I am now ready to tell my story of what's been happening...

( please note that if you figure out who or what I am exactly talking about DO NOT SHARE NAMES or labels because I don't want anything that can link us back to our original perpetrators. However if you are a victim of a situation either related to or similar to this, I have no problem privately emailing back and forth with specifics.)

It has taken me a very long time to have the courage to post this post but I hope that my willingness to do so will help victims out there that might be drawn to this website because of the situation I'm about to share. Long story short, almost 20 years ago there was a man who was pastor and he sadistically and sexually abused little children, more focused on boys. Not only was he allowed to stay in a position of leadership even after these children disclosed, but our church Association became privy to all this information, basically chose to sweep it under the rug for the sake of this man's "character," and even though he ended up leaving our association he maneuvered his way back into a church that wanted to rejoin our association. Our pastor is one of the men who voted to allow this man to come back into the association... He was mostly naive and knew minimal information (he knew there was an open police investigation regarding "sexual molestation" of a little boy, and that this man had a history of "spanking" children) but enough that we are working on getting to the point where we can confront him publicly in the church.  (If you are a Christian you will understand when I say there are steps to follow from Matthew 18. We are on Step 2 where other individuals are brought in to confront before you make it public before the congregation.) We've already come to the realization that we probably will not end up staying in our church but my husband and I decided we wanted to at least fight for the truth to be made known and do it in a way that the association cannot shut us down. That means we have to be very strategic and follow the technical Christian guidelines of how to disseminate information that's considered gossip or slander. We've already had one couple leave our church, we've had another family remove themselves at this time until the pastor confesses and repents hopefully, and our family and at least one other family are borderline leaving unless a miracle happens. This situation is very large scale and luckily this evil pastor ended up being arrested and charged for at least the physical abuse... It was a technical hung jury in regards to the sexual abuse ( only 2 out of 10 did not vote Yes)... but they are going to retry and add new counts of sexual molestation and abuse in a new trial coming up. The only reason this case even broke open is because one of his childhood victims finally grew up into an adult and came to a pastor who went to the police after hearing his disclosure! There's so much corruption in our church Association in regards to not following through on mandated reporting, allowing men who knew information about the situation to be in a place of power and protect this evil abuser, outright lies to the members of their churches to continue to make themselves look like they're doing what's right, Etc.

Things have gotten even more complicated lately because the pastor outright lied to me when I had documented something he had said that I could share with our congregation which was a 46 page document showing that one of the pastors, who somehow was able to stay in leadership at his church even though all his elders and most of his deacons quit and 50% of the congregation left, had been part of this Association cover up and had sinned. I directly asked our pastor if we could upload this document and share it with the church and his answer was "yes." Then, after we shared it with the church, he emailed us to "immediately" take it down and that he would send out a letter to explain why, quoting a "misunderstanding", with the congregation. We have confronted him via email in regards to him lying to us and making us look like we're trying to be deceitful and undermine his authority by sharing the document without his permission even though he supposedly is taking full responsibility for the misunderstanding... But we've already had people attack our character via email citing that we're trying to undermine the pastor which isn't true obviously. Anyways we're having to get pastors outside of our association involved to help confront our pastor because we don't trust anybody that's in pastoralship in our association! You might think we're crazy but we're trying to do is blow open the fact that these men are lying to their congregation by having it documented. In my pastor's email response to our accusations of him lying he use the word "misunderstanding" seven times and didn't even address the fact that he had said "yes" to a very specific question that gave us permission to do what we did! The good part is though that it's now documented... A few of the people who have either removed themselves or left our church, one of the reasons why they did is because the pastor would not return emails nor would he meet with a recorder or in front of other people so he was using these people's words and twisting them and they had no proof to show that. We are one of the few families that now has documented proof! We feel that our place and purpose and being in this church is to continue to try to expose the evil and ultimately help show people the reality of how sexual abuse corrupts and how important it is for people to believe when children just closed and not force them to be around their abusers just because they're in a roll of leadership!  Most of our congregation has been very appreciative of our insight... Some new parts of our story others are learning as we shared because of the situation. We've only had one members meeting in regards to the stuff and I are supposed to have another one sooner than later.

I know most of you are going to be like "well you should just leave and get out of there cuz those people are brainwashed" ... But we know that that what happened to us was for a reason and we're trying to use it for good. We know our children are safe and we love the people in our church and want to make sure that we've done everything possible to help them see the truth. Anyways, pray for us if you think about it. Some of you may even know the situation I'm talking about well like I said please don't name names. We're trying to remain anonymous because we are playing a very large part and how this all turns out. It's not just about us it's about an entire Association of hundreds of churches now!