(Interview) Shannan Martin has written about her once-beloved church that’s a block from her house in her books (Falling Free, The Ministry of Ordinary Places, and Start with Hello). St. Mark’s in Goshen, Indiana, is unique, she said. “It’s very small, the pastor is bi-vocational . . . we really don’t have paid staff, we don’t have a youth group.” It counts many formerly incarcerated people as members and prides itself on providing a ministry of second chances.

Last summer, the Martins learned that this grace-forward approach had been wrongly and dangerously applied in their church home.

A prominent leader at St. Mark’s had abused a 14-year-old in his former role as pastor of a Michigan church. A registered sex offender, he was now leading Sunday School classes where children and other vulnerable people were present. Then, the Martins learned that top church leaders knew, but had allowed the man to keep serving while not telling congregants of his criminal record.

Over several painful months, Shannan, her husband, and a small band of allies fought for transparency and accountability:

“I was just waiting for one person to say, ‘We messed up.” I believed that through rational logic, talking it through, and the power of the Holy Spirit among us, we could get to a place where people would say, ‘We made a mistake, and we’re sorry, and let’s fix it.’ That would have changed a lot.

Shannan agreed to speak with media about trying to make things right by working from within a church and denominational structure — as well as the decision to leave. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You wrote in March about your family’s decision to leave a church you had been part of for a long time. You mentioned July 5, 2023, as a significant date for you. What happened on that day?

July 5 will always carry weight in my body. It was a regular summer day, I was taking my kids to the pool, and as I pulled up I got a call from [my husband] Cory. He works as the full-time jail chaplain at our county jail and was having a conversation with an incarcerated man who was sharing serious concerns that a neighbor of his and his family’s was attempting to harm his girls. When this man said the name of this dangerous neighbor, it’s somebody who was a significant part of our church, somebody we knew, somebody we had concerns about already, and somebody who immersed themselves in all areas of leadership at our church.

Cory went back to his office and tapped around on the Internet and discovered that this man was a registered sex offender. We discovered that, previous to his attending our church, he had been a pastor at another church just across the state line and had abused a child in his congregation. He was arrested and charged and pled guilty and is now a registered sex offender. And we had no idea.

That was the first domino. The real trouble began when Cory called the pastor of our church [Tony Brinson], and on July 5, the pastor at that time said, “Oh, I already knew.” We thought this was going to be earth-shattering news. We were beginning to navigate the murkiness created by our church and our denomination that allowed this dangerous individual and others around him to be concealed in a church filled with vulnerable congregants. It was devastating.

On the same day, you’re facing the double whammy of the abuse, but also that church leaders knew of the abuse while concealing the truth. Talk a bit about those initial attempts to address this issue with church leaders.

July 5 got wilder and wilder as the day went on. We realized that the pastor of our church had told the main lay leader, and presumably their spouses both knew as well. We were just trying to figure out: Who knew? How long did they know?

Right from the start it was clear that the timeline they were giving us was muddy. They were saying they had just recently found out, but nevertheless they had known for several months. We were also active leaders; we live one block away, we have teenagers, including a teenage daughter who was around the age as this guy’s victim. There’s that fine line between, how do you go about addressing a situation like this? I understand that. But telling nobody — not notifying a congregation that is 80 percent formerly incarcerated people, vulnerable people — is just not the way.

We knew by the end of that day there was big trouble brewing. We knew this was going to be a fight, there was no sense of transparency happening. And we knew that we knew too much to not be engaged.

To say to “fight” for this community you love, it expresses a desire to stay and engage the system.

Not just a fight to bring some of this into the light, but it also became clear to us quickly that this was a fight to understand why there wasn’t more alarm. The tone was, “He made a mistake.” I kept saying, “This is not a sin, this is a crime. He didn’t make a mistake, he committed a crime.” And there was a deep unwillingness to engage this on that level.

Church leaders began looking at us and saying, “We thought the two of you understood second chances. We thought you believed in grace. You present yourself as being merciful people, and now we know the truth.” To try to tread water through all of this in saying: Everybody does deserve the grace of God and belonging in the kingdom of God. But grace does not equal access. These are two different concepts.

You elevated this crisis up through the UMC ranks. You wrote a letter to the UMC Indiana Conference’s presiding bishop, Julius C. Trimble, and other top leaders. What’s been the response? Your story reminds me that abuse isn’t an evangelical vs. mainline issue.

When we moved to this neighborhood 13 or 14 years ago, I had a sense that a mainline church would be different, that it was built to be different and to care differently. And to realize that it feels like they’re all following the same playbook. At every step, we tried to move this up the UMC ladder, and were met with not just resistance but full-out attack at every level, and it was disorienting.

Around a month later, we ended up reaching out to the district superintendent (DS) [Marti Lundy]. United Methodists are very into their procedure, and there’s this clear chain of command, so we did our best to fall in line. I remember knowing that the DS is a woman and again naively thinking, this will make a difference, she will understand, she will be concerned with us. That couldn’t have been further from the truth.

When she came to the church and met with us, it was an absolute disaster. At this point we had other people around us who were actively concerned and engaged. The DS gave us a sheet of paper, “rules of engagement”: you have to stop talking about this, this is in the past, you’re never allowed to bring it up again, you’re not allowed to email or make phone calls, you can only talk face to face about this. Reading between the lines, we felt they were trying to avoid a paper trail.

From there we sent it on to the bishop, the highest official within the Indiana UMC Conference, and received documentation from the bishop’s administrator saying that they had looked into it and had no concerns and please stop talking about this.

In fairness, I want to say that after Cory and I fought for the removal of this individual from our church, they did reluctantly say he could no longer attend. It was kind of phrased like, “he can no longer attend until we get this all sorted out.” But at the time it felt like a win; that was our gravest concern.

I remember saying, probably through some anger and some tears, “I have a teenage daughter who has felt uncomfortable around this person for years, and now we know, her body was protecting her. The unease she felt around this individual was well warranted.” Over and over they said they were interested in protecting his dignity and making sure he feels comfortable in the church. And meanwhile, I’m saying, my children and I are very uncomfortable. Not to mention the single moms who are sitting in this man’s Sunday School class believing he’s a spiritual leader to them.

A predator doesn’t just groom individuals. They target churches, they target vulnerable churches, and they groom everybody under that roof. We had evidence that was happening at the church.

When did you decide to leave, and how did you decide that?

After months of fighting, and by fighting I mean this felt like an embodied fight for what was right and what needed to happen, and fighting takes a toll. And realizing that nobody was going to swoop in and save the day for us. Once you realize help is not coming, we had to really make some hard decisions. For five months I allowed myself to believe there was hope, and at some point you just run out of hope.

The final straw was understanding that in the scope of that reality, that potentially other harm had already happened within our church or might in the future. Because there was such concealment. If something horrible hadn’t already happened, the gut feeling that there was more harm coming caused us to believe that if we were to stick around, we would be complicit. There was almost a sense of, “We gotta get out of here. This feels like a ticking time bomb.”

The other final straw was that Cory, two other allies, and I were all stripped from our long-held church leadership positions. It was our Lay Leaders, Staff Parish Relations Committee chair, and two Guiding Council members (all recognized positions by anyone in a UMC). We were removed because, “you don’t trust us.” That was a major red flag, and was also just shocking and upsetting. It felt at that point that they were trying to force us out. 

You’ve referred to a gut feeling, and mentioned your daughter had felt uncomfortable around this person. So, your embodied self is picking up on something that your rational mind can’t quite wrap itself around. This comes up so much in stories of abuse within institutions. Talk about the importance of paying attention to what our gut is saying in these situations.

My grief in all of this was, after two-plus years of experiencing my own gut sense that this person and others around him were not safe individuals, after two years of my kids saying, “he creeps me out, he seeks me out every Sunday, he gets too close, he’s too touchy-feely,” I have deep regret about this, I want to say this clearly: I was starting to say, “Oh kids, everybody’s a little different.” After two years I started to be acclimated. I started to teach my own kids not to trust their bodies and guts. That’s something I had to apologize to my kids for and say clearly, “Your body knows how to protect you a lot of the time.” Over time, what’s weird or “creepy” can start to feel normal. And that is a grooming process.

In a church context, we are conditioned to give people the benefit of the doubt. I just want us to be vigilant and trust our kids and honor what their bodies are telling them.

How has this traumatic experience shaped your posture toward the local church? At this point, do you feel like it will be a miracle to step foot inside another church any time soon?

Uh, yes. It feels like it would take a miracle. I’m also pretty stubbornly hopeful. So as much as I believe it would take a miracle, I still believe in miracles.

We desperately loved our church. I’ve written about it in every book I’ve published, I’ve said a lot of loving and beautiful words about it online. To be immersed in community with people who have struggled in ways I have not has been transformative. To be discipled by incarcerated people has been transformative. To be a part of the most diverse church in every sense of the word in the county. I mean, I just don’t know where you go. I have my broad spectrum worries about institutions for now, and hope that can heal. I need to see more examples of institutions that prioritize individuals, who believe survivors, who believe the people calling for transparency. I need to see more examples of that, because right now it’s hard for me to believe that the impulse to self-protect isn’t living large in every institution.

We’re still engaged in a Sunday morning Bible study with incarcerated people in our neighborhood. It’s one hour, we call ourselves the Holy Alliance, to borrow the language from Karen Gonzalez’s book The God Who Sees. We don’t see ourselves as a church, but we are for each other, people working our way closer to God and to the likeness of Jesus, and for now that’s enough.

I know there are readers who are facing a similar situation in their church, who want to engage the process to make things right. What would you say to people who are still engaged in trying to make things right in churches that they love?

It’s important and beautiful work. It comes from a place of real love.

We were seen as the disruptors — we were not the disrupters. We are not the problem here, but very quickly anyone making waves in that type of situation will be seen as the problem. It’s easy to write those people off, as trying to take down the church. There’s nothing I would have wanted less. It was only from a deep place of love for that church and for my faith and this neighborhood that provoked that response.

I would caution them to have a clear a idea of what their final straw is. There has to be an end date, when you accept that you have to go. There’s gotta be that clear line, to maintain your own physical, emotional and spiritual health.

Because as you said, you and your husband realized that you had a burden of knowledge; you knew too much to just stay and kind of hope that things will get better and that nothing bad will happen, because otherwise you are complicit.

For sure. For those five months we stayed in the fight, I was just waiting for one person to say, “we messed up.” I believed that through rational logic, talking it through, and the power of the Holy Spirit among us, we could get to a place where people would say, “We made a mistake, and we’re sorry, and let’s fix it.” That would have changed a lot.

The United Methodist Church has a rigorous and robust policy for having Safe Sanctuaries. The policy is thick, it’s detailed, and not at any point in time did anyone up the ladder say to our church, ‘here’s this policy that we wrote for these situations, put this into practice.’

If you go to the UMC website, I’m guessing they’re talking about their Safe Sanctuaries policy, and it probably is a pretty helpful policy, but only to the extent that you’re committed to using it. It’s wading through the ability of a faith institution to exemplify basic humility in saying they have messed up.

As a mom, I expect a lot more from my kids. To not be able to expect that from a group of adults in leadership, that’s the bare minimum of what we should be able to expect.

Editor’s note: Following the original publication of this interview, the Indiana United Methodist Conference responded in a statement on Facebook. It stated in part: 

“In the Spring of 2023, an individual self-reported his sex offender status related to a charge from another state in 2010, to the pastor. Upon this notification, a covenant of behavior was put into place. At no time was the individual entrusted with the care of children . . . We are grieved that the Martin family feels wounded by this situation and that they chose to leave the church. Our prayers continue to be with them.”

This article has been republished from The Beaty Beat.

Katelyn Beaty is author of Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church (2022) as well as editorial director of Brazos Press. An Ohio native, she lives in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more at KatelynBeaty.com.