memory, because I froze. Thank God, Audrey did not. She showed the email invitation that Rez had sent to her, and she asked her questions right there in the narthex once it became clear we weren’t going to be permitted to enter. I remember the glares of people I attended church with for more than two years as they walked around us into the sanctuary. I remember staring at the shovel-shaped brooch someone standing nearby was wearing and feeling like I was being buried alive as my airways constricted, a sure sign of an impending panic attack. I remember the look on Matt Woodley’s face as he yelled at Audrey that he couldn’t believe she had “the gall” to come advocate for survivors. I remember Meghan saying, “You’re not part of the family anymore,” as Matt Woodley waved the police over to walk us out.

I’ve rewatched the video Audrey and I made that night, and I feel again how I felt while filming that night: nervous, keyed up, and helpless. I wasn’t pressured to do it; Audrey offered me multiple opportunities to back out, but I wanted to do it. That girl smiling awkwardly in the video was trying desperately to hold back a trauma response long enough to beg anyone with ears to hear to please intervene.

So now I don’t have any more hope Rez’s leaders will change voluntarily. They prefer to employ the threat of state violence rather than converse with their sisters in Christ. But I do have hope that as more people learn the truth, they will be able to get themselves and their families to safety. At the very least, I hope exposure and public disapproval may be the impetus for change.

And I have hope that ultimately, God’s will is going to be done. Every injustice done by men, perhaps especially those done in his name, will be righted. Every low place will be raised, every mountain leveled.

People who experience abuse in religious contexts are often told that their honesty will damage the work of the gospel in some nebulous, Damoclean way. Various Rez staff have either directly or obliquely accused Joanna and Cherin of “attacking” the church, and even of being “instruments of Satan.” 

There’s an intense fear that many leaders experience when they learn about sexual assault in their organization. They’re afraid that if people know about what happened, it will negatively impact the work they are doing. Instead of processing that fear--it’s a very human and understandable reaction--and dealing with it appropriately, they give it free reign and lash out at survivors.

They can’t accept any responsibility or honestly engage with questions because they believe they’re being threatened. Survivors are the enemy, or at best, a distraction from their divine mission.

They forget that survivors are the mission. The mission is to bring light to those living in darkness: only the truth can do that. The mission is to bind up the broken-hearted: the application there is self-explanatory. The mission is to bring comfort and beauty and joy and praise to replace the mourning and ashes and despair inflicted by the world.

And at my most Midwestern Sunday School alumna, I can only look at the past five years and wonder why none of the men standing as God’s priests looked at a child who was abused by their colleague and asked themselves, “what would Jesus do?”

Jesus wouldn’t ask a real estate lawyer for advice if he were earnestly seeking clarity about laws surrounding child sexual abuse. Jesus wouldn’t tell a mother to “reconcile” with a violent predator so that the church doesn’t lose face. Jesus didn’t call on Roman soldiers to prevent people from asking him questions. Jesus doesn’t look at Joanna and say that she doesn’t matter because she’s not a church member.

I keep hearing how complex the ACNA processes are. So complicated that they can’t fulfill promises to reimburse a family for counseling or hire a safe, impartial 3rd party investigative firm in the first place. So complicated that they can’t set a date for an ecclesiastical trial in nine months or be transparent about Bishop Ruch’s attempts to delay or derail the trial process, despite his public professions of gratitude and eagerness to comply. So complicated that they can’t inhibit Bishop Ruch, despite two separate presentments that have shown “there are reasonable grounds to put the accused to trial,” or even explain why they haven’t inhibited him.

After the professor who abused me was reported to university officials, I waited months without hearing anything but “it’s complicated” and “we’re working on it.” The day the dean received a letter from my parents, asking why the school still hadn’t taken action, she had her assistant walk around campus to find me and pull me out of class for a meeting. It’s as complicated as they want it to be. The process is as slow as their priorities make it.

It’s a heavy burden.

The solar system is complex: natural satellites revolving while they orbit the planets, planets revolving while they orbit the sun. The complexity of the movements of the planets and their moons is inexplicable without the burning mass of the sun at the center. The complexity of the laws and polity of the ACNA is worse than meaningless if it serves to inhibit, rather than facilitate, the Body’s call to be the hands and feet of Christ.

In every encounter of his life recorded in Scripture, Jesus affirms the dignity of those with whom he interacts. He listens to them, he tells the truth. He unapologetically clears God’s temple of those who misuse their power to exploit and abuse vulnerable people. He doesn’t pull punches to save face or protect the interests of established power. God has more for survivors, for anyone, than the leaders of the ACNA have shown they are inclined to offer. 

There is a reason I titled this episode “Survivors ARE the mission.” When I first heard Kelley utter that bold idea, I was taken aback. I have actually been saying something similar for the past few months. It was an idea that occurred to me as I released the first episodes of the Wall of Silence, and I then began saying it to a few people when describing my motivation for making the podcast. My phrase goes this way: “This podcast is a church planting initiative.”

It’s said somewhat satirically, but at the same time I’m completely serious.

Over the course of the decade and a half the Anglican Church in North America has been in existence it has had a few ambitious and highly motivated church planting initiatives, such as Anglican 1,000 and now one called Always Forward. For the most part, this is all wonderful. Though not directly involved in those initiatives, I was part of the same drive to see Anglican churches take root across the country, and helped to plant a church in Peoria, Illinois for over a decade, before it closed in 2021.

But with the number of abuse cases that have arisen in the ACNA, many have questioned the push to plant more and more churches, when it seems there is crucial work needing to be done in communities that are already established. Sure, go make disciples, increase the flock, but are those sheep safe or have we instead left God’s people vulnerable to the unrecognized wolves among us? Even more, what if in some instances, the shepherd of a newly appointed church community happens themselves to be one of these wolves?

What should ongoing clergy abuse scandals in our denomination affect the energy and time we pour into our well-meaning church planting initiatives?

So there I was on July 9, 2024, in a meeting with my bishop and 4 other priests, a meeting my bishop had called because, to the best of my knowledge it had been reported to him that on Twitter I was contemplating disobeying his command to pause this podcast and he desired to address it with me. And in this meeting, it was conveyed to me again and again that the podcast is not part of the mission of our diocese, that the cases of abuse were happening in other dioceses and that we should let them and those in provincial leadership handle them. Our job is to pray for them.

It was in these moments that I decided to try out the idea that had been bouncing around my head the last few months, and that so closely echoed Kelley’s own idea. 

I said something to the effect of: “This podcast is a church planting initiative.”

In response, I believe someone present retorted by saying: “But not for our diocese.”

And then I said, “Oh yeah, it is. If you could see it. It’s a way to bring restoration and healing to hurting people. Do you realize the ACNA is a Google search away from all of this mess? And it’s not just the Upper Midwest Diocese. My heart is to help restore what the ACNA could be. But if we don’t take responsibility for it, it’s going to be a bigger mess.”

As I look back on that meeting, I see my words could potentially be construed to care too deeply for the PR problem of the abuse cases at the expense of the actual people who have been harmed. Kelley’s words are a striking reminder that this is all about God’s people: precious sons and daughters created in God’s image. When there are those who are damaged among us, we stop and care for them and tend to them so they can heal. There would be no greater church planting initiative than for the people in our communities to see how we react when tragedy strikes. As followers of Jesus, there can be no greater witness to who we are as a people than how we treat the most vulnerable and wounded in our midst. And if we fail in this calling, the world continues to look on, and will respond accordingly. That is a PR nightmare no well-funded initiative can ever overcome. 

For some reason, Kelley’s story called to mind an old worship song, one of my favorites, “Your Name is Holy,” written by Brian Doerkson. The bridge of that song says: “In your name, there is mercy for sin, there is safety within. In your holy name. In your name, there is strength to remain, to stand in spite of pain. In your holy name.”

Over the years those words have come to mean a lot to me, especially to stand in spite of pain. Pain of rejection. Of losing someone, either through death or loss of relationship. The pain and loss of illness and how life will never be the same again. The pain of seeing your children suffer. The pain of betrayal and of realizing those you once trusted now see you as an enemy. All of our pain runs deep and wide.

But Kelley’s story has helped me to see these lyrics another way. We as church leaders and regular churchgoers, in God’s holy name, can stand even in the midst of the pain created when church abuse has been called out in our community. We can stand and together take on that pain with God’s help. We don’t have to kick out or demonize those calling for accountability—survivors ARE the mission. Church leader, churchgoer, is there strength to remain, to stand in spite of the pain all of this is causing. In God’s holy name, I believe we can.

In our next episode, we delve into the broader picture of how the Upper Midwest Diocese responded to Mark Rivera’s abuse by speaking with someone who brings a detailed, behind-the-scenes account of what happened. I hope you’ll join us.

If you believe in what the Wall of Silence podcast is trying to accomplish, please consider supporting us through our Patreon page at patreon.com/wallofsilencepodcast. Each month, there will be extra interviews and conversations released exclusively for Patreon members. Again, that is patreon.com/wallofsilencepodcast. I appreciate you helping to make this show a reality has me lift up the voices of church abuse victims. 

The Wall of Silence podcast is produced and edited by me, Chris Marchand. I also do the music and our artwork is by Alice Mitchlick. You can find her other work or commission a piece through her Instagram account, @mouthful.of.stars. Please rate and review the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast service you listen on. You can find a link to the transcript of this episode and through related links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening.