Thoughts on the Chi Alpha Sex Abuse Scandal

Part 3: An Intentional Wound

A couple weeks ago, I published a series examining a conflict between the apostles Peter and Paul, and what it teaches us about the public rebuke of Christian leaders. The study was inspired by my own pondering about how public rebuke might have prevented years of sexual abuse in certain Chi Alpha college campus ministries in Texas. Last week I started a new series with my thoughts on the Chi Alpha sex abuse scandal.¹ If you don’t know much about it, please refer to Part One and Part Two as a lead up to this post, as it doesn’t stand alone.

In the aftermath of the Chi Alpha sex abuse scandal becoming public, I’ve read student testimonials and news and feature articles. I’ve read the published letters that warned, five years earlier, our national leadership of a sexual predator working with Chi Alpha students. I’ve listened to the results of scholarly research that analyzed the power structures and language in our governing and policy documents that created ambiguity about who should intervene and how it should be done.

But, I have not heard lament from those in AG leadership.

I thought I might hear it in August of 2023, a few months after the scandal became public, when AG ministers from around the country and world gathered in Ohio for the Assemblies of God’s General Council, the largest gathering of AG ministers in the nation that occurs every two years. I was not in attendance that year, but around lunch time on the last day of business, a pastor friend texted me: “The rumor is that legal counsel is going to address the Chi Alpha situation at 12:30 today…if you can livestream.”

Chi Alpha falls under the division of the “U.S. Missions” department. A little after 12:30 p.m. local time, the then-U.S. Missions director (not legal counsel) came to the stage. I waited with bated breath for his comments, anticipating a word of acknowledgement, sorrow, or lament over what had come to light only a few months before.

However, the U.S. Missions director never mentioned Chi Alpha by name. His comments were generalized and only hinted at something “broken”:

Our future’s promising. We’ve worked through some difficult times, and we have really aligned ourselves with some areas that were broken. You’ve heard it said that the bird with the broken wing can never fly as high again? Well, I want you to know with man it’s impossible….but not with God, for with God all things are possible. I want to declare that God has given U.S. Missions wings that will take us higher than we have ever flown before. Amen.²

After expressing gratitude for the directors in U.S. Missions, he left the stage with applause. As he left, the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God offered, from his seat as chair in the middle of the stage, these comments:

We don’t always mix inspiration and business and business and inspiration. I want you to know that this fellowship has an incredible, incredible ministry that’s reconciling students to Christ, and it’s the ministry called Chi Alpha. And we’re grateful that God is raising up people who feel a call of God who will go on to perhaps the greatest mission field here in the United States, and that’s universities, campuses.

I get it. Along the spectrum in ministry lines there are times when there are hiccups, there are times when there are shortcomings, there are times when there are failures, but the failure of some individuals never trumps the strength and the purpose and the vitality of the particular ministry.³

Without naming the sex abuse, each set of comments tiptoed perhaps as close to the issue as legal counsel advised. I will try to be as generous as possible in my interpretation of these comments. I recognize that the men who spoke them were engaging in the courageous task required of pastors in difficult times: they were encouraging the flock—pointing them to the God through whom impossible things are made possible and celebrating the service of young people responding to the call of God.

And.

I have learned in recent years how important it is to be able to acknowledge two seemingly opposing truths without allowing either to cancel the other out. Let me demonstrate this here:

1. The men who made these comments are good, God-fearing, well-intentioned men. And, their comments did not satisfy the desire I and many others have for transparency, acknowledgement, accountability, truth, and lament.

2. I can be generous in my reception of their comments. And, I can say it is impossible to reconcile the word “hiccup” with a massive sexual abuse scandal.

3. I am encouraged by remembering the God who does the impossible. And, it is difficult to reconcile the triumphalist tone of “flying high” absent an acknowledgement of all that has brought us low, all that has broken our “wing.”

Without allowing space for both the triumph and the brokenness to breathe together, each set of comments nodded at the elephant in the room and minimized its enormity.

It was only as I drafted this post that I learned, from those who have been following this story closely, that an official statement of lament and acknowledgement was in fact published on the AG.org website in 2023. You can read it at the link and you can see that heartbreak takes up space in the language.

However, there is currently no direct link to the statement on the AG website (that I have found to date). The link shared in the paragraph above was given to me through an online forum. Multiple people who have followed the story closely even told me that no such statement ever existed. When I went to the AG website’s “Official Statements” page to look for it while writing this post, there was a page error and no content. Using the website search feature, I searched for “chi alpha,” “Savala,” and “statements.” Searching for “Savala” did result in a link to a statement in Spanish. However, when I clicked on the link, it took me to a dead page on the Spanish-translated site.

To this day—to my knowledge—there is no obvious and accessible public acknowledgement or lament about the harm that was done and the suffering that continues for many victims. To quote the movie Encanto, all of this gives “We Don’t Talk about Bruno.”

While Daniel Savala and some of the Chi Alpha ministers who engaged in sexually abusive behavior have been arrested, charged, and/or convicted, I still long to hear from our leaders who existed in the grey periphery of the scandal. I long to hear their lament and resolve to examine our practices of governance so abuse on this scale can never happen again.

As I said in Part 2, these Substack posts are not meant to demonize those leaders in the “grey zone,” nor are they meant to demonize Chi Alpha. Faithful ministers can be found in every division of the Assemblies of God; many are my personal friends.

And. We know that well-intentioned people can make harmful decisions when the political current of an organization encourages a particular kind of bureaucratic response to difficult situations. (In this case, as Ryan Beaty has explained,⁴ the national and local governance structures and lack of specificity in policies regarding accountability for Chi Alpha missionaries made oversight difficult to implement.)

And. It is my personal opinion that our ministerial culture often equates rebuke of our leaders and/or critique of our movement with disloyalty and dishonor. For the sake of the church and the gospel we preach, we need to redefine our ideas about loyalty and honor so that they are no longer contingent on office or rank and fully contingent on a love for accountability, justice, and truth (and, by the way, we can’t have unity if we don’t have truth). On the Chi Alpha and the Lion’s Den website, there is testimony from many students who learned from their Chi Alpha leaders what I can only call a twisted teaching about “spiritual authority,” which in application seems to have looked like a veneration of, a radical deference to, and a refusal to question their leaders. I fear a version of this exists in pockets of our broader fellowship. At the end of the day, blind deference and a refusal to critique our movement will result in a loss of credibility with a world we seek to win for Christ.

When I go back to the words of my dream, that “pruning will bear much fruit,” I remember that pruning is costly. Every year, I cringe as I cut back my rose bush, fearing it will not blossom as beautifully as it did the season before. Pruning costs us the potential fruit from the part of the vine that is cut off. The gardener must be willing to forgo that fruit for the sake of greater fruitfulness in the season to come.

Pruning is also an act of intentional vulnerability. It creates a wound that heals in the long-term, but bleeds in the short.

What does pruning look like for the Assemblies of God or any organization that must account for systemic failures that lead to the unintended enablement or hiddenness of widespread sexual abuse? And how can we be cleansed if we cannot admit to ourselves and the world that we’re in need of washing?

It’s important we recognize that one barrier to intentional vulnerability is our litigating culture. The church in the United States has, for better and worse, bowed to the advice of secularly trained legal counsel, which often stands in direct opposition to restorative practices such as corporate confession, corporate repentance, and corporate lament. In conversations about the Chi Alpha scandal, I have heard versions of the sentiment, “So-and-so would have done/said such-and-such but legal counsel advised against it” multiple times. We need to be honest about the fact that fear of litigation and financial loss seems to have impaired the corporate body’s ability to confess the truth, lament, heal, and restore credibility to our witness of the gospel we preach, as well as earn back the trust of college campuses, students, parents, and a world that is watching.

There are no easy answers here, I know. But these are questions worth asking. And these practices are worth questioning. So what, I’ve often wondered, if courageously lamenting the heinousness of the abuse and the failure of our systems makes us vulnerable to further financial loss? If we do truly serve the God of the impossible, wouldn’t we have to trust him with our bank accounts?

Friend, I know you may be thinking, “This is all so easy for her to say. She doesn’t have to make the hard decisions and steward the money that has been sacrificed so that the gospel can be preached through our ministers and ministries.” I agree with you. It is much easier for me to tap out these words in a Substack post than for any leader, aware of the true cost of confession and lament, to put our resources on the line.

And. I wonder what kind of gospel we are protecting if we are unable to demonstrate the humility that confession, repentance, and lament require. Every Sunday, Assemblies of God ministers around the world invite congregants and church visitors to altars where confession, lament, and surrender are met with strength, hope, and redemption. We, too, must be willing to go to the altar.

In closing, I would like to suggest a few altar-embracing courses of action that may still be attainable for us in this significant moment. There are surely others, and there are minds smarter than mine that will certainly have more and better things to say. Nevertheless I believe these ideas are worth considering (or at the very least improving upon):

First, let the members of the institution steady themselves to accept some degree of financial loss through pending lawsuits. Allow this loss to drive us to investigate every nook and cranny of policy that needs clarification and improvement.

Second, at some point, the truth of what has happened must be acknowledged broadly and widely—and not just by journalists outside of our movement. When lawsuits are settled and done, members of the institutions have a right to know how resources have been spent. Talk about what has been learned and regretted. Identify best practices moving forward.

Third, lament. Make clear and easily accessible statements of lament verbally and in writing.

Fourth, create a fund so that ongoing professional counseling is available to every victim of AG clergy sexual abuse or malpractice from now until Jesus comes back.

Fifth, invest in trainings across the country for district leaders, pastors, and board members to be able to recognize spiritual and emotional abuse and the warning signs of sexually abusive behavior.

Six, create policies that encourage and protect employees from punitive measures if they, in good faith, publicly “blow the whistle” on questionable activities outside their own departments or “zone” of ministry. Despite popular opinion, we have a very good biblical precedent for the public rebuke of Christian leaders.

At the end of the day, I long for us to embrace the vulnerability of pruning—to welcome its wound—so that we can prepare for a better harvest, a better future.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

1. You can find a repository of information, first-hand accounts, articles, and resources for victims of abuse at this site. Account creation is required.

2. Source: personal video made from livestream capture of GC 2023.

3. Source: personal video made from livestream capture of GC 2023.

4. Governance information begins at around 1:12:00 and goes til about 1:15:00.