II. The Missions 

In 2009, as invitations from church groups were multiplying, GRACE was tapped for a new kind of work. A Florida-based group, New Tribes Mission, was in trouble, as now-adult children of its missionaries were speaking out publicly about sex abuse at a New Tribes boarding school years earlier. Another phone call to Tchividjian, from out of the blue, led him from preaching prevention to once again investigating perps.

With more than 3,000 missionaries across 20 countries, New Tribes members have been described as the “Indiana Joneses of the missionary world.” Founded by a Los Angeles missionary in 1942, New Tribes sends its staff to remote locales, from rural West Africa to the Arctic, to evangelize communities that don’t have translations of the Bible.

Children of the missionaries are known in Christian shorthand as “MKs,” for missionary kids. About five years ago, a group of MKs whose parents were stationed in Senegal during the 1980s and 1990s started exchanging stories about the abuse they say they’d suffered. New Tribes had some 20 or 30 couples spread across Senegal, embedded with villagers they were trying to convert. New Tribes culture (though not formal policy) dictated that children, when they reached six or seven, were sent to a central mission boarding school so their parents could focus on evangelizing.

In Senegal, the school was in the city of Fanda. The children lived there under the supervision of untrained and usually reluctant New Tribes “dorm parents”—some of them missionaries who’d failed in the field—and saw their biological parents infrequently until graduation. The dorm parents and the missionaries were themselves overseen by field leaders, whose power and control, GRACE would later write in its investigative report, “paralleled that of a pastoral staff, a congregational board of Elders, a set of church Deacons, an employer, a local civil government, and a family chieftain, all in one.” Former staff members are more blunt. They describe field leaders as despotic.

The dorm parents—whom the MKs were taught to call aunts and uncles, and to see as representatives of God—were permitted to spank the children, and MKs describe spankings that were more like beatings, leaving children with welts after minor infractions like failing to sleep at naptime. Some say they were subjected to cruel and bizarre punishments like being forced to eat their own vomit. “The culture at school was one of fear,” says Bonnie Cheshire, a 34-year-old MK who was sent to Fanda at age 7.

In the mid-1980s, one of the dorm fathers, David Brooks, who oversaw the “Little Dorm” for the youngest children, allegedly began sexually abusing girls, including Cheshire. The missionary kids say he would come to their beds at night under the guise of comforting them and touch them inappropriately. They say he taught them to masturbate and he encouraged the girls to take pictures of one another in the shower and to play games that involved finding objects hidden in his or other girls’ bathing suits. Another dorm father allegedly punished girls by holding them down and kissing them. One allegedly groped a missionary kid’s breasts. The wife of a New Tribes missionary allegedly had sex with a male MK. In all, seven staff members at Fanda were accused of sexual abuse.

MKs’ letters home were censored, but when some of the girls told their parents what was occurring, and when parents told New Tribes field directors, they were told that they were gossiping and that their “slander” would “destroy another man’s ministry.” The kids say they were told that their complaints would condemn Africans to hell, because their parents would no longer be there to save souls. The parents of the MK who alleged statutory rape were sent back to New Tribes’ “boot camp” and eventually expelled from the field.

In 1988, Brooks left Senegal for a medical furlough. In late 1989, while he was on leave in the United States, additional allegations of abuse emerged from Fanda. Brooks made a partial confession to New Tribes administrators and was asked to resign the following spring. But New Tribes never notified U.S. or Senegalese authorities, and he was never prosecuted.

New Tribes’ Senegal mission exemplifies what Tchividjian and GRACE call “spiritual abuse”—wielding religious authority to persuade the victims that they were responsible for what happened to them. They say such abuse is often the by-product of “legalism,” a catchall term for rigid, rule-oriented Christianity wherein the state of your soul is reflected by the length of your skirt or how you discipline your children. “Legalism” is often used by moderate Christians to decry the petty obsessions of fundamentalists. But the term also reflects a seminal theological debate within Protestantism, which was originally grounded in the conviction that Christians are saved “by grace alone”—that is, by their profession of faith and not by their actions. Abuse victims often describe the communities they came from as legalistic: isolated and authoritarian bodies that placed obedience and rules above all else, where no one was allowed to make small mistakes and where crimes had to be covered up to protect the cause of Christ.

New Tribes’ school in Fanda closed in 1997, officially because of security concerns as civil war raged within the country but unofficially because so many missionaries withdrew their children from the school that there were no longer enough students to maintain it. That same year, New Tribes conducted an ill-conceived internal investigation into the abuse claims. Mission officials sat in on missionary kids’ interviews, and in the end, all but one of the abuse victims declined to testify. Consequently, New Tribes identified just two perpetrators and cast the abuse that occurred at Fanda as an exception. New Tribes continued to operate schools in other countries it was evangelizing.

In 2008, Kari Mikitson, another Fanda MK who claims to have been abused, contacted New Tribes looking for answers: What had the mission known about the alleged abuses while they were being perpetrated, and what actions had it taken to ensure it would not happen again in other New Tribes schools? The mission board and lawyers met with Mikitson and Cheshire to offer an apology and ask for forgiveness. That wasn’t enough. Mikitson and other MKs founded a website, fandaeagles.com, to publicize the alleged abuse. The site has had 3.6 million views and shows up on Google searches right below the New Tribes Mission website. New Tribes subsequently conducted a second cursory review of the Fanda allegations. When the MKs kept up the pressure, the mission agreed to hire a neutral party to investigate.

The missionary kids were initially skeptical of yet another group promising a “Godly response,” as GRACE did. “This was the same terminology used against us by New Tribes to justify both the abuses and the cover-ups,” Mikitson says. “In evangelical-speak, ‘Godly response’ to abuse means using any means necessary to protect the institution’s bottom line, while piously pretending their real concern is protecting the name of Jesus.” But GRACE offered to fly Mikitson to Florida to observe one of its church trainings. She went prepared to “cross GRACE off the list” but instead heard such a staunch defense of victims’ rights that she became convinced that the group was right for the job.

GRACE took New Tribes’s commission with two conditions: that the investigation would be independent and that its final report would be provided to MKs and their families, with New Tribes only learning the results after GRACE’s investigators completed their confidential interviews.

Courtesy of Bonnie Cheshire

Bonnie Cheshire, right, outside the Fanda school

Their report wouldn’t lead to criminal charges, because the alleged abuses had taken place so long ago and outside the United States. Instead, GRACE aimed for another sort of reckoning. Tchividjian shies away from comparisons to truth and reconciliation commissions like South Africa’s, because of how the word “reconciliation” is often used in a Christian context: as an end point to be reached as expeditiously as possible, as code for cheap grace. True reconciliation, Tchividjian maintains, is the prerogative of the harmed; beyond that, it’s up to God. Instead, GRACE aimed for radical truth-telling. Its report would give New Tribes a factual accounting of how it failed the MKs so that it might confess, repent, and change its practices. “From day one,” Tchividjian says, “we thought the objective should be to demonstrate authentic repentance, to know where you’ve failed and to be transparent about it.”

GRACE board members, including theologians and pastors, volunteered to serve on the investigative team along with former prosecutors Tchividjian and Victor Vieth and psychologist Diane Langberg. They expected the process to take a few weeks. Instead, it lasted more than a year, culminating in a 66-page report. The abuse turned out to be far more widespread and severe than anything even a former prosecutor could have imagined. “We lost a little bit of our soul on that investigation,” Tchividjian says.

The investigators began by sending a confidential questionnaire to all the Fanda students from the 1980s and 1990s whom they could find. Fifty-six of 108 MKs responded (compared to a 3 percent rate when New Tribes tried), and GRACE’s team interviewed 21 in person or by phone, taking written statements from a dozen more. They also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of mission records and interviewed nearly 40 New Tribes staff who had been associated with the Fanda school.

Released in August 2010, the report identified more than 20 victims of alleged sexual abuse and documented dozens more physical and emotional abuse allegations. The victims of spiritual abuse at Fanda, GRACE concluded, “may well include almost the total school population.” In addition, missionary kids from other New Tribes boarding schools around the world had gotten in touch with GRACE, with some reports going back to the 1950s, and it recommended that New Tribes investigate those claims as thoroughly as those from Fanda. “We have seen what the devil does with silence and inaction,” the investigators concluded, “and we reject it as the sin that it is.”

The report offered a checklist of ways that New Tribes could demonstrate repentance: Establish a $1 million fund for victims’ and their families’ care; terminate 14 former dorm parents and supervisors; notify the abusers’ current churches; cooperate with future lawsuits; and, for those Fanda and New Tribes leaders who had ignored the abuse, require a penalty tithe of 10 percent of their paychecks for the victims’ fund.

Tchividjian and the other investigators spent a day going through the report with New Tribes’ board of directors. They prayed together, and New Tribes agreed on the spot to most of the recommendations. The mission’s CEO, Larry Brown, told the conservative Christian World magazine that the board was “ashamed” by what GRACE had found and acknowledged that Fanda’s authoritarian atmosphere and theology—specifically its culture of “legalism”—was to blame. He pledged to find out what had happened at the other schools.

“It seemed very clear to us that they got it,” Tchividjian says. But that was the immediate response. “The long-term response,” Tchividjian says, “was that New Tribes pulled back significantly from us. I think what was happening was other institutions were looking at them thinking, ‘Why in the world would you hire a group to do what they did? They dragged you through the mud.’”

New Tribes soon announced new investigations of alleged abuses in at least nine other schools in eight other countries—but this time, it wouldn’t be hiring GRACE. The mission hired a new coordinator to administer investigations under the project name IHART, or Independent Historical Abuse Review Team. New Tribes has told the missionary kids that whatever information the research turns up “will be stored at a law firm,” accessible only through “a legal process.” (New Tribes leaders declined repeated requests for comment on the investigations and to answer questions about whether it has implemented the recommendations in GRACE’s report.)

Rachel Steffen, a New Tribes missionary, says her two daughters were sexually abused by a dorm parent in the Philippines. Click below to read more of her story.

 

Rachel Steffen

“I think what happened with GRACE and the Fanda report is they took New Tribes by surprise, and it was a huge blow to them when it came out,” says Rachel Steffen, a former New Tribes missionary who says that her two daughters were sexually abused by a dorm parent in the Philippines. “I think they vowed that they would never lose control like that again.”

Nearly four years later, only one of New Tribes’ subsequent investigations has been completed, for a school in Brazil, and the results have not been released.

In 2011, as the initial promise of GRACE’s first investigation turned to disappointment, another embattled missionary group came calling. The Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) was founded in 1927 by a splinter group called “Regular Baptists” to promote a “militant, missionary-minded, Biblically-separate haven of Fundamentalism.” Thanks in part to its insular culture, the group remains obscure even in conservative Christian circles—GRACE’s leaders had never heard of it—but ABWE is hardly marginal, with around 900 missionaries in 60 countries, backed by some 5,000 supporting churches. Here was a second chance to establish GRACE’s model of redemption in a group that was struggling with its past sins.

In 1988, one of ABWE’s missionary doctors in Bangladesh, Donn Ketcham, allegedly began sexually abusing and raping a 12-year-old missionary kid who asked not to be named; we’ll call her Julia. Ketcham, then in his late fifties, was a beloved figure with deep ties to ABWE; his Baptist-preacher father had helped found the General Association of Regular Baptists. He was charming and charismatic and alleged to have had serial affairs with younger female ABWE staff, more than once resulting in the woman’s dismissal.

Julia’s sister Diana, a 41-year-old pastor’s wife in Colorado who alleges that Ketcham groped her in Bangladesh, told the Prospect the story she and Julia shared with GRACE. In July 1989, the sisters were back home visiting an adult sister in Indiana when Julia, who hadn’t revealed what had occurred to anyone in the family, told their pastor what Ketcham had allegedly done. Instead of informing the family, Diana says, the pastor phoned ABWE headquarters in Pennsylvania. A staff psychologist, Russell Lloyd, flew to Indiana with Ketcham’s supervisor, Russell Ebersole, to determine whether Julia was telling the truth. Once convinced, Diana says, they compelled Julia, who was just shy of her 14th birthday, to sign a confession stating that she had “participated in a physical relationship” with the doctor and that what she did was “very wrong.” The ABWE officials then flew with Julia to Bangladesh. Julia’s parents were made aware of her “confession” but never told that their daughter had said she had been raped. Julia was made to ask her family’s forgiveness.

Lloyd and Ebersole confronted Ketcham, who left the mission field and returned to his home state of Michigan. ABWE sent a vague notice to the churches that sponsored Ketcham’s missionary work, stating that he’d been let go for “immoral conduct”—a phrase that most read as adultery. Ketcham established a family medical practice where local church members sent their children, and where he continued to work for more than 20 years. (ABWE did not reply to repeated interview requests for this story; attempts to reach Ketcham, now in his eighties, through his daughter yielded no response.)

Julia struggled with eating disorders and repeatedly attempted suicide. By the time the family left Bangladesh in 1991 to get her better counseling, Diana says that the alleged rape had “forever altered her life.” The family wouldn’t hear her whole story for another 20 years.

More than a decade after Julia’s family returned to the United States, stories about Ketcham began to surface. At least two MKs allege they were raped, and five others allege being groped under the pretext of unnecessary breast or pelvic examinations. Another six or seven missionary kids accuse Ketcham of drugging and abusing them. They remember being alone with Ketcham at the ABWE hospital or in his home and waking up in the morning feeling hazy and nauseated, unable to recall what happened the night before. At a 2002 ABWE reunion, a group of now-adult Bangladesh MKs confronted the mission’s new president, Michael Loftis, about Ketcham.

They went away expecting the mission to launch an investigation, or at least report Ketcham to the Michigan Board of Medicine. But ABWE offered only to help pay for victims’ counseling. Little happened until 2011, when Julia spoke out publicly. After finally telling her family about her alleged rape, she co-founded a website, BangladeshMKsSpeak, with another missionary kid, Susannah Beals Baker. The site detailed Julia’s story and published testimonies from other victims. In the first week it was live, BangladeshMKsSpeak attracted thousands of comments and scores of other stories.

ABWE was forced to respond. The mission reported Ketcham to Michigan’s medical board; within a year, he surrendered his license. On its website, ABWE published a confession of its own, acknowledging that Ketcham should have been fired years earlier and that the vagueness of its dismissal letter had allowed the doctor to conceal his alleged acts. The letter pleaded with the MKs to “please, please forgive us.” ABWE president Michael Loftis was let go. By mid-April, at the missionary kids’ urging, GRACE had a new job, investigating Ketcham and ABWE’s response.

Courtesy Tamara Rice

Julia (front center) and her sister Diana (right)

GRACE went to work in June 2011. It soon became clear, however, that ABWE was not enthusiastic about being investigated. The mission failed to produce documents GRACE requested, Tchividjian says, and in early 2012, ABWE began a separate investigation of all its missions. The result was a brief website notice stating that a handful of abuse cases had been confirmed, that unnamed offenders had been identified, and that none was still working in the field. Some allegations were not reviewed, ABWE said, because “the victims did not consent to pursuing an investigation.” While GRACE’s investigation continued, Diana says the mission tried to undermine it: ABWE leaders offered compensation for Julia’s treatment in what struck the family as an attempt to buy her future silence. They said no.

In January 2013, after more than 100 interviews, GRACE announced, in a routine update on its website, that its investigation was nearly complete. Three weeks later, ABWE fired GRACE, alleging that the investigation was “fatally flawed” and “would not find the truth.” For survivors and their families, this was devastating news; it meant, under the terms of its contract with the mission, that GRACE’s report could not be released.

The public criticism of GRACE put its fledgling reputation on the line. ABWE claimed that the missionary kids’ testimony was tainted by their exposure to one another; that the investigators weren’t using the evidentiary standards of a courtroom and had not recorded the interviews; and that eight interviewees had complained that GRACE had asked leading questions and excluded positive recollections about ABWE from their interview summaries. ABWE claimed that one unnamed interviewee said she felt “revictimized” by GRACE.

Tchividjian and his fellow investigators published a 15-page, point-by-point rebuttal on GRACE’s website. Their process wasn’t like a courtroom’s, they said, because this wasn’t a legal proceeding. The investigators recorded some testimonies, but not all, because they allowed interviewees to ask that they not be tape-recorded for fear of reprisal from ABWE. There were no court-grade transcripts because hiring court reporters would be exorbitantly expensive, and the mission had balked at paying even a fraction of previous transcription costs. GRACE pointed out that all interviewees, both survivors and mission staff, had been given drafts of their transcripts and asked to correct them however they saw fit. Fond memories of the Bangladesh mission, the investigators noted, were not what they’d been hired to find. “When placed in the context of ABWE’s conduct over the past 20 months,” GRACE concluded, the termination “strongly suggests ABWE is unwilling to have itself investigated unless the investigation is within your control.”

ABWE replaced GRACE with Professional Investigators International (Pii), which said it was conducting not an investigation but “research” into the Bangladesh hospital where Ketcham had worked. Pii, which is also handling at least one of the New Tribes investigations, was founded by a Mormon couple, one of whom runs an image–consulting firm. The company’s website emphasizes that “the client suggests the scope of work initially.” In a brief statement responding to questions from the Prospect, Pii CEO Linda Davis characterized its work for ABWE and New Tribes as “totally independent investigations following investigative procedures, very thorough in nature.” Beyond that, she had no comment.

Courtesy Tamara Rice

A teenage Tamara Rice on a train in Bangladesh, where she alleges she was abused by missionary doctor Donn Ketcham.

In a section for frequently asked questions on its website, ABWE promises that in its “desire for transparency,” it “intends to publicly release the unedited report, when it is completed.” The Bangladesh missionary kids are dubious. When Pii contacted Tamara Rice, an MK, for an interview last November, she says the investigators refused to say how her answers would be used or whether her identity would be kept confidential. She, like other MKs, has refused to speak with the new investigators under those conditions.

“ABWE accused GRACE of building a case against them in their investigation,” Rice says. “I feel there’s a good chance that what ABWE is doing now is building a defense case against future lawsuits—that really these interviews are lining the walls of their lawyers’ office.”

III. The Fortress

By 2013, a decade after Tchividjian felt called to spread the word, sex abuse had become a topic that Protestants could no longer ignore. Since 2004, GRACE had trained more than 150 churches and ministries, consulted with dozens more on prevention policies, and helped implement abuse-awareness programs at six Christian colleges. Despite the disappointments, the New Tribes and ABWE investigations had shed new light on the problem. So had a fast-growing network of survivor websites publishing accounts of abuse.

Two major evangelical foundations, children’s mission ministry OneHope and relief organization Samaritan’s Purse (run by Tchividjian’s controversial uncle, Franklin Graham), had asked GRACE to help them develop and implement abuse-prevention and response policies. Tchividjian, Langberg, and others on the GRACE board were regulars on Christian media. The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant body, had passed a resolution calling on member churches to report suspicions or allegations of sexual abuse to law enforcement. Then as the ABWE investigation was unraveling, Bob Jones University turned to GRACE.

It appeared that the school was ready to open itself to change. Bob Jones revised its sex-abuse policies, held its first campus-wide awareness training, and sent a sizable delegation to a GRACE conference. Meanwhile, alumni and staff members were telling their stories to GRACE.

While Tchividjian would not comment about their ongoing investigation, theProspect interviewed eight Bob Jones alumni who say they’ve given testimony. Their accounts offer a glimpse of what GRACE is likely to find: a cloistered atmosphere in which abuse victims have been discouraged from coming forward, and in which those who do are routinely blamed and discouraged from reporting it to family members and police.

Katie Landry, now 31, left her homeschooling Mennonite family in Ohio and matriculated at Bob Jones when she was 19, two weeks after she says she’d been raped by a co-worker back home. “When that happened to me,” she says, “I didn’t have the word rape in my vocabulary. I knew that there was a word called fornication, when an unmarried person has sex, and I knew there was adultery, when a married person has sex outside marriage. But there wasn’t anything in my life that said sometimes sex happens when you don’t want it and you didn’t ask for it.”