the college ministry

written on March 17, 2022

trigger warnings: heavy themes of mental health, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation this post may also contain much stronger words than I am typically comfortable using to avoid ambiguity

updates from college fellowship

After getting back to America in November, I had the chance to catch up with my American friends, and I actually got news that some changes had happened. Firstly, the staff member that I had initially confided in had brought this up with HQ, who started asking around about it. They decided to ban the brother from the ministry. Part of me was thankful that they finally took some action to show that they cared about what happened and that it wasn’t okay. However, it was still too little, too late. At that point, it had already been over 1.5 years after things went down.

their inaction

One of the things that I had to process was that I was quite hurt by how this ministry handled the entire situation. The day after things happened, the brother had gone off to the spring retreat and I had not. And he shared a story that wasn’t quite true about me (saying that I seduced him) with many people, including the campus staff, regional staff, and many of his disciples. In the response to this, the regional staff and campus staff met with him and talked about what had happened. But they didn’t bother to ask my side of the story.

At that time, I didn’t realize that the story that he was sharing was any different from what he had shared with me, so I didn’t even think to reach out to the staff myself. In my mind, they had already heard his side of the story and come to the conclusion that they had. Some of the comments that were really confusing for me were comments like “You should get married early instead of living in sexual immorality.” Now I understand that they thought we were in a relationship and that everything that had happened was consensual.

During this, they still hadn’t asked me what happened.

The year afterwards, the entire staff happened to cycle out.

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