#YWAMToo: My Sexual Abuse Story

I imagine you lying awake at night. Your wife breathing quietly next to you. Her rhythmic breaths a reminder of her goodness. Your children tucked away. Innocent. Unknowing.

I imagine your eyes peeled to the ceiling, searching the corners of your memory. Searching, searching, searching. Trying to find a way to justify what you’ve done. Trying to discover a memory that isn’t there that will absolve you of your crimes.

You know. You’ve always known. You betrayed your truest self when you touched me. You abandoned the core of who you are, who you always have been and always will be, the day you didn’t interrogate your own thoughts. When you saw me, a child, as your peer. I was never your peer.

I imagine you wrestling with your own conscience, who so badly wants to come clean. Thousands of miles and the borders of countless countries have separated us for decades but your betrayal has stayed alive in my body. I know that your Self, your true Self, wants to be free; to finally drag the truth up from the shadows so you can unburden. But the aftermath will feel worse than death. Living in the truth of what you have done will suck the very life from your marrow.

Trust me.

I know.

On a crisp December afternoon, I took to Twitter to name names. I had spent over a decade preparing for that afternoon. My process was thorough. It started long before I had a smart phone in my hand to stitch my own story into the millions of patches in the quilt of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movement started by a black woman and two queer women, respectively.

My story started on a therapist couch in 2005. I was describing the relationship I had with a man named Scott Frerking, a full-time missionary with a global evangelical missions organization called Youth With A Mission (YWAM). Scott and I met in 1990 when I was 12 years old when he was one of my spiritual leaders on a summer mission trip. I described our deep, abiding love for each other. I described that he was truly a bright spot in the darkness of my adolescent years. I described the years we spent joined at the hip. The dates we went on. The nicknames and private letters we wrote one another. He was a family friend, present at most family functions for most of my teenage years. I described that we had kissed and caressed and I was devastated on the night when I was 16 years old and he was 27, he rolled on top of me and made out with me for hours in my car. Starting the next day he promptly ignored me for months, acting as though he didn’t even know me. I described the way my heart and body felt confused and scared and the way Scott convinced me to keep it a secret and not tell anyone. Ever.

My therapist gently, quietly used the words “sexual abuse” and “grooming”. I argued. No! That is NOT what it was. Yes, I was a child and he was an adult but our relationship was very different because our souls were peers. That is what he told me and that is what I believed!

The unravelling was violent.

As a child of evangelicalism, raised by the Assemblies of God denomination and Youth With A Mission’s [YWAM] conservative purity culture, it was unthinkable for me to conceive that my spiritual authorities were anything but God’s voice and guidance in my life. Coming to terms with my sexual abuse was like visiting my childhood home only to find that it wasn’t ever occupied by me. All my memories were the same but they began to morph into what I didn’t have the strength or wherewithal to see before: the people I trusted to keep me safe not only fed me to the wolves; they WERE the wolves. And they ate me alive.

Since coming to terms with my grooming and sexual abuse at the hands of two men who were my YWAM leaders, Shaun O’Brien and Scott Frerking, I have decided that I will not allow their insidious, deceptive and abusive behavior to steal my life away. I knew that the road to recovery would be fraught with pain and anguish and it certainly has been. I have clocked countless hours with professional therapists, trusted friends, advisors and safe loved ones who have held me up when I felt torn asunder from facing the wounds they left on my soul. I have been an outspoken advocate for survivors of sexual and spiritual abuse knowing that as I offer a safe space for others to heal, I am also lending healing to myself.

When Tarana Burke’s #MeToo hashtag went viral I viraciously read every tweet for months. It felt overwhelmingly cathartic to partake in the pain of others. The brilliance of #MeToo is that Ms. Burke gave a microphone to survivors who needed to tell their stories as a part of the healing process. She had been working for years to shed light on the systemic violence against women that is pervasive in our wider culture. Her hashtag went viral not because it was a new trendy concept but because she built the foundation for women, especially women of color, who have historically been ignored and erased, to have a public platform to be heard and more importantly, to be believed.

Then in November of 2017 two queer women, Hannah Paasch and Emily Joy, took to the Twitter streets with #ChurchToo, an exposé of how conservative Christian churches are a hotbed of sexual violence against women and children. I couldn’t stay away from the thousands of stories of people who have been systematically pushed to the margins of religious culture, coming forward to tell their stories of predominantly male church leadership abusing the innocence and naivety of women and children in their care. This time, because of the religious nature of the stories, I was like a moth to a flame. My hot tears were another layer of healing. Each drop leaving my body with a tiny measure of pain exiting with them.

Never once, in all the months of reading other stories, all the tears I had spilled for myself and the countless other victims, had it even occurred to me to tell my own story publicly. I have learned that it is a very common coping mechanism for survivors of trauma to diminish the abuse they endured as a way to disassociate from the pain. Regardless of all the work I had done to heal the wounds inflicted on me by these men, it never occurred to me that I had the strength and deserved the dignity of telling my truth.

I spent several months preparing emotionally for going public. I knew that I wanted to expose the rampant sexual abuse and grooming that happens in Youth With A Mission culture. I knew that if I told my story, others would come forward. I also knew that would take an emotional toll on me. So I sought the support of my therapists, my incredible relationship and embodiment coach, Jamie Lee Finch, and my intimate loved ones to thoroughly process the possible ramifications of coming forward with what happened to me in YWAM. I knew my body would tell me when she was ready to step up to the mic. She did.

I created the #YWAMToo hashtag for me first. I needed to tell my story. But I knew in the quiet places of my heart that if I shared my story, others would come forward. And they did. They flooded the internet with their stories of abuse while they were a part of YWAM, one of the biggest modern missionary organizations in the world. So many of them came forward publicly, naming their abusers by name and the specific YWAM bases where the abuse occurred. Many of them landed in my DM’s, painstakingly telling me what happened to them at the hands of the very people they entrusted their vulnerable lives to.

Grooming. Manipulation. Brainwashing. Emotional and spiritual coercement. Rape. Molestation.

It has been intense. I knew it would be. I prepared myself and I have held every story with as much self presence as I have been able to muster. There have been many days where my DM’s have gone unread because my body needed a break from holding so many stories of abuse.

Since then, I have come to discover that my abuser, Scott Frerking, is now the lead pastor of a church called Hill Country Fellowship in Burnet, Texas . He and the church’s leadership board were made aware of my tweets within a week or two of me coming forward. The incredible thing about social media and the power of the #MeToo, #ChurchToo and now #YWAMToo movement is that there is an army of people who are now ready to believe women. So many wonderful strangers saw my story and did their own research and found Scott hiding in plain sight at his church in Texas.

I suppose looking back on it, I may have had a small part of me that expected him or his church to reach out to me. Perhaps his elder board, which is a group of men set up to hold the lead pastor accountable, would hear these allegations and reach out to me to hear more.

No one did.

I gave them time. Not one of them reached out to me. Instead, they took to the stage to tell their congregation that they didn’t believe me. They alleged that anyone can say anything on social media these days so they were going to believe their pastor and stand by him. A real “he said/she said” situation.

I was on a birthday trip in January when I was made aware that one of the founders of YWAM, Lynne Greene, wrote an article about me, without naming me, entitled “Trial By Social Media” claiming that it is basically a fashion trend for women to accuse men of sexual misconduct. He manipulated the scriptures Christians use as their moral guideposts to justify why it is more important to believe the men who perpetrate abuse than the women “gossiping” about them. In his article, Lynne Green said, “…Is it ever possible that the woman could have a different reason for holding a grudge against this man? Is there even a remote chance that he is innocent of the charges? What does sexual assault mean?” This is the kind of toxic perspective that is taught in evangelical purity culture and YWAM mass produces this teaching to implicity trust spiritual leadership (usually male) even if everything in you tells you something is wrong. Greene manipulates even futher by warning women that they should be careful to not falsely accuse men or the men may commit suicide, “Some men in these circumstances have committed suicide. Does he still deserve it?”

I am no stranger to churches and religious organizations covering up the sexual, financial and religious misconduct of their leaders. It hit my family personally when my parents-in-law covered up years of sexual assault and misconduct amongst their mega-church staff at Discovery Church in Orlando, Florida where they were pastors. I vehemently advocated for the truth to be told, reported to authorities and for the victims to be supported in their recovery process. The leaders of that church, which included my in-laws, found the truth to be unpalatable and instead opted to silence people by having them sign non-disclosure agreements, forbidding them to ever talk about what actually happened. The perpetrators were paid to be silent and the victims were lost to revisionist history. In the aftermath of that scandal, I lost one half of my family as a result. I have paid the ultimate price for the gross negligence that is prevalent in evangelical religious institutions. #ChurchToo isn’t just a bunch of people telling their stories. It is a real life of hellish betrayal that I have lived and paid for with a broken heart and lasting psychological, relational and mental health scars.

Put 10,000 hours into any one thing and you will become an expert, they say. I’m an authority on how evangelical religious institutions like Youth With A Mission truly build their empires on the literal lives of vulnerable people who they crush into supporting their prolifically abusive behavior.

Scott Frerking and the leadership of Hill Country Fellowship in Burnet, Texas didn’t know that when they thought I would go away, it was an impossibility. I have seen too much. I have endured the weight of grief and I have emerged from the dark grave. I have lived the life of healing and redemption that they preach is possible every weekend but they don’t see that in me doing so, I now have a deeply carved out space inside of me to stand with confidence and authority to shed light on their smallness. They thought that I was just another nameless woman who would go away if they banded together with their collective power.

They were wrong.

I wrote an official statement of the details of what happened in the nineties between Scott and I and emailed it to the elder board of Hill Country Fellowship. It was like re-opening a wound to write it all out in black and white. I sent the statement on a Sunday evening and on Monday morning, the head elder, Jim Costello, emailed me a few sentence reply that they had received my email and were taking the allegations seriously.

The next week, they stood on the stage with Scott and once again publicly announced that they believed him and were standing with their pastor. Not one elder has reached out to me to ask any questions. Scott took the stage and gave an impressively deceptive and minimized version of what happened all those years ago. He used scripture to talk about unity within their church and the need for the congregation to “cover him with grace and forgiveness”. He exploited the death of his son to stoke the pity of his congregation. His monologue ended with a standing ovation from his congregation, shouts of “We love you, Scott!” and the emotionally and spiritually manipulated congregation dramatically singing, “Let the King of my heart be the mountain where I run…”

They honored their pastor only moments after he admitted to kissing an underaged girl who was eleven years younger than him.

This scenario isn’t uncommon. Many high profile cases like the one from Highpoint Church in Memphis, Tennessee which involved the courageous survivor Jules Woodson writing the article, “I Was Assaulted, He Was Applauded” for the New York Times about how her abuser Andy Savage was literally applauded by his congregation when he “confessed” his “mistakes” from years earlier. This scenario happens over and over again. Evangelical culture systematically believes abusers over victims as a direct result of the toxic, patriarchal teachings of purity culture that bastardize isolated biblical texts to control and manipulate victims into submission and silence. Evangelical churches and missions organizations like YWAM are fertile soil for sexual abuse to flourish directly because of the patriarchal theology that teaches young girls to not trust their own bodies and intuition and implicitly trust their male leaders. They routinely get away with becoming their own judge and jury by handling and then acquitting perpetrators in-house instead of going through proper legal channels of mandatory reporting. Their toxic theology allows them to absolve themselves of guilt so that they can maintain their power over vulnerable people.

A few weeks ago, an attorney contacted me. Hill Country Fellowship has hired them to do a full, third-party investigation. I sat with the attorney for nearly 3 hours painstakingly telling her every detail of the way Scott groomed and sexually abused me when I was a child. It was difficult to verbalize all the nuances of my abuse. Each memory felt like a small cut from a thousand tiny pieces of glass.

What will it take for evangelicals to uproot the toxicity of their theological teachings that has created such an insidious environment for abuse to flourish? When will they see that they cannot simply just apply quick fixes to the festering infection their theology has created? Is it even possible for evangelicalism to separate their practices from their theology without the whole thing crumbling around them? Even the most seemingly progressive church spaces are ripe with confusing, conflicting and often expertly masked messages of misogyny, white supremacy and a blind allegiance to the men who lead the churches.

I write this piece as a way to contribute to the incredible work that Tarana Burke, Hannah Paasch, Emily Joy and the thousands and thousands of courageous women who have told their stories through #MeToo and #ChurchToo. I imagine a world where evangelical churches and missions organizations are exposed for the toxic culture they are. Our voices collectively rise above the nauseating din of throngs who don’t believe us. We are getting louder and those of us who have publicly told our stories are holding in our hearts those of you who have, for so many valid reasons, kept your stories hidden away quietly in your bodies. If you are a survivor of sexual abuse within evangelical culture please read these words and allow them to be a balm to your wounded heart: I believe you. I see you. You are not alone.