Dear Church: You Must Do Better for Our Children by Darcy Metcalfe

I was 19 years old when I first walked into Dr. Morven Baker’s office. My inability to consistently sleep or eat combined with my unabating nervousness and lack of concentration had driven me to the point of desperation. Dr. Baker is a therapist for women survivors of abuse and is contributing to this ecclesio.com series, also. I knew I was a survivor of some sort but had yet been unable to put intelligible words to what had happened to me.  Instead, the images, voices, smells and figures just sat inside of my mind and soul for years, spinning in circles.  It felt as though I was chained to an unspeakable monster which no one saw except me.  With Dr. Baker’s help, I began my journey out of the wreckage of my abuse. It has taken many years to find healing, and in many ways, I feel this will always be an unfinished journey.

I am a survivor of sexual abuse in the church. This is the first time I’ve written that in publishable print.  I was a small child when it began. And yet, to this day I can remember and tangibly sense parts of all that happened as if it were yesterday. Survivors are not able to erase the abuse from our minds, or erase the path of destruction that resulted in our lives. However, it seems that the universal church can have an incredibly short-term memory when it comes to facing its actions and complicity related to the abuse of children. Recently, I was disheartened by Pope Francis’ inferred dismissiveness concerning the allegations against the third top Vatican official, Cardinal George Pell, when he noted that the allegations were “decades old”. Unlike the church, survivors are unable to forget no matter how many decades pass. Pell has now taken leave from the Vatican to face the allegations in Australia.

Although the Catholic Church has garnered the most attention for abuse allegations and convictions, this is not a problem of only the Catholic Church. Child abuse is a problem in every church denomination. My abuse happened in a very conservative, Protestant evangelical church.  The church is often viewed as a place of automatic trust and safety; this naïveté by the church and its members is what leads predators to find churches particularly attractive places to prey.

I am deeply discouraged about how the church has historically responded to abuse suffered by the children in its care. Often, it seems that the church has scrambled to cover its assets, instead of tending in any meaningful way to its victims. One example of this is the Child Victims Act.  For eleven years now, this piece of legislation has been circling the floor and repeatedly killed by the New York State Senate. This legislation seeks to change the statute of limitations for child abuse in the state of New York. Under current legislation, victims have until the age of 23 to come forward and file claims. However, this legislation would give child victims until the age of 28 to file criminal claims, and 50 to file civil claims. It also offers a one-year window to revive old cases and treats public and private institutions equally under the law. All of this means that thousands of church abuse cases could be revived that had previously passed the statute of limitations, and the church would no longer have special protections as a religious institution.  This summer, Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan killed this bill again, demonstrating once more how millions of dollars in lobbying can guarantee the repeated failure of a bill. The Catholic Conference, headed by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, led the pack in spending over two-million dollars in lobbying against this legislation, presumptively because it could potentially bankrupt the diocese. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, even made a public statement saying that this legislation is a “vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activist out to rape the Catholic Church.” I found his use of language particularly heartless. After reading multiple news accounts of how this legislation continues to be defeated, I was left wondering if the church has simply forgotten to read the Gospel it proclaims. Has the church read about the life of Jesus and his imperatives to love, show mercy, and seek justice? If so, there is no evidence of it here. Has Cardinal Dolan read about the lives of the prophets and their multiple commands to protect the vulnerable, or about Jesus’ special favor towards children, the dangers of the love of money, or about imperative virtues such as humility, compassion, and the honoring all people? The Jesus of the Gospels told us to love one another not to protect our material wealth at the expense of innocent children. Given the church’s benevolent and lofty doctrinal understandings of what it is called to be in the world, the question remains, “Why has the church so often been more inclined to desperately clutch onto and protect its money rather than use it to help heal the people it has hurt so badly?” It is long past time for this part of the church –  the part of the institution which thrives on insatiable greed and the corruption of striving to maintain power – to die. This part of the institution must cease, even if this means every cobbled stone of the Vatican being dismantled or its billions of dollars of art and real estate auctioned off. Comedian Samantha Bee responded to this story about the Child Victims Act by observing, “If you’re an institution who has hurt so many children that paying out civil settlements would make you go bankrupt, maybe you should.” Maybe losing all our material wealth is what must happen to bring the church back to what our faith calls us to be in the world; to bring us back to our first century homeless, possessionless, Jewish teacher who showed us what it truly means to love.

When I joined the Presbyterian Church (USA) and later became an ordained minister in this denomination in 2012, I did this with the promise to myself that I would never stay in a church institution that refused to take the safety of children seriously. Letty Russell once wrote in Church in the Round that she had always found it so difficult to walk away from the church but also found it difficult to walk with it. I, too, cannot find it within myself to completely walk away from the church, although I have often tried. I also refuse to walk with a church that will not take the safety of children, youth, and vulnerable adults seriously. In recent years the PC(USA) has taken major strides in creating policies, materials, and resources to equip the church to better live into Christ’s command to love and care for those in our charge. However, there is also still much to do. The PC(USA) has created these policies and resources in the wake of being forced to face multiple cases of abuse within the denomination.  (Rev. Kris Schondelmeyer will share his personal story as a survivor of abuse in the PC(USA) in this ecclesio.com series). One example of the PC(USA)’s recent steps toward creating safe spaces is the Presbyterian Mission website on “Creating Safe Ministries” which supplies churches and individuals with multiple resources and tools to aid in shaping safe and nurturing churches.  Presbyterian minister and author Carol Howard Merritt also just released her book Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God after Experiencing a Hurtful Church. This book addresses how survivors can begin to heal from the abuse, and also what the church’s role must be in this healing if it truly wishes to reconcile and regain any trust from a rightfully untrusting society.

My final bit of insight concerning child abuse in the church is that theology matters deeply. What are we teaching in our churches that would give license for such things to happen? In the church in which I was abused, the theology that was taught set the stage for the horrors that happened there. This theology placed women as second-class citizens. Women were only created to be “helpmates,” and are never intended to be truly autonomous people. This theology also taught that children should be seen and not heard and should comply with every whim of adults. We believed that God is a wrathful God who tortured and killed his own son so that I (the child) could be saved from my awful self. All these pieces of theology add up to a perfect destructive storm. It is a storm which paves the way for a male predator to abuse a child – particularly a female child – with some theological reassurance that women and children are of little worth anyway. The child who is abused, who already fears a God that would torture and kill His own son, is also taught never to speak because she has nothing of value to say. She is trained to believe she must comply with whatever is forced upon her by adults, because this is the sanctioned hierarchy. I cannot emphasize enough that THEOLOGY MATTERS. And when we use our sacred text to judge, condemn, demean, degrade, ostracize, exclude, or wield power over anyone, then we are getting it all wrong as Christians. That’s just not Jesus. Many years have passed now since I was that terrified 5-year-old girl in the church basement, but I still feel her terror and hear her voice within me. And I will always wonder if the theology had been vastly different in that church, if I would have had to suffer as I did.   

Darcy Metcalfe is an ordained minister in the PC(USA) currently serving in Coggon, Iowa. She is also pursuing her PhD at the University of Iowa, studying ethics and bioethics in the Religious Studies Department.  She served 6 years on the Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns in the PC(USA), and is passionate about a broad spectrum of advocacy work.  The joy of her life is her son Coltrane.