Dear Reader,

In a previous post I briefly mentioned my childhood experiences within the church. In this post, I would like to dive a little deeper into that aspect of my childhood, with the specific goal of shedding light into the dark world of child abuse within the church and how it so often happens right under the noses of true Christ followers who are simply unaware of what this evil sometimes looks like.

For context, I was born into a family with a very long church history. My paternal ancestors were a part of a small group of men who began a particular denomination of the church back in Europe, and many of them spent their lives traveling across the world for their denomination. My family also had connections with Freemasonry in Europe and Canada and had involvement with those in high-up positions in freemasonry. My parents were products of their own terrible childhoods leading them to choose their own darkness as adults, which impacted my home growing up. In this post, however, I am focusing more on the church elements of my abuse, and will not be discussing my family.

For my first 9 years of life, I moved 9 different times. All of this moving meant that my early childhood was full of different church experiences. From the ages of 0-3 I attended a Christian Reformed Church and from about 3-9 I attended two different Lutheran Churches. Soon after I turned 9, my family moved into an old farmhouse out in the country in the Suburbs of Chicago. At this point, my family began attending a non-denominational Church where I would remain for the next 14 years of my life. 

My first memory of abuse that took place inside a church building was around age 3 or 4 at the Lutheran Church I attended at that time. The abuse also took place inside of homes, medical offices, clinics, farms, hotels, and temples. As far back as I remember, I was sometimes forced to participate in pornographic photoshoots involving both adults and other children. Around this time in my life, I remember there being somewhere between 2-5 different men who were present during my abuse throughout an average week, and I would then also see those same men at church on Sunday mornings. Two of the men were actually pastors. Those two pastors were both eventually arrested and charged with trading and producing child pornography. One of the men was even sentenced to 58 years in prison due to the extreme nature of his crimes.

When I was 6 years old, my family was part of a team of church planters who began another Lutheran Church in a neighboring city. Some of the men who were a part of this church plant had already been abusing me for as long as I could remember. At this new church, the abuse continued and became more and more severe the older I got.

As stated above, when I was 9 years old, my family moved one last time and began attending a nondenominational church where I would remain for the rest of my childhood. I quickly recognized that one of the pastors of this new church was familiar to me as someone who had already abused me on multiple occasions. At this point in my life, the abuse intensified drastically. This pastor quickly became a family friend, and worked hard to get close to me and gain my trust. Although he was abusing me, he manipulated me in such a way that made me believe he was also caring for me, protecting me, and showing love to me. I was easily deceived and taken advantage of. From my earliest memories I had never experienced anything different, and my pastor’s abuse somehow seemed “nicer” than what I had experienced from some of the others.

Like many other fundamentalist churches in the U.S. at the time, the church I grew up in followed the popular teachings of Bill Gothard, the disgraced founder of The Institute of Basic Life Principles and Advanced Training Institute whose headquarters were located near my hometown. These twisted teachings created the perfect environment for abuse to flourish. It was all about authority, legalism, and fear. The culture of the churches around me promoted an environment where asking questions was considered insubordination, talking about problems was gossip, and raising concerns was not believing the best. The subtle twisting of Scripture in these ways blinded those who could have helped me from being able to clearly see problems or speak into any suspicions they may have had. Years later, I found out that some who knew me as a child had noticed red flags, but, considering the church culture, didn’t think much of it at the time. There is so much I could say about the twisted teaching I was taught. For now, I want to focus more on what took place within the environment that this false teaching created. I plan to talk more about the culture itself in a future post.

From my earliest memory, the abuse I experienced was filled with religious twists, including rituals that I couldn’t even begin to put words to until recently. It took me 14 years of slowly telling my story, bit by bit, to be able to put words to more of what happened. Now, after talking to counselors and investigators who have experience with this specific type of abuse, I can more clearly make sense of what I witnessed and experienced. I am confident that the pastors and church leaders who were abusing me and other children were not true Christians. They were simply using “Christianity” as a cover to give them what they needed to carry out their twisted desires and provide esteem, reputation, power, resources, and access to buildings and vulnerable people. Their role within the church provided the perfect opportunity and cover for their much darker activities.

At this time, I do not plan to share the terrible details of my past experiences, but I will say that what my abusers were doing was intentionally designed to twist the Bible in every way possible. Scripture that God designed to bring comfort was often weaponized and distorted and used to cause me harm and distress. Jesus himself was portrayed by these men to be a terrible monster, creating fear in the hearts of those being abused and causing us to view Jesus not as the Good Shepherd that He is, but as another abuser. Rituals were intended to destroy everything God designed to be right and good and to spit in the face of the True Lord Jesus in every possible way.

As a child, it was confusing and upsetting for me to see pastors and well-respected congregants raising their hands in worship to God when only a few minutes prior, I had witnessed these same men performing blood rituals and child abuse in a back room of a church. I learned to never believe or trust adults, especially pastors. I remember cowering in the back of the church as my pastor publicly worshipped God and received honor and praise from everyone in the room while I struggled to even sit because my body was injured and in pain from what had been done to me.

When I was around 11 or 12, my pastor took on a new role in my life. He became one of my main handlers, trafficking me to others. He and those who were involved often used church events or youth activities as a cover for abuse. Instead of attending the events, I was taken elsewhere to be abused, sometimes for multiple days at a time. A common explanation for my absence afterwards was that I had gotten sick, which was also helpful in explaining why I seemed “off” afterwards. These abuse encounters sometimes involved kids from other churches, some who were familiar to me and some who were not. There was no accountability for these events, so it was easy for these evil men to use their authority to create situations that benefitted themselves.

During my adolescent years especially, I often felt that I was living life in another dimension from the “normal” people around me. There seemed to be no safe place for me to go. I felt isolated. I had been taught to be loyal to my family and my church, so I did my best to cover up everything shameful that was happening to me. I had been groomed to believe what was being done to me was not abuse because I had always been taught that this was the role that God had created me for. A passage in Scripture that was often used against me was Romans 9:21which says,“Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?” I was taught that I had been created for dishonorable use because that is what God wanted me to be, so I just needed to accept God’s plan for me and there was nothing I could do to change it. I felt angry at God for making me for shameful purposes, but I feared God too much to allow myself to question it. I feared the wrath that was to follow if I even dared to ask questions or fight against God’s plan for my life. Because of the programming, I believed that if I fought against God, I would go to hell, so I accepted my fate. I remember going to church and pretending everything was fine, doing my part to be who I needed to be, but inside, my heart was completely walled off.

As a young teenager, my pastor who had been abusing me lost interest in me because I had become too old. I felt his rejection deeply since I was still unable to understand how abusive he really was. Around the time he left my life, I stopped caring about anything. I spent nearly a year locked inside my bedroom, rarely leaving or eating anything and believing I didn’t deserve the comfort of food, so I ate only enough to survive. At this point, I told a peer about the abuse I had experienced. This well-meaning friend told an adult in my life what I had said. This ended up making my situation far worse, leading to horrific punishments for talking about the abuse. I still attended church throughout this awful year, but I was very awkward, quiet, and I had no real friends. I felt different from the others and kept to myself, trusting no one. After trying multiple times as a child to escape the abuse, I had lost hope in adults and did not believe they would help me if I told them the truth of what was happening. I had been taught that giving in to abuse was always less terrible than the consequences of trying to fight against it. And besides, this was the only life I knew.

Several years later when I was about 18 or 19, I found out from the News that my pastor who had trafficked me had been arrested for producing child pornography in another country. He had been arrested as soon as he re-entered the U.S. My church refused to acknowledge what had happened to the congregation and the church leaders never once questioned any of the children in the church who had grown up around this man. It was later discovered that the mission organization he was associated with was full of sexual predators. When that was revealed, the organization changed it’s name. Around the same time, my church changed its name as well.

When I learned what this man had done to so many other girls, my initial reaction was extreme anger, hurt, and – due to the programming – jealousy that I had not been the only one. Up until that point I had still believed I was special to that man. I thought I was the only one. It was a painful realization when I discovered that I had never been anything special, I was simply another body to be used and abused. This new perspective on what had happened to me left me depressed and hopeless.

Over my teenager years, one of my other abusers had risen up to become my main handler, but things had changed. The abuse was different now that I was older. For years, I had been conditioned for a particular role in the group so the expectations placed on me were higher. I was living two separate lives, trying to do what I needed to do to survive. It never occurred to me that there was a way to escape the life I was living, so I continued as well as I knew how despite the massive divide between my two worlds. From an outside perspective, I appeared to have a lot going for me. My family was very prominent in my community, my parents had money, and I worked hard to be viewed as the “good Christian girl” that I had been taught to portray. In reality, I was being sucked deeper and deeper into the lies and satanic mindset being fed to me. A lot happened in my life after that, but I’ll wait to share that in a future post.

In my early 20s, a different pastor in my church who was involved in business with my father embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from my family. The church knew about this and covered it up, turning the accusations against anyone who dared “gossip” about the sins of the leadership. In the end, this event is what God used to bring me out of this church to a new church where I began hearing the true Gospel and seeing it lived out by the leadership. This time when I began sharing my experiences, I was heard and believed. But I needed more help than this little church could offer me at the time, so I ended up moving to another state to receive intensive, Biblical discipleship, leading to my salvation. Despite the lies I was taught growing up, God ultimately revealed Himself to me through His Word, where I was able to get to know the True Lord Jesus. A passage that God used to open my eyes for the first time was John 10:10-15, which says,“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”

I know many of you may struggle to believe a story like mine because it seems hard to imagine something like this happening in our comfortable American churches. Please keep an open mind as you continue learning more about this topic. Many have similar stories to share, and it is important that we know what to look for in order to better protect the children and vulnerable people in our churches today. My desire in sharing my story is not to attack the church, but rather to support and protect the true Church of Christ by shining light on the reality that there may be wolves in our midst, and unless you’ve lived it, you may never see it. By sharing my story, I am hoping that some of you can look for and see clearly if there is any depravity in your own churches. I’m also hoping that sharing my story will help some of you to see and believe victims of abuse in the church, and by believing the truth, you can stand against the wolves. Thank you for taking the time to read my story. 

Sincerely,

~K