What Does It Mean to be Victim-Centric and Trauma Informed?

Let's listen to victims and put them, and the vunerable first.

The first red flag for us in our former church, Edgefield Church Nashville, was an inaccurate email disclosure that lionized a sex offender. Sometimes, our intuition reaches a conclusion before we can rationalize it: as we thought about why the email was so appalling, it struck us that,

• the offender’s shame was centered

• every effort was made to minimize the offender’s crimes and equate them with everyday sin

• victims were encouraged to “love on” the offender

• victims were told how they should respond

• victims were finally encouraged to go to the very same elders for comfort

The approach centered on the offender. Victims were sidelined: an afterthought.

Months later, after we had discovered additional convictions the elders hadn’t bothered to uncover, there was a members’ meeting where the same tactics were repeated:

• his extensive, documented contact with children was reduced to “more than zero.”

• the church declined to commission a third-party investigation for fear of legal liability due to defamation of the offender

• the offender was not declared to be deceitful, as evidence clearly showed

• for some reason, they felt the need to defend their decision to exclude the offender from church temporarily and even to defend their public announcement of this decision

• the entirety of the presentation focused on the offender and cover for the church’s lack of due care, except for one lonely slide about how the church would support victims. How empty the claim of “we will advocate for you” must appear to a victim who must then listen to a presentation in which the elders decline to investigate if there are victims of a convicted pedophile who spent years around children in the same very church - the gall of this is just unbelievable.

But the problems started much earlier - by this time, the elders had made the cost of being victim-centric much higher than their proud hearts could bear.

The Alignment of a Church’s Interests

I wish and long for churches that just do the right thing.

However, we must acknowledge a humble truth: we are all sinners, prone to act in our self-interests, especially without the correct accountability structures around us. As much as leaders of the American evangelical church are exalted and looked up to by many, this especially applies to them, as we have seen repeatedly (I could start citing examples, but even just the Dallas metro area gives us a constant supply).

When churches act to put the legal exposure of their entities, their reputations, and their pride at risk to promote the interests of a sex offender, they set themselves up to later align with the interests of that offender, should an allegation arise or deceit be shown.

Here are some examples of what that might look like:

• Edgefield Church praised an offender, calling him a “token of God’s grace” … “the kind of miracle that we long to see.” - it was later shown not to be accurate, and for the offender to be a liar (at least two elders have said to me they asked the offender directly, are there any other victims other than the one we know of, and he replied in the negative, according to both). Now, the elders look like fools if they follow the truth and declare him deceitful.

• Edgefield Church (under its former name, Edgefield Baptist Church) allowed the offender to be around children and to be employed illegally despite pastors allegedly knowing his status. This puts the church at legal risk of being sued by victims who later come forward. When deciding whether a third-party investigation should occur, the interests of the church and the offender are now aligned.

• The same situation plays out repeatedly - it’s far from one church. The Village Church Denton, but worse, it extends to the entire denomination (in this case, the SBC) and their response, as Christa Brown has worked so hard to document.

In the SBC’s “Caring Well” report on sexual abuse, published in 2019, they summarize this attitude in graphical form:

This leaves us to wonder: was the intent of this report to be circulated, read and absorbed by churches? Or, was it just to make the SBC look good? It’s evident that many of its churches continue to make the same mistakes post-2019. What more could they do to elevate this issue, at least to the importance of preventing female ministers, for which they remove churches from their congregation?

Victim-Centric

The response of nearly every church to the problem of sex offenders tends towards being primarily offender-centric:

• Putting the needs of an offender first (for instance, by listing them first in a policy document, as Edgefield Church did)

• Exercising cheap grace in forgiveness without demonstrated, long-term repentance

• Not doing a full and proper investigation into an offender’s history

• Allowing sex offenders free-reign around children

Being victim-centric is the opposite:

• Putting victims and the vulnerable first

• Acknowledging that offenders have placed themselves a much lower priority through their actions

• Correctly discerning that the Bible’s call to protect our little ones is predominant over allowing potentially dangerous offenders into our sanctuaries alongside victims and the vulnerable

• Making safety and protection the #1 priority

• Creating ministries for victims of sexual abuse, especially those who were abused in the context of churches. How many ministries does your local church conduct? Does your church do prison ministry? If so, why don’t they do ministry to a problem that the global Church has helped fester - sexual abuse in its buildings?

Trauma-Informed

To be trauma-informed means having listened to victims and to understand how they feel.

It means understanding what can be traumatic long after the abuse, including many aspects of how evangelical churches tend to treat sex offenders. It means never repeating mistakes that the church has made in the past, which might trigger traumatic memories for victims.

It means knowing why victims of child sexual abuse do not come forward until, on average, they are 52 years old.

It means acting in accordance with having listened to victims, knowing what to avoid saying and doing. As an example, an offender should not be allowed to give their own testimony to the church, as this is an opportunity to further distort the truth and wield power over victims.

It usually means consulting with victims and their advocates to gain this information. The consequences of being sexually abused are not things we can alone imagine if we are not ourselves victims. While we can take good guesses at what the many strifes of life might feel like without personally experiencing them, that is not the case here.

We must listen. And then we must act, informed by what victims say.

The Recidivism Rate

I’ll finish by pushing back on one thing Rob Showers, Edgefield’s lawyer, says:

Sex offenders that become Christians and are successfully assimilated into a church environment have a much lower chance of recidivism

Recidivism is an appalling metric to use for success when ministering to sex offenders. Primarily, it is offender-centric, not victim-oriented. It doesn’t speak to the experience of the vulnerable victims or the success of safeguarding. It specifically refers to the odds that a known offender re-offends and is also successfully prosecuted for that subsequent offense.

Is it the case that “successfully assimilated” offenders go on to commit fewer crimes? (note: fewer is not good enough - we need to protect all children in churches, not just most of them)

Or are we just describing a group of offenders who found such a ripe and easy hunting ground that they are able to live out their days, re-offending as they wish, never at any risk of being caught? Since the church leaders hold them up as trophies, if they do receive an allegation, they will partner with the offender to do everything they can to bury it, since a prosecution would also have severe consequences for the church.

Isn’t this potential risk to the church exactly why Edgefield Church will not do a third-party investigation into the offender who ran children’s plays and published photos and videos of children online, despite an elder saying, “There’s a high likelihood that he has victimized other children. That may have happened at Edgefield. We need to find that out“? And doesn’t the failure to do that investigation ensure this offender lowers the “recidivism rate” of offenders assimilated into churches - regardless of whether he re-offended?

In short, Goodhart’s law comes to mind:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

If the goal is solely to lower recidivism, I wholly believe the church can deliver, but we certainly won’t like the end result.

If you were abused at Edgefield Baptist Church, or Edgefield Church, or have information to share with me, please get in touch. The elders of this church have behaved in negligence of their responsibilities, yet claim to be Godly men, so I afford them no confidentiality. With anyone else, I guarantee privacy, confidentiality an your own interests put above all else.