Episode Eight

Transcript

But I am here to tell you all that we had a part — those of us on the Bishop’s side or the ACNA’s side — we all had a part in creating ACNAtoo. This organization was born out of our well-meaning but entirely inadequate ability to care or to listen to these two survivors for over 6 months of them engaging directly and privately and repeatedly with us.

This is the Wall of Silence podcast, the ACNAtoo story, an account of church abuse and coverup in the Anglican Church in North America, of things done and left undone and why we should care about it.

This is Episode 8, Helen’s Story Part 1: Why I Resigned.

A disclaimer: this episode contains references to sexual abuse. And a second disclaimer: the views and accounts expressed in this podcast do not represent the Diocese of Quincy or the views of the Bishop of the Diocese of Quincy.

In this episode, we hear from Helen Keuning, who served on the Bishop’s Council of the Diocese of the Upper Midwest. After serving on the Council for a number of years, specifically working on Bp. Stewart Ruch’s crisis response team, she resigned in March of 2022. This team was formed to specifically address Cherin and Joanna’s concerns about the sexual abuse of Mark Rivera, a lay catechist or non-ordained pastor at Christ Our LIght Anglican, in Big Rock, IL. But also, more generally, how the diocese could help develop policies and procedures to safeguard against abuse in the future. In her own words, Helen details the story of what led to her resignation. 

To get caught up on Cherin and Joanna’s stories, I invite you to go back to our previous episodes. Up till now, our story has centered on the abuse survivors themselves, but along with our previous episode featuring the account of Kelley Goewey, our focus will now shift to detailing how church leadership responded to Mark Rivera’s abuse. Helen worked as a lay leader within her diocese and thus offers us an insider’s perspective of the processes they took and why she ultimately could no longer support how they treated survivors, how they spoke publicly about the abuse, and the directions they decided to take moving forward. Before we get to Helen’s story, let’s once again define a few terms to set the context:

You will hear the acronym UMD a number of times, which is the abbreviation of the Anglican Diocese of the Upper Midwest, sometimes referred to as the Upper Midwest Diocese. The Bishop’s Council that Helen served on is something of a Standing Committee for the diocese, consisting of both clergy and non-ordained members which meets to discuss and decide upon important matters in the diocese. This somewhat relates to another term, that of a Deanery, which consists of different geographical groupings of churches within a diocese where the clergy are meant to gather regularly for spiritual and relational support as well as for practical training and vision-casting. The deaneries of the UMD are relevant to Helen’s story, in that she is from Minnesota, while most of the UMD leadership are located in the Chicago area.

At certain points, you will hear the name Greenhouse and its leaders mentioned. This is a church-planting initiative separate from – but connected to – the UMD. It should be noted that the congregation Mark Rivera served at was a Greenhouse church plant.

Finally, you will hear the PRT mentioned, which is short for Provincial Response Team, the committee formed at the provincial level of the Anglican Church in North America to oversee the UMD’s handling of Rivera’s abuse. Make a note of both Greenhouse and the PRT as terms, as they will both be covered in future episodes.

As Helen begins her story, she goes into her background of serving her church and diocese.

My family began attending Upper Midwest Diocese Church of the Cross in Hopkins, MN back in 2008. I served on the vestry there from 2011 to 2017, and near the end of that term I was invited to join the Bishop’s Council of the Upper Midwest Diocese. In January of 2021, I was invited by Bp. Stewart Ruch to join his “crisis response team,” formed to respond to Cherin and Joanna’s concerns. I did not know Joanna or Cherin before that time.

This crisis response team met via Zoom with Joanna, Cherin, and two of their supporters on February 10, 2021. I remember this call vividly. Joanna, Cherin and their advocates shared about their frustrating and painful experiences with how the church handled their matters. Their underlying concern was that this type of response was completely normal and standard, but they had come to Bp. Stewart and to all of us in order to impact that response of the church. They wanted to make sure this never happened to another woman or another child in the UMD ever again. We said that this was exactly what we wanted as well.

This was to be, however, the only Zoom conversation that the two sides ever had together. We never reached out to them again to have such a face-to-face conversation. 

While the crisis response team worked to secure an investigation firm, Cherin and Joanna heard almost nothing from us. There was a lot of silence. That silence and lack of transparency into our behind-the-scenes processes began to taint any trust that they had in our response team.

During this time, I took a back seat to the process. I was in Minnesota, while everyone else on the response team was at Rez. I believed in their good intentions and believed they were working hard to do the right thing. I believed in the character and competence of every single member on our team, and I believed that a mutually-satisfying investigative firm would be hired.

Yet, the long silences bothered me. Why isn’t anybody reaching out to Joanna & Cherin more proactively? I thought. Some of the curt or brief email responses bothered me. Why couldn’t that have been said in a softer or more sympathetic manner?

The attitude on the crisis response team also began to slowly shift in opposition to and in frustration with Joanna and Cherin. We were all working so hard to do exactly what they asked us to do — find an independent investigative group. Why are they so unappreciative of our efforts? 

We had indeed asked them to be part of this process of selecting the independent investigation firm during our one and only Zoom call. We had indeed invited them to teach us and to advise us — not only with their personal experiences — but with their gobs of research. By the way, if you give Joanna credit for nothing else, I ask you to give her credit for this: she is painstaking about nailing down her facts, she is a thorough researcher, and she is an intrepid communicator.

But, then, despite our invitation to have their involvement, over the course of the next couple months, what we actually did was slam the door of involvement in their face. We decided that what we needed was a NEUTRAL investigator, someone with no preconceived notions of either side, right? 

So, of course, nobody could be chosen or involved with their “J-Team” — that’s the name that Bp. Stewart’s team, our crisis response team, had dubbed Joanna, Cherin and their two supporters — so nobody from their J-Team could be involved in the decision. And we were told that Bp. Stewart and his leadership team would also not be involved in this decision. So only the Director of Operations at Church of the Rez and UMD Chancellor Charlie Philbrick would interview the final few firms and make a final decision.

What I did not realize at the time, due to being under the impression that Chancellor Charlie Philbrick was brought into this matter sometime after the fact, was that he also was personally implicated in the original May 2019 abuse report mishandling.  He was far, far from being neutral or independent.

If you remember from previous episodes, Charlie Philbrick has served as the Chancellor, or lawyer, of the UMD and advised Rev. Rand York, rector of Christ Our Light Anglican, that he was not a mandated reporter in Rivera’s case because the abuse did not happen at a church event and that Rivera lacked any role involving oversight of the church. To quote from the Husch Blackwell report, “Along with this, based on an email update from Mark Rivera to his supporters, it was made known that Philbrick helped Rivera find a lawyer for his defense.”

The need to get the private investigation started and finished ASAP was also seen as a priority, but what I did not realize then, due to not being copied on all communications with Joanna and Cherin, is that these women did not care about the immediate hiring of a firm.  They wanted this to be done right — and that meant informing and protecting any survivors that remained at Rez and in the UMD. 

It is worth noting that in a February 2021 email, Joanna made it clear that she and Cherin would have to be incredibly careful about participating in a third-party investigation set up by the UMD, most likely not participating at all, as any details they shared and an investigation could jeopardize the then ongoing legal cases they had against Rivera in Kane County, IL.

In any case, our crisis response team decided to hire the investigative firm Grand River Solutions and we said, in effect, “Here . . . this is what we wanted, this is what you wanted and asked for.” And then we were surprised when they responded with hurt and anger and dismay.

My biggest regrets from this time are the following:

Why did we not invite a trauma-informed specialist or a victim-advocate to join our response team? 

Why were no outside experts on sexual abuse or the handling of sexual abuse allegations ever consulted before we decided on this process of picking an investigative firm? 

Why did we not have anyone from outside Rez — besides me — speak into this entire crisis? 

Why did we have nobody whatsoever present from outside the UMD?

These lacking elements are what led Joanna . . . and later Cherin . . . to go public on Twitter.

But I am here to tell you all that we had a part — those of us on the “Bishop’s side” or the “ACNA’s side” — we all had a part in creating ACNAtoo. This organization was born out of our well-meaning but entirely inadequate ability to care or to listen to these two survivors for over 6 months of them engaging directly and privately and repeatedly with us. For Cherin, it had been a matter of years.

They gave us time and permission to take their painful story and make a right response. Instead, we grew suspicious of them and their requests. We sidelined them from the process. We cannot point our index finger at ACNAtoo without pointing the other four digits squarely back at our own chests. This was “our bad” originally and nobody else’s. Not ACNAtoo’s. It points to a cultural and leadership problem.

Joanna’s going public on Twitter led to a deep fear and a wide set of behind-the-scenes responses. At that time, I felt a deep personal cognitive dissonance because I wasn’t entirely sure that “our” side was the “right” anymore. Not at all.

I wanted so, so desperately to step off the Bishop’s Council. But, I knew that I was the only one left with any of the backstory as to how we got here — with ACNAtoo blog posts popping up and an absent bishop. So, I stayed, and I would remain for another nine months until I knew that I could no longer continue to serve – and belong – in an unsafe system. I resigned from the Bishop’s Council on March 18, 2022 and shortly thereafter left my home church of 14 years.

Helen goes on to list four reasons as to why she resigned. 

The first was the public dishonesty that I had witnessed during my tenure that was crushing to my conscience. Important figures in the church were quick to tell falsehoods and half-truths, while survivors’ stories were treated without regard for their wellbeing and without safeguarding their very names and identities. For example, the public communications from both the UMD and the ACNA were that Bp. Stewart’s leave was completely voluntary, and they imply that it was self-initiated. Neither is true; I was in the meeting where Bp. Stewart’s leave was directed by Provincial representative Bp. Alan Hawkins. As a first-generation Chinese immigrant, I understand the desire to “save face.” But, I thought in July of 2021 — and still think today — that I was being asked to perpetuate a falsehood every single time I had to agree (or at least not openly disagree) with the statement that Bp. Stewart had chosen to step down from his position completely on his own volition.  

I also  heard the false claim given by diocesan leaders about who reported Cherin’s daughter’s abuse. Throughout 2021 I heard, “Hey, the Church reported the incident. Of course we reported the incident. We definitely reported the incident.” Who that somebody might be who actually did the reporting was never named, but it was always stated that it had been done, it was so. It was an indisputable fact accepted by everyone. And so I believed it as well.

There were 5 church leaders who were told about Cherin’s daughter’s original accusations of sexual abuse back on a May weekend in 2019: (1) Fr. Rand York; (2) William Beasley; (3) Chancellor Charlie Philbrick; (4) Sr. Warden Christopher Lapeyre; and (5) Bp. Stewart Ruch. None of these men ever stepped forward and claimed to have made an official report, and yet, we as the UMD – for most of two years – held forth that reporting “had been done.” The consistent narrative that I heard after Bp. Stewart stepped down continued to be:  “Why is he being punished on social media for Mark Rivera’s child molestation when the church reported these crimes?” The longer I stayed on the Bishop’s Council and the more I reflected on what I knew about the underlying facts, my new question became: If the church knew that no leader actually reported this incident, then why was the message that we had done the right thing — why was that message the one that was trumpeted loudly for most of 2021, two years after these events took place?

By neglecting to verify the truthfulness of its own belief in its own supposedly correctly-taken actions, the narrative that UMD and its leaders proactively reported the initial abuse of Cherin’s daughter is, and always has been, a lie. We need to own that.

Indeed, the UMD Bishop’s Council’s meeting minutes for Dec. 14, 2020 – when Bp. Stewart first made the Council members aware of abuse situation – reads, "The only point where there was a legal concern was questioning whether the diocesan clergy person involved in the situation reported the situation as soon as they should have. The local child and family services representative voiced this concern. We immediately retained legal counsel for that clergy person, were the situation to develop and exacerbate into something more.”

To be clear, no clergy or staff member from the Upper Midwest Diocese ever called DCFS or the police to make a report of lay catechist Mark Rivera’s sexual abuse of Cherin’s daughter. 

The second reason I resigned was because I watched Joanna & Cherin work so hard to be heard and heeded, and they were villainized for it. They had the gall to continue to challenge publicly the “powers that be” in our UMD and in our ACNA. They were blamed for simply wanting to ensure that a similar case of abuse does not happen again. The price they paid was steep.

During one of our very first introductory Bishop’s Council meetings, on August 10th, 2021, someone — I forget exactly who — brought up the topic of the new ACNAtoo blog and the posts on it.  Very rapidly, three or four other BC members jumped in.  Here was the gist of some of their statements:

You should fast and pray before you read ACNAtoo because it is definitely Satan’s work in our diocese . . .  You know, of course, that everyone who signed the ACNAtoo Statement is ultra-liberal and is out to promote female ordinations and/or out to destroy the traditional biblical views on marriage?  You know that the Evil One is out to destroy Bp. Stewart, and he is using Joanna/Cherin to do this work?

I knew that I had to jump in and say something — fast! I had met Joanna & Cherin over Zoom and even that was enough to show me that these women were not demonic in any way. They came to Rez – at great personal cost and vulnerability – to seek help from Bp. Stewart in finding and helping other survivors.  They were concerned that Mark Rivera may have groomed and abused other young girls and women during his 20+ years of lay ministry at Rez in the children’s ministry, youth ministry and in prayer ministry positions. They have since been proven right.

I tried telling the entire BC this: yes, I certainly believe there is great evil in the world, and I certainly agree that Satan is always at work to lie, steal, kill and destroy.  But, I entirely disagree that ACNAtoo or Joanna or Cherin are synonymous with “Satan” or somehow “his instruments.” They are a symptom of a great underlying illness in our UMD.  They are the pains that tell us that this body is in distress.  They have done us a great favor in not leaving quietly, but in speaking their story and asking us all to examine what has gone wrong in our churches that Mark Rivera’s ongoing abuses were allowed to happen for so many years.

The Bishop’s Council listened to me politely, but nobody else chimed in. 

The next day, Barbara Gauthier sent all of us an email with her views about ACNAtoo and a list of resources that she used, citing an Anglican Unscripted podcast that is factually incorrect on numerous core details of the story. “Bp. John is absolutely right,” she wrote, “that anyone reading this letter from the #ACNAtoo group to our Archbishop needs to get on their knees and pray hard before reading it. I think in addition that it would also be advisable to pray through Ephesians 6:10-19, as we are also engaged in spiritual warfare, as Paul says, in which our Enemy attacks by sowing fear, dissension and confusion among the faithful. The Lord has equipped us to be able to stand firm in faith.” 

Here is an excerpt from the referenced episode of Anglican Unscripted, found in Episode 674. 

If you want to divide and break down the Church, you're doing a wonderful job. If you're looking to heal a situation, this is not the way forward. Let the process work. If you find fault with the process, please send me an email where the process is wrong, or put it in the comments. Go to the comment section of Anglican Unscripted of this episode and tell me where the process is wrong, because the process was not followed and we have a tremendous mess in the ACNA. And here's how Satan works: I want to step back a couple months ago - what, was it January - that Bp. Ruch put together this wonderful statement on behalf of the College of Bishops on how we are going to deal with those who have same-sex attractions and what they want to identify themselves with, the hyphenation. And it was just an amazing document! Everybody praised it! It made the presses almost around the world! And Satan was like 'I can deflate this real quick because somebody wasn't following the process.' Boom!

Let's shoot the messenger... Let's shoot the messenger.

A statement that I have heard repeated often in many different settings by various leaders goes something like this: Trust the process. Once the independent investigation by Husch-Blackwell is completed, we will have all the information about what happened here and can know the truth.

I want to disabuse you of this notion. I went to Husch-Blackwell myself for three hours’ worth of Zoom interviews.  They guaranteed no anonymity to any of the people who came forward to speak to them. Under their contract with the ACNA — which not even the UMD’s Bishop’s Council ever saw, even though we were supposed to chip-in and pay for 50% of the costs of this investigation, with the ACNA paying the other 50% — the law firm of Husch Blackwell had to submit a report to the ACNA that would include the names of each victim that spoke to them.

I ask you — if you were a victim of sexual abuse in the UMD — would you go forward to tell your story to a law firm that stated that your full name would be given to the powers that be in the ACNA Province, and would you trust that there would be no personal repercussions to you from the same religious system in which you were originally abused?

After Bp. Stewart went on leave, the ACNA commissioned a special team, called the Provincial Response Team and mentioned in this episode’s introduction, to select a new firm to investigate what had taken place in the UMD. In January of 2022, they announced that they had chosen Husch Blackwell, a law firm, to do the investigation. You'll hear more about the issues and problems surrounding the Husch-Blackwell Report in future episodes.

Joanna and Cherin attempted to encourage the leadership to put safeguards for survivors wo spoke out in place, but they were ignored.

My third reason for leaving is somewhat related: I could not join a self-righteous mob who sought to condemn Joanna. In February of 2022, the Bishop’s Council was informed in a top-secret meeting that Bp. Stewart was attempting to come off of his leave of absence, making secret appeals to the Archbishop alongside an assisting attorney who was a part-time Rez staff member. This appeal was not granted, and though not unanimous, the Bishop’s Council voted for Stewart’s leave to continue. Then, just days later, a letter was emailed to the Bishop’s Council, the Archbishop, and the ACNA’s College of Bishops from a group of five victims of Mark Rivera, previously unknown to me, who would later post the letter on Twitter with the handle @BelieveUsToo. I wondered, how did the BelieveUsToo survivors decide to go forward with their appeal to have their bishop returned to them so quickly after Bp. Stewart’s bid to return was denied by both the ACNA and the Bishop’s Council? Could these BelieveUsToo survivors coming forward from Rez have been encouraged or even cultivated to provide both a shield behind which Bp. Stewart and the UMD could hide and a sword with which to attack Joanna and ACNAtoo?

As I would learn later, Joanna had openly and vulnerably disclosed to Bp. Stewart and other leaders and apologized for what she believed to be the worst and most damning details of her story, over a year before the BelieveUsToo letters were posted publicly.  No one from the UMD ever responded to these sections of Joanna’s email or engaged her in conversation about this. Yet, in many of the Zoom meetings, in-person conversations, emails, and texts regarding the BelieveUsToo letters, members on the Bishop’s Council and folks at Rez expressed elation and even glee.  Not everyone, of course, and to varying degrees and varying volumes, but there was a strong sentiment of: Hooray!  The tide is turning and our bishop will be coming back soon!  We are saved!  Alongside this was also an acute sense of condemnation: I cannot believe what Joanna did! Wait until her supporters find out! She’s going to get what she deserves! I can’t wait . . . She accused Bp. Stewart and, now, look at what is going to happen. We knew she was evil and this just proves it. I could only think to myself: So this is what we are going to rejoice over? The fact that a woman who was raped twice by a much-respected lay leader has now been “caught” in the former act of enabling that abuser after he began abusing a much younger woman? How did things get this ugly and messed up in the UMD?

Did we not realize that this younger woman and all the BelieveUsToo victims apparently never came forward to Rez about their sufferings at Mark Rivera’s hands until after Joanna made a disclosure to the church about her sexual assaults? Joanna and Cherin urged the church to openly confront Mark Rivera’s abuse and create a safe space for more survivors to come forward. When the church failed to do this, Joanna and Cherin spoke up publicly, which encouraged additional reported victims of Mark Rivera to come forward with their abuse for the first time. At least I hope it was the first time because if they had come forward with their accounts of abuse to the church before this and Mark Rivera had not been disciplined and the church had not notified anyone of it, that is an even bigger mistake.

I saw Joanna being labeled as “sinful,” and being rejected for being an “unbeliever” and not “a member of the church.” I saw Joanna being painted in broad strokes as “the devil’s instrument” against our absolutely good and totally right and justifiably enraged religious leaders. I saw her mocked and demonized. It didn’t matter anymore how we treated her. She was no longer someone who was made in the image of God, someone who Christ loved and died for. She was the “other,” the “enemy.” We could take as many shots at her as we wanted and we would be doing God and the Church a favor. I saw many, many lies about Joanna taking deep roots into people’s consciousness — people who had never met her, never listened to her, and never heard her tell her story.

I pictured Jesus bent down and writing in the sand, and I heard him say, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” I felt like I was standing with the Pharisees in this matter and not with Jesus.

In a recorded talk from 2022 entitled “The Power of Truth & Sincerity,” Wade Mullen, author, teacher, and advocate for abuse survivors unpacks the pattern and progression of how easily a community turns on the people who speak up about abuse.

When a person or institution takes a defensive posture in order to hide the truth, then those defenses — those denials —can be followed by an attack against the person who is seeking the truth. So this is the ‘A’ in DARVO. And think of how upside-down this is: the survivor, who takes the step to tell the truth, not out of vengeance, but out of a desire for justice, and safety — safety for themselves and for others — is subsequently seen as a threat to be attacked instead of a helpful voice to be cherished. The person speaking the truth ends up being condemned by the community. And these attacks can take a variety of forms. I went through a number of those attacks in my talk a couple years ago, and one of the points I made is that a survivor can tell their story with the hope of being met with light, but instead is met with darkness. And they then become a target of the same kind of dismantling tactics that the perpetrator used: attacking their sense of reality, eroding their identity, cutting them off from support. Only now, there’s a team of people, perhaps even a powerful institution, engaging those kinds of attacks. And then it follows that if the truthteller is seen as the one in the wrong, then the person or institution might begin to claim to be the victim. So they’ve reversed the roles of “victim” and “offender.” And this is incredibly effective, in part because in my experience — and I understand this is just my experience — but I’ve seen those in the wrong get to this point, and when they begin to describe what they want — what justice would look like for them — they’re not as interested in a discovery and an acknowledgement of the truth. They are interested in seeing the truth-tellers punished. And they promote their ‘victim’ role; they sell it in an effort to invite condemnation on truth-tellers. So they might even claim they are under attack from the Devil. Think of what that communicates to the survivor and the implications of that, and the kind of response that might invite from a community who now sees truth-tellers as agents of evil.

The fourth and final reason that I resigned was because I no longer trusted the leadership in the UMD or in the ACNA to follow in the footsteps of Christ. I no longer imagined that women have a true voice in our diocese. I no longer believed that I am — or that my daughters would be — believed by those who hold power here.  

Here is a section from my resignation letter to the BC, emailed out on March 18th and mailed by post to Bp. Stewart:

“Stewart Ruch and Greenhouse Missioner William Beasley are both like big, powerful semi-truck trailers being driven rapidly down the highway.

There’s nothing inherently “good” or “evil” about a large semi-truck. They are powerful vehicles. They carry much greater loads and are much more useful for interstate commerce than my battered blue minivan. They can do much good. And they can impact many people. And they are gifted to do much more than most leaders.

However, semi-trucks also have much more danger associated with them. Their speed and their load and their sheer force can cause great damage — particularly, if the driver is not regularly trained and specially licensed . . . or if the truck’s blind spots are not being pointed out by huge mirrors on either side. These trucks are also hard to stop.

Who among us haven’t been caught in the middle-lane of traffic between two huge semis and not felt some degree of fear and trembling lest we be crushed in between them?

Well, I would submit to you that the UMD has been. We have been crushed between two powerful semi-trucks in the form of Bp. Stewart Ruch and Missioner General William Beasley.” 

A priest wrote a letter in March 2022 that was forwarded to the Bishop’s Council that listed many specific dire concerns and hurtful situations. The man concluded with these words:

“Is it possible that in these situations, there was no shepherd who was willing or able to care for the sheep or overseer to hold the shepherds accountable? If that is the case, I would hope we would do whatever is necessary to protect the sheep in our care.”

I beg of you — all you church leaders who care for the lambs and the sheep in our congregations — please take these warnings seriously.

The crux of this problem — in my mind — is not whether Bp. Stewart or UMD met some legal obligation to report the child abuse that Cherin brought to the attention of Father Rand in May of 2019, but it is the following more complex and layered questions:

1. How have our systems and structures and the blindness or ignorance of our leaders allowed an alleged child molester to be among our children’s ministry, our youth groups, and our prayer teams for a couple decades?

2. How were over a dozen (adding up the survivors of ACNAtoo and the BelieveUsToo movement), how were over a dozen women and girls who Mark Rivera allegedly abused not able to come forward in the intervening years to report him to Rez or to someone else within our UMD? Or, if reports were made, why was this person not removed from lay ministry?

3. In light of the #MeToo movement and in light of the Catholic abuse scandals and in light of the stories about sexual abuse in nearly every sector of society — from churches to schools to gymnastics and sports . . . how is it that a diocese with so many churches and so many proactive leaders still willing to remain so ignorant of trauma-centered responses or be caught so unaware of these vital issues that impact many of their congregants? 

4. Why are we still thinking that the Upper Midwest Diocese and Bp. Stewart is in the position where we have to be proven to have done something wrong or illegal before we can be condemned by the world when, in fact, what the world is actually demanding is something different of us? They’re demanding, “Show us how and when and where you have actually done something right here. Show us that you have a heart for protecting the sheep and fighting for them, and not just defending the shepherds who have either abused or neglected their sheep.”

I know many ACNA leaders have been working diligently on your policies and procedures. But, making sure that the most vulnerable are protected will require you to prioritize this in how you spend your time, your money, your energies and your lives.  

You will need to make it a priority to not only put the necessary paperwork into binders, but to continue to make sure that you and all your lay leaders or volunteers learn about how to spot the wolves and how to protect the sheep.  

You will need to make it a priority to train your staff, your vestries, your prayer ministers and all your leaders — not just the ones who volunteer with children and with youth.  

You will need to make it a priority to have these conversations in the open within your church family and to listen to and learn from those in your midst who have personal experiences with abuse and trauma. I guarantee you, they are there.

You will need to make it a priority to believe and to care for anyone who comes forward.  

You will need to make it a priority to get outside, professional help and trauma-informed care for your church, for your leaders and for your flock.

You will need to make it a priority to provide real accountability for all deacons, priests and rectors — not trusting in their absolute goodness, infallibility or inability to sin. You will do this for their own good and for the good of all who are under their care. 

You will need to not turn away from those who suffer because of your own blindness, arrogance or apathy.

You will need to choose to love “the least of these” because you represent Jesus to them and to the watching world.  

We like to believe that “we” are on the side of all that is right and just and “they” (whoever they are) are on the side of evil and wrongdoing. It’s harder to look inside and find that the evil is inside of us, inside of me. And the name of that evil is neglect, apathy and turning away. The name of that evil is the opposite of love of neighbor. It is not actually “hate” of neighbor.  It is simply not choosing to love. 

It’s the story of us walking by the man who is lying bleeding on the side of the road to Jericho (see Luke 10:25-37) because it’s inconvenient, because I don’t know who did this to him, because I don’t have time right now, because I have more important ministry to do, and because this might cost me my job or my friendships or my reputation.  Why should we care for her? 

Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon on Apr. 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, titled, “I Have Been to the Mountaintop.” In it, he called his listeners to remember Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, and he asked them to consider why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. Were they too busy? Would helping the injured man make them unclean? What if we learned how to respond to abuse cases in our churches with the challenging questions King offers us here?

But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. And you know it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over at that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. It’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking and he was acting like he’d been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him? That’s the question before you tonight.”

We’ll leave Helen’s story there fore now, but she has already given us much to think about. What are the consequences of our actions? Of our inaction? In our desire to protect a beloved community, what if we end up hurting and ostracizing people God has called us to love and serve? And along with all of this, what are the limits of our willingness to work within church systems that do not listen to and care for abuse survivors? When do we have no choice but to walk away?

Helen concludes her story with what happened next and what she’s learned since then in the next episode, The Aftermath.

Full versions of Helen’s story can be found in five articles on ACNAtoo’s website. The material you hear in this episode and the next was condensed and adapted from what she first wrote there. You can find links to those articles and other articles and clips referenced in the show notes for this episode.

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.