This is not a cancer update

This is not a cancer update; I’m still waiting to hear from Mayo Clinic about the whole “maybe you have a second rare blood cancer or maybe you had two of them all along or maybe the first one is morphing into a different one!” situation. But sometimes I write about other things, like when I wrote about the abuse I experienced in college, or when I wrote about leaving my church. This is about both, so as always please feel free to not continue reading if that would be unhealthy for you.

I stopped attending Church of the Resurrection when I realized that the clergy were misleading the congregation about their involvement in addressing reports of child abuse within the diocese. At the first public announcement the congregation was assured that all involved leaders responded appropriately and the authorities had been notified. At the second public announcement, one of the priests said that actually none of them had reported the abuse because the church’s lawyer told them they weren’t legally required to do so, but it didn’t matter since a child’s parent had made a report. He also made a jokey comment about the credibility of Twitter at the expense of the survivors. And so I had to stop attending the church. I knew it wasn’t safe.

It was really tempting to shut my eyes and fully walk away, but I couldn’t. I still can’t. I have read the documentation of the church’s initial promises of good intentions and the all too swift decay of trust as promises were broken and boundaries were repeatedly crossed. The survivors’ testimonies and the timeline of the church’s failure to care for them have been made available online by ACNAtoo. I’ve watched several of the victims and their advocates fight battles they should never have had to fight. They’re still fighting, with deep integrity and a love for people who are hurting that encourages me every day. I’ve seen the leaders at Resurrection ask for advice from the survivors in writing and then ignore survivors’ concerns about the direction of the abuse response. I watched as, one by one, people in leadership who tried to stand up for the survivors felt pushed to resign their positions. I’ve seen a depth of dehumanization and pride and antagonism towards abuse survivors that is no less damaging for being familiar to me.

I spent two years attending Church of the Resurrection. I gave freely of my time. I  served weekly and sometimes twice a week in childcare. I tithed. I was a member. As far as I know, by the church’s own policy, I was still a member (they have a mandatory “exit meeting” which I was never offered). When the church made notice of their 11/10 meeting to address the abuse, the ongoing investigation, and the involved bishop’s return to leadership, I wanted to attend. I invested my heart, my time, and my talent at Resurrection for two years. I want the best for Resurrection’s congregation, whom I consider to be my brothers and sisters in Christ, and part of me hoped there would be answers and closure.

So I went. A friend and abuse advocate with whom I often served in the church’s nursery invited me to come with her, because I did not think I could muster the courage to attend alone. I approached the doors to the sanctuary, through which I have walked hundreds of times. And they had hired police officers to guard those doors. A pastor approached me, told me that she couldn’t remember my name, but she remembered my face, and I was not welcome. A priest joined her and they said we were not regular attendees. When my friend pointed out that she was sent an invitation by the church and has consistently attended via their livestreamed/recorded services, they said that didn’t count, which raises some questions for me as a disabled person. They both avoided the fact that the actions of the church leadership made us unable to safely attend the church, and that they were supposedly holding this meeting to communicate and rebuild trust. They told us that we weren’t safe, we were causing a disruption by seeking answers, and that we were “not part of the family.” And friends, this is the curse of my dratted PTSD features–right when I most wanted to be strong and unmoved–I had a flashback to my abuse in college, to being told that I was a threat and not worth protecting at the expense to the university’s reputation. And so I made a very weird chokey noise and my eyes filled with tears and I felt so, so stupid and ashamed for hoping that this would be different.

The clergy had the police officers come over to tell us to leave the property (you read that right, my frail, can’t-walk-without-a-cane self got asked to leave a church by police. I mean, the last time someone felt threatened by me it was because I was their opponent in a Tolkien trivia contest. Go figure). We left voluntarily and went to the sidewalk outside of the church. A former church vestry member followed us outside to intimidate us into leaving public property. We politely declined and filmed a short explanatory video outside of the church.

Dear friends, I’ve seen all of this before. I was sexually harassed and psychologically abused by my academic advisor when I was an undergraduate student at a Christian university, and every attempt I made to report it was met by victim blaming, spiritual abuse, and manipulation from the college deans and other faculty. I was told to let go of the past and forgive like Jesus would, to suck it up and apologize so I could graduate “on good terms,” and that my abuser just “loved me a lot” and I didn’t understand. That because no physical contact occurred, none of the abuse really mattered. Matthew 18 was thrown around a lot, because it’s very handy for leaders to use out of context as a stick to beat survivors with while feigning ignorance of the power dynamics involved in abuse.

I was called hysterical, the one with the problem, “too sexually modest,” (that one was a real trip to hear as a young woman raised in a conservative Christian church. Let me tell you, 19 year old Kelley didn’t even know that was a thing you could be, let alone be reprimanded for by a seventy-something university dean). The abuse was my fault because I attracted the professor’s attention, because I participated in class, because I wasn’t confident enough to convince my abuser that I meant no when I said no. Not one authority figure ever addressed the fact that the abuse happened because their employee saw a vulnerable young woman and made the ongoing decision to abuse her for the next four years. Not one authority figure ever acknowledged that the abuse continued because they had ignored many opportunities to intervene every time I or another student asked for help.

So I’m familiar with the tactics. Leaders at Church of the Resurrection have used every move from my university’s playbook, but turned up to eleven. The church’s leadership continue to spend a great deal of time pinning down whether or not they technically broke any state laws by choosing not to report the child abuse once they were made aware of it, seemingly oblivious to the fact that legally reporting child abuse is the bare minimum required in that situation. Why hasn’t the widespread failure of all these clergy and the overseeing bishop to address any of the clear warning signs of multiple alleged predators active in their diocese for years prompted any self-reflection that perhaps they are unfit for leadership? Why was the first impulse of everyone in power to scramble for a legal excuse to do nothing at all? This happened at my university as well–in fact, several authority figures repeatedly refused to see me and constantly rescheduled on me until my parents pointed out to them that even though we had no desire or intention to do so, I had grounds to pursue legal action against the university. Why is the fear of legal action more motivating to people in power than the horror of abuse in their communities, to the point of asking a mother to pursue “reconciliation” instead of justice for her child?

I’ve seen emails from Resurrection leaders expressing frustration with the lack of gratitude and the high standard of care expected by the abuse survivors. This is not unique to them. I also was expected to say thank you when university administrators handed me a band-aid to cover a bullet wound. I was chastised for daring to ask for more than a fake apology. In my last meeting with school officials, one of the deans told me that my abuser’s job was safe and that the university wouldn’t be contacting any of the other students who gave me permission to mention their names for further testimonies of harassment. Similarly, Resurrection received notice about multiple victims, who later reported that Resurrection staff never contacted them to follow up on the abuse allegations. At every turn the leaders have rejected expert advice about best practices in survivor care and have chosen instead to frame the survivors and advocates they don’t like as adversaries or even “tools of Satan” and “poisoned wells” while providing emotional and financial support to the abusers.

I’ve made a great deal of progress in healing–shout-out to my psychologist and the social workers and therapists who have helped me–in the near decade since I graduated, but the unfortunate truth about trauma is that it’s always there until the Lord returns and all the sad things come untrue. And even though I stopped attending the church as soon as I saw the danger, the actions of the clergy at Church of the Resurrection have brought back a great deal of trauma with which I have been struggling to cope for the last year and a half. Flashbacks and nightmares related to my time in college have resurfaced for the first time in years, which is a really awful part of what trauma does to your brain and your body. And I want to be completely explicit in saying this: learning that the abuse happened is not what triggered my trauma. I learned of the abuse and I was horrified and grieved. I prayed for the survivors. But my trauma was only triggered almost two months later (May 9th-June 27th 2021), when it became clear to me that the leaders at Church of the Resurrection were handling the abuse the same way my abuser’s accomplices did.  

And yet, even though I lived through four years of abuse exacerbated by university administrators’ commitment to dehumanizing me to minimize my abuse, in the eyes of Church of the Resurrection, my trauma precludes me from seeing their actions clearly. And this too is familiar to me. I’ve explained my diagnosis to doctors who have never heard of a myeloproliferative neoplasm in their entire career, only to have those same doctors tell me moments later that they know more than I do about the cancer ravaging my bone marrow and my blood. I’m the one who has had to read every research paper and medical study I could find, who has spent hours researching therapy options and drug interactions and co-morbidity prognoses. I’ve been deeply immersed in this knowledge because my survival has depended on it, whereas doctors outside of hematology/oncology may never encounter a single patient with a rare blood cancer.

Who is better able to speak knowledgeably on abuse? Is it the people who experienced the abuse? Or is it the authority figures who ignored or downplayed red flags for years, who did not know that clergy in Illinois are mandatory reporters or what that responsibility entailed and had to ask a lawyer to look it up? According to the church’s third-party investigative report, the lawyer spent “a matter of days” researching and still came up with the wrong answer, so I think I’ll listen to the abuse survivors, thank you. To demand that survivors educate you on best practice abuse response is negligent and reprehensible. To demand that education and then disregard all the information provided to you by those same survivors is to willfully harm people who are already suffering.

Church of the Resurrection’s current stance seems to be that if these pesky, unreasonable abuse survivors would just shut up and go away, they could continue on with their glorious ministry. And again, this is nothing new. For years I carried a burden of authority figures telling me that I wasn’t worth a dent in their religious institution’s reputation, that if I spoke up any louder about my abuse I was sinning, because telling the truth would hurt their ministry. But friends, a so-called ministry that depends upon complicity with abusers and the silence of the abused has no place in the kingdom of God.

And so…what? Why am I writing this? I am not a direct victim of the abusive dynamics of Church of the Resurrection and the ANCA’s Upper Midwest Diocese. But what I know from my own experience is that healing and change can come when people listen to survivors. The official policies failed me when I was a student. But a friend and my parents listened to me and they were able to make the university’s deans meet with me. The undergraduate faculty had to attend a mandatory sexual harassment course, and the campus was covered in flyers about what to do if a professor is abusing you. And when I wrote about my abuse a few years after graduation, another professor contacted me to tell me that my story helped them to know what to look for so they could help other students experiencing abuse.

So I write this in hope. I hope that these words might reach out to people who will read the survivors’ stories. God has so much more for His people than broken promises and half-truths. When leaders fail to appropriately address abuse and instead focus on disregarding and estranging survivors, they are propping up a system that will perpetuate abuse, continuing to be safe for predators and traumatic for survivors. I stood up to my abuser and the institution that protected them (ineffectually to be sure, I had no idea what I was doing), because I didn’t want anyone else to be abused like I was. And now I won’t look away from my sisters and brothers who were abused in the diocese I once considered my spiritual home.

And I write this because I know that you, my dear friends and family who have faithfully prayed for me and with me throughout my personal long defeat of cancer, will also join me in prayer that God will succor the survivors and shine the light of His truth and justice into every dark and hidden place.

Great is His faithfulness.

***I want to be very clear that I am not on ACNAtoo’s staff and this post is 100% my own.***