For Kevin and Janene Martin, this Sunday dinner at the home of a church family seemed like any other. Ministering in rural Nebraska, they were accustomed to such after-church hospitality. When Jeff, the family’s athletic fourteen-year-old, offered to play with the Martin’s two children-Jonathan, 2, and Cynthia, 3-they gladly accepted.
While the adults got acquainted, the two pre-schoolers bounded off with Jeff, who promised to track down some old toys kept in his room.
An hour later, when dinner was about to be served, Janene excused herself to find Jonathan and Cynthia. Opening the upstairs door unannounced, Janene found Jeff zipping up his pants with Cynthia and Jonathan standing on either side of him. Janene recoiled. No, you didn’t see that, she told herself. How can you think such a perverted thing?
Looking down and without saying anything, Jeff quickly slipped past Janene, who was left standing alone with her two children, stunned and speechless. In a fog Janene returned to the dining room, unable to process what she had just witnessed. Jeff wasn’t at the dinner table.
Once seated, shock gave way to panic as Janene desperately looked for an excuse to leave the house. She had to find out from the children exactly what had gone on. Leaning over to her husband, she whispered, “Don’t let the kids out of your sight.” With no polite means of early exit possible, the dinner seemed to last an eternity. Finally, the Martins were able to excuse themselves and walk out the door. On the way to the car, Janene whispered, in short gasps, to Kevin what she had seen in the upstairs room.
Despite her pounding fears, Janene determined not to upset needlessly her children if, in fact, nothing had happened. The children fell silent in the back seat of the car.
“So what did you guys do tonight?” Janene asked in a cheerful voice. Still no response. Her mother’s instinct warned her this wasn’t the time to press the issue. For the remainder of the ride home, the children didn’t speak, while Kevin and Janene searched for a rational explanation for what she had witnessed.
Childish Irresponsibility?
Try as they might, the Martins couldn’t make sense of the incident. Before that afternoon, Kevin and Janene had little contact with Jeff. He had not been an involved member of the youth group, showing up only occasionally for meetings. They felt they couldn’t walk up to Jeff and say, “Oh, by the way, why were you zipping up your pants?”
Distraught, Janene assumed the worst while Kevin kept looking for a plausible explanation-perhaps Jeff was just tucking in his shirt. Kevin’s hopes, however, were short-lived. Two weeks later, while Janene was driving in the car with the children, Cynthia spoke up.
“Mom, do you remember when we were at Jeff’s house?”
“Yes.”
“He showed me his pee-pee. That’s wrong isn’t it?”
Janene’s heart stopped. “Yes, dear, that’s wrong.”
Ironically, Cynthia’s next statement helped Janene maintain her spiritual and emotional equilibrium in the days to come.
“I guess Jeff didn’t know that Jesus was watching.”
As soon as she got home, Janene raced to call Kevin at the church office.
“Kevin, it’s true,” Janene sputtered. “Jeff did do something to our children.” She tearfully relayed what Cynthia had told her in the car.
Shocked but finally convinced something had happened, Kevin, after hanging up from talking with his wife, immediately phoned the chairman of the board and received his second shock of the day.
“I’d ignore the matter, Kevin,” the board chairman said. “What Jeff did was no more than childish irresponsibility. Don’t make this into more than it is.”
While the board chairman’s response upset Kevin, it infuriated Janene. Childish irresponsibility? thought Janene. A teenage boy has just exposed himself to two preschool children!
The Martins reluctantly accepted the chairman’s verdict and, for the time being, dropped the matter. At least Jeff had not physically molested their children, they consoled themselves. For that much they could be thankful.
Disturbing Revelations
Several months later, a death in Janene’s family brought a niece to live with the Martins. During her stay, she grew close to Cynthia and Jonathan, and earned their trust. One day the niece approached Janene with a concerned face.
“Do you know about the incident?” she asked her aunt.
“Yes, I do,” responded Janene. Her niece stared in disbelief.
“What’s wrong?” Janene asked. “What are we talking about here? He exposed himself to my children, right?”
“No,” the niece replied, her voice quivering. “He forced them to have oral sex with him.”
The news hit Janene with the force of a sledgehammer. Cynthia had finally mustered enough courage to tell her cousin the entire story. Now the Martins knew the truth-Jeff had not just engaged in what the board chairman had called “childish” behavior. It was criminal sexual abuse.
Janene called Kevin at the office and broke the news to him. There was no question now that the board chairman and church would have to be involved and the police called in. Kevin immediately went to the chairman and shared the tragic news. He and Janene would need all the help they could get to walk through this unfolding nightmare.
Once again, the Martins were unprepared for this elder’s response.
“You need to follow Matthew 18,” he said, nonchalantly. “Pastor, you know that the first step for you is to confront the brother who has sinned against you. Besides, my wife and I are leaving for Cancun tomorrow, and I don’t have time to deal with the matter.”
While Kevin and Janene were facing the worst hour of their lives, the appointed church leader and his wife boarded a plane for a ten-day trip to Cancun. Janene remembers her bitterness: “I was furious-at least he could have taken time out from his packing to get involved. I wanted to know that he really cared about what had just happened to my children.”
Upset by the chairman’s indifference to their trauma, Kevin also grew confused by the chairman’s counsel. Was it his responsibility to be reconciled to Jeff when the issue was criminal sexual conduct? he agonized. If Jeff confessed and repented, were he and Janene simply to drop the matter? What about justice?
Desperate, Kevin turned to an older pastor-friend in the community. He explained to him the circumstances and asked him what he would do.
“You don’t have any choice,” the older pastor replied. “You must report Jeff’s criminal act to the authorities for the sake of other children he might harm. The county will not put him on trial, but they will require him and his family to receive counseling.”
A Tough Call in the Making
Turning Jeff in to the authorities was not an easy decision. The question-Is pressing charges the right thing to do?-tormented them. The chairman’s pious attitude confused their logic.
But as often as they wrestled with that question, they ended up with the same conclusion. They must go ahead with it-for Jonathan and Cynthia’s sake, for Jeff’s sake, and for the sake of other innocent children who could become victims.
“I began watching Jeff at church, and realized for the first time that he hung out at the nursery,” says Janene. “He frequently volunteered there. I grew frightened for the other children in the church, not just my own.”
They reported the incident to the local sheriff’s department, who, because Jeff lived outside the city limits, would have to pursue the investigation.
Janene remembers dialing the sheriff’s number: “As I picked up the phone, I grew numb. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. I found it difficult to mouth the words, molesting and sexual abuse to the woman on the phone.”
When the board chairman returned from Cancun and learned the Martins had pursued a criminal investigation, he was incensed. “You have not acted in accordance with Matthew 18,” he fumed. “I cannot go along with what you’re doing.”
The tension escalated. The days were a blur, a period of emotional vertigo. Janene described the conflict as a war: “Kevin would receive calls from the chairman and hear, ‘You’re doing the wrong thing.’ Then he would come home and hear from me, ‘No, it’s the right thing to do.’ “
Feeling unsupported at the office as well as at home, Kevin’s emotional health plummeted. Feeling overwhelmed, he withdrew into himself, further angering Janene.
“I stuffed my pain,” he now admits. “I was experiencing what psychologists call ‘psychological noise.’ Different voices were saying, ‘Do this. Do that.’ I went through a range of emotions, from wanting to walk away from the whole affair to finding a gun and taking my own revenge on Jeff. In the end, I turned inward.”
Not long after Kevin and Janene had reported the alleged molestation, the county sent a detective to the Martin’s home. An easy-going, grandfatherly personality, he quickly put the children at ease. It was a moment of tremendous relief. At last they had an ally who could walk them through this sordid nightmare.
When the detective finished interviewing both children, he asked if he might speak privately to the parents.
“There’s no doubt they’re telling the truth,” he told them. “At their age, they could not invent such details.”
Now there was no turning back. But new fears surfaced: Would Cynthia and Jonathan have to appear on the witness stand? Would they be cross-examined?
“No,” answered the detective. “The sheriff will come to your home and take a statement from each child, with both of you present at all times.” He assured them they could stop any line of questioning they were uncomfortable with.
Satisfied the legal process would not make their children victims a second time, the Martins drove to the sheriff’s office and filed formal charges. There they learned that Jeff had a previous history of sexual offenses. The authorities warned them not to contact Jeff’s family. Doing so would only give him or his family time to change their stories or hide evidence.
When the sheriff came out to the Martin house to take a formal deposition, he talked to each of the children individually. Hearing their children recount the details of the crime to the officer was the hardest moment yet of the entire ordeal for Kevin and Janene.
“That was the first time we had heard the complete story,” says Janene. “I fell apart when I listened to my two-year-old son describe what had been done to him. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that.”
Threatening Phone-Calls
As he left, the sheriff told the Martins that within the week he intended to arrest Jeff at school. A particularly awkward moment arrived when the following Sunday Jeff and his family showed up at church. Apparently, the sheriff’s department had not yet contacted them. The awkward moment passed, though, without incident.
Through a series of discreet inquiries, the Martins learned more of Jeff’s family history. The father was an alcoholic known to chase people off his property. On one occasion when Jeff had been caught throwing rocks at passing cars, the father forced angry motorists off his property at gunpoint.
All this additional information reinforced their decision to reject the chairman’s advice to confront Jeff’s parents themselves. Given the family’s history of volatile behavior, they would have exposed themselves to physical danger. They would have also jeopardized the entire criminal investigation.
Immediately after Jeff’s arrest, Janene began receiving threatening phone calls from his mother, who was making every effort to hide the incident from his father.
“I’m going to see to it that you and your husband never pastor again as long as you live,” she snarled. “I’m going to start rumors that will destroy you.” The phone calls continued, and the pattern was always the same: Jeff’s mother would call, scream at either Kevin or Janene for several minutes, and finally the Martins would hang up.
But from the authorities they soon learned that Jeff had confessed to the crime. As a result, he was forced with his parents to go for counseling, something that never would have occurred unless the court had ordered it. Thankfully the case never reached the local papers.
Not long afterwards Jeff’s mother lost her job. She complained to the board chairman that her firing was the fault of the Martins. Because of them, she argued, the police had come to her place of employment. Only later would Kevin and Janene learn she was let go because of suspected embezzlement. (She was eventually convicted of the crime and sent to prison.)
A Church in Denial
The Martin’s suspicion that their children might not be Jeff’s only victims at church began to take on credibility. Out of the blue one evening, a junior high girl, who knew nothing of what happened to the Martin’s children, approached Janene.
“A couple of times now, I’ve overheard Jeff using explicit sexual language. I can handle it, but he’s done it in the presence of my four-year-old sister,” she said. She also told Janene that Jeff was frequently maneuvering to be alone with her sister in the Sunday school rooms.
Janene told her to stay with her sister in those situations because Jeff had taken liberties with her children.
And when Janene and Kevin heard that two other boys from their church were exhibiting behavioral patterns similar to their children, they also told these boys’ parents what had happened to their kids. The mother and father, though, refused to take them seriously.
Word reached the board chairman that the Martins were warning people about Jeff. The chairman’s wife cornered Janene one morning after the church service.
“What you’re telling other people about Jeff is wrong,” she said. “You should not be talking to anyone else about this. By the way, Jeff’s mother blames you for losing her job.”
The Martins sensed no support from the church leadership. When Kevin brought up the sexual abuse incident at a board meeting, the elders followed the lead of the board chairman, saying no immediate action was necessary. No steps were ever taken to investigate whether Jeff might have molested other children in the church. Nor were any nursery policies changed to insure the safety of the church’s children.
What’s the Right Response?
The pain and duration of the crisis threatened the Martin’s marriage. A year had passed since Janene had walked in on Jeff’s act. Both Kevin and Janene struggled to cope with their grief and anger. Each felt angry at the steadfast denial occurring at church, yet each misunderstood the other person’s emotional reactions.
Janene’s reaction was to fight back; she wanted action. She resented the passive way Kevin reacted to the incident: “I wanted Kevin to stand up to the chairman, to the board, to the church. I wanted him to act differently. I didn’t understand the deep hurt he was experiencing on the inside.”
The rage of Janene’s father, however, was a comfort during those dark days. When he learned his grandchildren had been molested by a church teenager, his first reaction was, “Where does this kid live? I’m going to blow him away.”
“I knew my father didn’t actually mean what he said,” Janene remembers. “But he was so incensed at what had happened, which was the response I had hoped to see in Kevin. I found a sense of security in his rage. To me, it meant he really cared.”
Added to these pressures were the unanswered questions of faith: Where was God? Why was this happening?
“When I learned my children had been harmed,” Janene says, “some of the first words out of my mouth were, ‘I never agreed to sacrifice my children.’ I knew there might be a cost to ministry, but I had never dreamed it would be this.”
And then the Martins learned they were expecting twins. With a low salary, dwindling savings, and poor health insurance, the Martins faced severe financial pressure. When he asked the board for a salary increase, Kevin was told he couldn’t expect to make much more in this area of Nebraska than what he already was receiving.
Then, less than a year after the twins were born, Janene was diagnosed with cancer and underwent a hysterectomy.
“I remember studying Job at that time, trying to make sense out of what was happening to my life,” Kevin recalls. “I kept asking ‘Why?’ Why was all this happening to me? As I pondered Romans 8:28, I wondered if that verse was really true. The circumstances of my life seemed to make the plan of God unknowable. I just couldn’t put together what was happening to us with what I knew of God.”
The stress of the sexual abuse crisis, the birth of the twins, Janene’s cancer surgery, their economic condition-these almost destroyed Kevin and Janene’s marriage. At one point, the Martins received a Christmas basket from the church, the same groceries that the church was giving to the poor. To make ends meet, Janene often would go to garage sales, buy items like dressers, refinish them, then sell them for grocery money.
After five years of ministry, the Martins decided to resign from the church. Attempting to stay in Nebraska, Kevin returned to the insurance business, which had been his original occupation in New York. But with the farm crisis hitting the Nebraska area hard, little money was to be made in the industry. Moving out of state was their only option.
Before the Martins left Nebraska, though, they would run into Jeff again. The timing of that encounter was as painful as it was ironic.
“It was Mother’s Day,” Janene remembers. “We were in a restaurant when we ran into him. I could hardly look at him. He was grown up by then. After that encounter, my son began having nightmares.”
Soon the Martin family would encounter Jeff again, this time at a county fair. “When I saw Jeff walking toward us,” Janene says, “I froze, glancing at the kids to check their response. There was none. But when we got in the car the first thing both of them mentioned was Jeff sexually molesting them. At the time they were six and four. Just seeing him triggered all those horrible memories.”
Healing the Wounded Hearts
Only after their move to Illinois did the Martin family saga take a turn for the better. Kevin secured a better-paying job in the insurance industry. Janene and Kevin also found a pastor in the Chicago area who began counseling with them. During the time of their counseling, Janene heard a tape on the radio by Pat Williams, the former general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers. He and his wife had written a book entitled, Rekindled.
The tape and book dealt with the collapse of their relationship under the strain of the basketball executive’s high-stress career. The story of the rebirth of their marriage gave hope to Kevin and Janene. They began talking through the pain, anger, and resentment of those years in ministry. They met two times a week with this pastor and his wife for the better part of a year. The wounds slowly began to heal.
Through the long months of asking, “God, where were you?” Janene discovered a comforting Old Testament passage, which she paraphrased: “I’ve kept all your tears in a bottle, and I’ve recorded every one in a book” (Psalm 56:8). Meditating on that truth, Janene realized how painful it was for God to watch his only Son upon the Cross.
“He does watch and feel and care for his children even in painful situations,” Janene can now say. “He did collect my tears. He was there.”
Nor has the furnace of suffering destroyed Kevin’s relationship with God. “I remember saying several times during that period of my life, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I praise him,’ ” Kevin says. “I didn’t know why these things were allowed into our lives, but I was confident he was there. Some day I believed I would know why.”
For the Martin children, healing has been painstakingly slow and difficult. Cynthia and Jonathan continue to struggle with the trauma of their abuse. Jonathan, now nearing adolescence, is a good-looking, out-going teenager. He evidences, though, a strong need for control, a pattern typical for children victimized by sexual abuse.
“He still refuses to talk with a counselor about the experience,” Kevin says. “He feels that would be an admission of defeat. Looking back, both Janene and I wish we had been more intentional about our children’s counseling when they were younger.”
When a junior high health teacher told Jonathan’s class a certain percentage of the class would be homosexuals, Jonathan left the class traumatized.
“Maybe I’m now in that percentage,” he told his parents.
His parents assured him, though, that his being a victim of abuse by a male didn’t mean he was destined to be a homosexual, that he was, in fact, a normal, healthy young man.
Long after abuse has taken place, children commonly still feel responsible for what happened. A top priority for Janene and Kevin, then, has been to help both children develop a strong personal and sexual self-image.
Their daughter, Cynthia, now an attractive and popular high school student, faces challenges of her own.
“Our beautiful and sensitive daughter has no shortage of interested boys,” says Kevin. “But she struggles with personal boundaries.
“Just a few weeks ago, several members of the soccer team approached her, asking for her phone number, which she gave them. One of her girlfriends, though, took her aside and said, ‘Don’t you know what kind of guys they are?’ Realizing she might be sending a wrong message, Cynthia went back and told those boys it really wasn’t her phone number. Thankfully, they tore it up.”
The healing process for both children will be ongoing. Kevin and Janene are committed to working through the myriad issues with their children. A serendipity of this slow process has been a friendship with a Christian therapist. Janene had started attending a support group in which two Christian therapists also took part. Over a few months, one of the therapists has become something of an aunt to Cynthia and Jonathan. Both children are able to talk with her without her being perceived as a formal therapist. God has, indeed, provided for their needs.
Advice Born of Experience
While the Martins still have unanswered questions from their ordeal, some issues have become quite clear. They are convinced, for example, that they were right not to drop the matter when the board chairman and others suggested they do so.
“Knowing what I know now, I would have never second-guessed our actions. What we did was absolutely right,” says Kevin. “I should have been more confrontive. The chairman was wrong, period.”
Kevin and Janene also have definite advice for parents who suspect their children have been victims of child abuse in the church.
“If you suspect abuse, don’t sweep it under the carpet,” argues Kevin. “Though you can’t run rough-shod over people with unfounded allegations, you have to say something if you suspect it is occurring.” As an insurance agent, he helps churches take steps to prevent child sexual abuse from happening in their congregation: “Churches also need to screen their workers. Policies and procedures need to be set up so that adults, particularly males, who purportedly commit 95 percent of all sexual crimes against children, aren’t allowed to be alone with children in potentially compromising situations.”
“Today I would be much more assertive in exposing the problem in the church,” says Janene. “I just can’t believe how squashed we felt by the church. If I ever suspected something like that again, I would keep pushing until I found someone who would listen. I would go to denominational headquarters, to the superintendent, to anyone, until I found the help I needed.”
Their conclusion: “Pastors and churches need to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. We can do a lot to prevent ourselves or others from becoming victims.”
-Bob Moeller is contributing editor to LEADERSHIP.
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
