As Crystal shared, earlier this year we were in a series of MCC Asia leadership virtual workshops on PSEA (Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse) that stretched over several weeks. I was asked to prepare a devotional for one of the workshops and I decided to read a passage from Jean Vanier’s book The Broken Body. From my years of working in human services in the US, I am particularly aware of the vulnerability of people with disabilities and I wanted to highlight them as we discussed protection mechanisms. My devotional turned into something different than what I had intended.

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For many of us who have worked in the disability field, Jean Vanier is a foundational figure who advocated for belonging and community at a time when many people with disabilities lacked basic rights and recognition. In 1964, he founded the original L’Arche community which provided a model of intentional communal living that celebrated and valued people with disabilities. There are now 153 L’Arche communities in 38 countries across the world. Jean Vanier’s writings hold a beautiful vision of community that is richer for holding the weak and vulnerable at its heart; not as beneficiaries coming along for the ride but as full participants who are just as worthy as anyone else.

I was preparing for the devotional when I discovered that in 2020 – less than a year after Vanier died in 2019 – L’Arche published the findings of an internal report concluding that Vanier had sexually abused at least six adult women without disabilities between 1970 and 2005. The report found that Vanier had coerced the women into “manipulative and emotionally abusive” sexual relationships. There’s no public evidence of this but I am fairly confident, given the timing, that the investigation and report were delayed until after Vanier’s death. One of his victims testified in the report that, “I was like frozen, I realized that Jean Vanier was adored by hundreds of people, like a living Saint… I found it difficult to raise the issue.“

Society teaches us to expect abuse from the stranger, the other… But report after report has confirmed that most abuse is initiated by someone the victim knows. We can’t trust that someone isn’t abusive just because they are broadly known to be a “good person”, a “good Christian”, or even a “good Mennonite.”

In 2015, Mennonite Quarterly Review published a detailed accounting of ‘Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual abuse.’ John Howard Yoder, who died in 1997, remains the highest profile Mennonite theologian. I won’t go into his accomplishments except to say that, like Vanier, he was an inspirational and foundational figure for many people. John Howard Yoder sexually abused over 100 women during the 1970s and 1980s while at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. His abuses continued into the 1990s while he was faculty at Notre Dame University. John Howard Yoder’s abuses were widely rumored and directly reported to the leaders of the Mennonite institutions involved.

The 2015 report provides a detailed accounting of how certain institutional leaders enabled John Howard Yoder’s abuse even while being very troubled by it and repeatedly failing to convince him to stop. Here are some of the justifications that they gave for not taking stronger action.

• Concern that John Howard Yoder’s abuse, if made public, would undermine his theological influence.
• Concern that John Howard Yoder’s abuse, if made public, would harm Mennonite institutions.
• Concern that John Howard Yoder’s abuse, if made public, would damage or end his troubled marriage.
• Concern that John Howard Yoder was sinning and needed to be convinced to repent.
• Concern that Christian ‘due process’ be done for John Howard Yoder by following Matthew 18:15 “If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you have won that person back.“
• Prioritizing ‘healing’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘restoration’, ‘grace’, and ‘forgiveness’ for John Howard Yoder without ‘accountability’, ‘repentance’, or ‘justice’.

The critical lesson for us to learn, as leaders responsible for protecting the vulnerable, is that these justifications enabled the abuse to continue.

• Abuser Centered Approach: The justifications outlined above have something in common – they are all focused on protecting John Howard Yoder or the institutions involved. The ones who needed protection the most, the victims of his abuse, are notably out of focus.
• Protecting Yoder’s Christian ‘due process’ as outlined in Matthew 18:15. This verse was weaponized to force victims to face John Howard Yoder alone and, even after some victims did courageously confront him, leaders refused or delayed carrying out their responsibilities as outlined subsequently in Matthew 18:16-17: “But if you are unsuccessful, take one or two others with you and go back again, so that everything you say may be confirmed by two or three witnesses. If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church. Then if he or she won’t accept the church’s decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector.“
• Protecting Yoder’s troubled marriage. John Howard Yoder was responsible for the damage to his marriage. In the process of trying to protect Yoder’s marriage, the leaders were actively protecting Yoder from the consequences of his actions and enabling his abusive behavior.
• Protecting Yoder’s theological influence and reputation. By engaging in sexual violence, John Howard Yoder had already compromised his peace witness, theological influence and reputation. He made the decision to abuse and it has forever tainted his work. The abuser is responsible for the consequences of their actions, we are responsible to protect the vulnerable to whom we are accountable. Anything less makes us complicit in that abuse and in future abuse.
• Protecting Mennonite institutions and faith. The Mennonite leaders who enabled and prolonged John Howard Yoder’s abuses caused far more damage to Mennonite institutions and faith than if they had immediately held him accountable. This allowed the abuse to continue for decades and made Mennonite institutions complicit in sin. As should be clear from the Catholic church’s abuse scandals, the damage of shielding wrongdoers from accountability is far greater than the damage of admitting that individuals did wrong and then holding those individuals accountable.
• ‘Healing’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘restoration’, ‘grace’, and ‘forgiveness’. As Christians, we believe that no one is beyond redemption, but that should never come at the expense of the safety, security, and rights of the vulnerable. Grace is not a free pass to harm others. The promise of repentance is also not actual repentance. Even when Saul of Tarsus stopped persecuting believers and publicly became a follower of Christ, he still had to work at repentance before the early Church accepted him. Our role is to support the victim in regaining safety, security, well-being, and agency, after that they can chose to pursue forgiveness on their path to healing if they feel led to do so. Unless we were the ones abused, the abuse is not our sin to forgive. Instead, we should prioritize the victim’s path towards ‘healing’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘restoration’, ‘grace’, and ‘forgiveness’*.

*I want to be clear about this. Victim-blaming, especially around sexual violence, is common across most cultures. It is the abuser, not the victim, who is responsible for the abuse.

I did not read the planned passage from The Broken Body for the devotional that morning. Instead, I shared some of what I’ve written above and then read 1 Corinthians 13:1-6 with a final line added by me. Some sections below are bolded for emphasis.

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.

If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.

Love does not abuse.

1 Corinthians 13:1-6 with a final line added by me, NLT

It is painful to learn that someone you admired – who inspired you to be better, who shaped your worldview – did those things while engaging unapologetically in evil acts. Both Jean Vanier and John Howard Yoder excused their sexual abuse of women under the guise of spirituality; in doing so they further sabotaged their own teachings of belonging and peace with the grossest of hypocrisy. It is impossible to reconcile the dissonance between what is admirable and what is abhorrent. We can intellectualize it but, in our hearts, good and evil cannot be reconciled.

The more foundational the person’s influence was to our identity, the more troubled we are… Were we gullible fools? Why didn’t we notice sooner? Are the values we learned from them false? Is it wrong to still admire and be inspired by an abuser’s work? I did not mourn when Jean Vanier died, he had lived a good life and left an incredible legacy. I mourned when his abuses were revealed – something beautiful and precious had become twisted and warped.

I speak to these feelings because it is very important to understand that we have to set them aside. It doesn’t matter how we feel about the abuser when we are the ones responsible for supporting the victim and preventing future abuse. Even if we’re in the roles we’re in because the abuser inspired us.

In the MCC context… Maybe the abuser is a trusted local partner staff who has known MCC for decades and who has an inspiring vision for their home community. Someone who MCC has sent to peace trainings and invited to present at our regional partner gatherings. Someone featured in the Common Place and other publications sitting in our home church’s library. Will this coming out destroy this person? What will be lost if we address their abuse? Will the project fall apart? Who could ever replace them? What will local communities think? This is the face of the project for the local community; the person who they associate with clean water, vegetable gardens, and peacebuilding. What about lost relationships between this person and decades of MCC alumni? What if those alumni blame MCC? What will our supporting churches think if they learn that abuse was committed on a MCC project? Did previous MCC leaders know? Will MCC look complicit because we didn’t catch this sooner?

Do you notice the critical mistake in the above paragraph? The paragraph is all about the abuser and the institution.

In a victim-centered approach, the victim’s wishes, safety, and holistic well-being take priority in all matters and procedures.

Office of Justice Programs, 2010

If we are the ones responsible for protecting the vulnerable, our priority has to be on supporting the victim and preventing future abuse.

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When I worked in human services in the US I sat on the committee that reviewed abuse investigations and I supervised the Compliance Officer who conducted those investigations. That experience taught me that even “good people” will sometimes excuse the abusive behavior of others; they would tolerate others doing things that they would never do themselves. There were so many reasons…

• …to avoid conflict.
• …fear of reprisals against them.
• …fear of reprisals against the victim.
• …doubt and second guessing themselves.
• …cynicism that anyone will take the report seriously.
• …fear the reporting would make peers and leaders look complicit because they were already aware of the abuse.*
• …realizing that it was abuse after the fact and feeling that it’s too late to report because they didn’t respond in the moment**.
• …putting the responsibility for damage to the abuser’s career, marriage, reputation, etc on the reporting rather than the abuse.
• …fear of being labelled a troublemaker.

*It is true that they would look complicit because they have become complicit. So many times the new person on a team goes to report abuse and discovers that leaders already knew about it. As outlined in the MQR 2015 report, this happened several times to new church leaders and others who tried to address John Howard Yoder’s abuse; they went to authority figures and discovered that what they thought was a one time incident was well known and had happened before.

**It is very normal to be shocked by abusive behavior and fail to respond in the moment, not fully comprehending what happened until later. Shock is a normal trauma response. The follow-up processing shouldn’t be an inward focused “why didn’t I do something in that moment, why did I freeze” but a victim-centered “how am I going to help that person so this never happens to them again?”

And so and so on. We are all only human. We make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes have tragic consequences. That is why it is critical to create reporting systems that distribute responsibility, prioritize a victim-centered response, and are separate from the daily concerns of the institution or project.

In September, I’ll be working with a local organization with a strong background in trauma informed and victim-centered approaches to set up a new reporting system for MCC Cambodia. This organization will take reports of abuse, neglect, or fraud from our project participants, local partners, and non-English speaking personnel. Then, if necessary to protect the person making the report, the organization will remove personally identifying details and translate it into English. Finally they’ll submit the report to the MCC Cambodia office, the regional office, and our US headquarters. The local organization brings reliability, culture fluency, and – most important – impartiality. The person taking that first report there won’t know the project, people involved, or broader impact. They’ll be able to focus entirely on a victim-centered approach. This adds layers of accountability and limits the potential for human mistakes.