Survivor who led charge in Nassar case targets church

Rachael Denhollander’s children recently asked her a question that continues to show her the cost of coming forward against sports physician and convicted sex offender Larry Nassar, a campaign which has given her a platform to speak out about a sexual abuse scandal in Sovereign Grace Ministries, a network of churches mostly based across the United States.

Last month, Denhollander’s statement in Nassar’s sentencing turned her into a Christian celebrity. In her victim statement in court, the former gymnast said her advocacy for sexual assault survivors “cost me my church.” Her own children recently asked her about this, why they stopped going to the church they belonged to for five years.

“It was painful to have to search for a church again because we really, really loved the people at our former church,” she said.

“That simply was part of the cost of coming forward” as one of Nassar’s victims, she added, and also speaking out against how churches handle sex abuse allegations.

Denhollander, who declined to name her former church, said she and her husband, Jacob, left the Louisville, Ky., church in 2017 because of elders’ lack of response to the concerns she has described as “the intentional failure to report sexual assault perpetrated in multiple churches, by multiple elders, at Sovereign Grace Ministries.” Their church was not part of Sovereign Grace Ministries (now Sovereign Grace Churches), she said, but it did support the organization, which had been accused of covering up cases of child molestation. A class-action lawsuit was dismissed in 2014 for reasons including statute of limitations issues, and current leaders of Sovereign Grace Churches say those accusations are “completely false.”

Denhollander said she now attends Reformed Baptist Church of Louisville, which is not affiliated with Sovereign Grace.

Last month, Denhollander received an overwhelming response to her statement during the Nassar sentencing, from Christian leaders and other sexual abuse survivors.

“This was never something I anticipated. This is not a platform that I ever wanted,” she said. “I actively desired not to be a public figure on the issue of sexual abuse because it requires relinquishing so much privacy. I feel that in many ways, particularly leading up to this, I was given a job that I did not want to do.”

Using her newfound platform, Denhollander in a Facebook post last week asked the Sovereign Grace network of churches to bring in a group called GRACE, an organization that trains organizations how to prevent and respond to child abuse, to conduct an independent investigation of how the church has handled abuse complaints, which would be released to the public.

Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of evangelist Billy Graham and executive director of GRACE, has said in the past that evangelicals’ record on sex abuse is “worse” than in the Catholic Church.

In response to Denhollander’s story, he recently tweeted: “It’s my hope and prayer that the Christian community will spend less time celebrating the fact that Rachael mentioned ‘Jesus’ in her statement and more time sobered and grieved by the failure of the Church to be her biggest advocate before the courtrooms and news cameras.”

In two responses — one last week and one Tuesday, the Sovereign Grace Churches leadership team wrote in a blog post that “she is mistaken in her accusations made” against Sovereign Grace Churches and C.J. Mahaney. Mahaney, co-founder of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md., which had been the flagship of Sovereign Grace, was among leaders of the denomination named in the now-dismissed lawsuit.

Denhollander’s “irresponsible” allegations, Tuesday’s blog post stated, “have profoundly damaged the reputations and gospel ministries of innocent pastors and churches.”

The statement also defended Mahaney, who is now senior pastor of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville. Mahaney’s inclusion in a conference called Together for the Gospel with high-profile pastors like John Piper, Mark Dever and Matt Chandler has drawn controversy.

The church network noted that previous comments by GRACE’s Tchividjian “suggest he has already prejudged the case against SGC.” It said the accusations of abuse were in two of its churches at the time; SGC reports having more than 70 churches worldwide. SGC leaders also said that one church accused of wrongdoing has had an independent investigation, and the pastor reported that two instances were found, one in which the family member did not want to tell the police and another in which the victim did not discuss details until “many, many years later.”

“While a single incident of abuse is grievous, it is simply false to characterize this as widespread within Sovereign Grace churches, whose experience with this horrible sin is, sadly, not unusual in our culture,” it said.

Denhollander said she has not personally heard from Sovereign Grace and characterized its response Tuesday as “full of misinformation and misdirection.” She added that it “only confirms the need for an outside investigation.”

She said the pattern of mitigating the severity of abuse of the victim is consistent in evangelical churches, noting the recent response to Tennessee pastor Andy Savage’s admission of a “sexual incident,” where he received applause from his congregation after requesting forgiveness. In that case, a woman disclosed a sexual incident that occurred 20 years ago, when she was in high school and Savage was on staff as a college student at a Texas church.

Church leaders should have shown an immediate recognition of the severity and the truth of the sexual assault of a child under his care and how he misused his authority, Denhollander said.

“You saw again the exact same dynamics that sexual assault victims always suffer from: minimizing the severity of the abuse, mitigating the damage that was done, and misusing principles of grace and forgiveness to keep a man in leadership who has done something that is very, very serious and disqualifying from leadership,” she said.

Savage was placed on a leave of absence from Highpoint Church in January, and an independent church investigation into his ministry is expected to be complete by the end of February.

A wise pastor, she said, will pursue forgiveness and justice when they learn of abuse cases. Some pastors don’t see the need to report abuse allegations to civil authorities, and reporting, counseling and restoration are handled internally instead of experts such as police, investigators and counselors who specialize in trauma, she said.

“I know that Christ … is the safest refuge for someone who has been so wounded, but that is not often the message that they are given, and that is heartbreaking for me,” she said. “When they seek that help, they are actively turned away by poor counseling ideology, by poor methods of handling abuse from the one thing that could give them the greatest security and refuge. So watching that has been extremely painful.”