Date: May 7, 2021
From: Joanna Rudenborg
To: Stewart Ruch
Cc: Cherin Marie, Eve Ahrens, [Redacted], Brenda Dumper, Anne Kessler, Eirik Olsen, Steve Williamson, Helen Keuning
Dear Stewart,
I was glad to receive your letter to the Diocese and to read that you sent it to leadership across the Diocese for distribution. This is a really positive step. The four of us read your letter thoroughly and acknowledged many things we deeply appreciated about it. We have a handful of factual corrections and comments to share in response to it, but I realize you are fielding quite a lot this week, so I’ll only share Sunday-announcement-relevant thoughts at the moment.
I don’t know what all you plan to announce on Sunday and realize you may only intend to encourage the congregation to read your letter. We are all hoping you will actually give a more detailed announcement, so I want to go ahead and list some specific things we hope to hear you speak to, mostly in no particular order:
First, a warning to the congregation upfront that you need to speak about something that is not appropriate for children to hear, and which may also be triggering to survivors of sexual trauma (so those who wish to can exit the sanctuary or turn off the livestream for a few minutes).
Cherin’s list of the positions Mark held at Rez. Obviously this is a provisional list that may not be entirely accurate or complete, but it serves as a starting point for people to examine connections and follow up with their children and others.
The fact that the current accusations of sexual misconduct against Mark involve 10 victims ranging in age from 9 to 41—but predominantly teenage girls and young adult women—and range in nature from grooming to indecent exposure to abuse to rape to child sexual assault. Specifically, Mark’s pending trial is for 9 counts of criminal sexual assault of a child (that’s the official verbiage of Kane County’s prosecution), and Kane County is currently investigating him on allegations of two incidences of rape (the police investigation of my case is ongoing). People do not respond the same way to abstract, vague references (“sexual misconduct” for instance) as they do to concrete details, so the wording here is really important. The congregation needs a clear picture of the scope and severity of what we are dealing with, obviously without compromising any victim's confidentiality, but using the ugly words that accurately represent what Mark did to his victims.
The fact that every single one of the current alleged victims was socially involved with Mark through their connections with either Rez or COLA—primarily Rez. For your reference: 9 of the 10 regularly attended one or the other or both of these churches at the time the incident(s) occurred. (I am the only exception, and I knew and generally trusted Mark due to my multiple decades-long relationships with some of his closest friends at COLA and Rez.) The social crossover between Rez and COLA can’t be overemphasized. I believe the entire membership of COLA used to attend Rez, and [Mark’s adult children] continued attending Rez after COLA formed (Mark himself did for a year or two, as well), which served as an ongoing conduit for Mark to access victims such as [redacted] and [redacted]. Regardless of technical Greenhouse / diocesan hierarchy, COLA was socially very much an appendage of Rez, with substantial fluidity of movement and interaction between the two, both of adults and children, all the way up until COLA’s indefinite suspension this past November.
An emphasis on the fact that no one at Rez / in the Diocese will know that those who reach out to GRS have done so, that GRS will not share their names or identifying information with the Diocese or anyone else because strict confidentiality is essential for both the independence of the investigation and the protection of victims and other innocent parties.
The exact dates of the time window for people to contact GRS.
An announcement that GRS will be compiling a final report detailing their discoveries concerning the nature, extent, and specifics of Mark’s abuse and the institutional failures that facilitated it (stressing that victim confidentiality will be carefully safeguarded in that report), and that the Diocese will make that full report (the identical one GRS provides the Diocese) publicly available online at the conclusion of the investigation.
I realize what I just proposed would be an unprecedented Rez Sunday morning announcement in every way, and that it would be incredibly uncomfortable for you to say some of these things, and for the congregation to hear them said. I realize that it involves sending children and others out of the sanctuary for an announcement, which only heightens this discomfort. I also believe everything on this list significantly contributes to the potential success of the investigation, and so needs to be said. I would just ask as you consider these proposals that you remember that the five or ten minutes of discomfort this involves for you and the adults who attend Rez is nothing compared to the discomfort of living every day as a sexual assault survivor. And I would ask you to consider how the congregation looks to you to model Jesus, and how Jesus never shied away from speaking the truth and defending and uplifting the least of these, very publicly, regardless if it caused discomfort, indignation, or even extreme anger in those listening.
Finally, I want to say that I hear the grief in the closing paragraphs of your letter to the Diocese, and I want to acknowledge again, as I did in January, how devastating it is for you, personally, to be in the position of overseeing this. You are in a truly impossible place, in this moment, including facing all sorts of inevitable interpersonal and institutional fallout. No matter what you do, there will be a considerable degree of backlash you can’t prevent or even prepare for. Perhaps you are already experiencing elements of this since your letter went out. I know from personal experience that it is not always much consolation in the moment to know that you have done the brave thing, so I can only say that I trust that every hard choice you make within this situation will eventually come back in exponential blessings in all the ways that matter most.
Thank you again for your continued work on this and for stating so clearly and publicly your dedication to supporting victims, discovering the truth, and taking accountability for making needed changes going forward.
Respectfully,
Joanna