Reform is overdue, pastor’s wife says
It was a snowy December day last year when my pastor husband called me with chilling news. Canadian megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey was accused of sexual misconduct by an anonymous woman. At the time, Cavey was placed on leave at the Meeting House, the church where he’d been the teaching pastor for 25 years, and by March he’d resigned.
In May, the celebrity pastor was arrested by Hamilton police and charged with sexual assault. Last week, the Toronto Star published an investigative report about the allegations against Cavey, featuring an interview with the anonymous woman who was the first to come forward. She alleges that Cavey said to her, “what they were doing wasn’t right, but that God was permitting it.”
These words alone are chilling, not to mention the alleged interactions he’s had with multiple women, including an underage girl, according to a recent report published by the Meeting House.
But as a woman who has grown up in the church since her preteen years and has been married to a pastor for over a decade, none of this is a surprise to me. I’ve become immune to pastors, men specifically, who think they’re above the law.
Even though I’m married to a pastor (one of the good ones, who has never had a ‘lead’ pastor title, a fact that I think has helped to humble him), I find it’s hard to feel safe inside the walls of a church.
I have plenty of my own trauma, but I also live with the trauma of the young girls and boys whose stories have been swept under the rug — or should I say, buried at the altar, a sacrifice for the god of the patriarchal church. The Pastor.
Not only do I empathize, but I also relate. I’ve also been subject to clergy sexual abuse. I was 11 years old when I reached out to a pastor who I heard speak at a youth conference. Soon we were engaging in email and instant messages. He broached sensitive topics, and even confessed that he struggled with masturbation.
What was an 11-year-old child supposed to do with that information? But he made me feel important and seen, and I felt grown-up knowing about his “problems.” We almost met in person once, but he had car trouble, a situation I think of as divine intervention.
We stopped speaking for a few years, but when I was 18 he sent me a message on Facebook. By this time he’d moved up the ranks from youth pastor to senior pastor.
While our interactions were virtual, they were sexually inappropriate, and after a few weeks I confided in a friend at university. He urged me to contact the elders of the church this man worked at. Together we emailed the church, and after weeks of back and forth, the communications stopped. I checked my laptop every week to see if the pastor was still working at the church, and even listened to his sermons for a hint of remorse. He never missed a service and he continued to work there for years.
The church is supposed to be a place of healing. Instead, we’re consumed with stories of hurt and abuse at the hands of the highest church leaders — and the stories we hear just scrape the surface.
How many stories live in the void, untold and unexamined?
The church stopped worshipping a god of love and sacrifice a long time ago, and moved toward becoming a business that often leaves the most vulnerable silenced and hurting. We need to see a real systemic change within the church, one that de-prioritizes the pastor and the financial bottom line and cares deeply about the people they’ve left wounded.
When we turn a pastor into a celebrity we celebrate all the wrong things: patriarchal norms, greed and hunger for increased financial wealth and church attendees and all-consuming pride. We have an epidemic of silence in the church, and every voiceless victim is proof that we’ve sacrificed the wrong things.