My experience with sexual assault and harassment at Idlewild Baptist Church
“Everyone
who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that
their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the
light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been in the
sight of God.”
-
John 3:20-21
I’m
30 years old, and up until a few years ago, I attended Idlewild Baptist Church.
I attended Idlewild my entire life, was married there and dedicated my babies
there. I served in the nursery as a volunteer for several years and worked on
staff in childcare from 2017-2018. During my time as a student and a young
adult, I witnessed and experienced several instances of mental, emotional and
sexual abuse, as well as elaborate coverups to keep these incidents quiet.
I’m
30 years old, and I’m tired of being quiet while more women are harmed, while
our children are at risk, and while the church turns a blind eye to the evil
being carried out by men in leadership at Idlewild. I’m tired of continuing to
participate in church community that communicates to its young men that they
can take out their unresolved trauma and unpleasant feelings on the women
around them, and that they can get away with it. Please understand that I’m
telling the truth. I’m telling my story the way I experienced it.
On
August 12th, I was sexually assaulted by a man I’ve known for the
majority of my adolescence and adult life. His name is Jack Tinker. A few months
ago Jack learned about sexual assault that I had experienced earlier in life, and
at that point began a cycle of mental and emotional abuse and manipulation. He
would work to obtain intimate information about my life, my marriage, my
psychiatric issues, abuse I’d lived through, friendships I had, and use it
against me. He would leverage any information he obtained and weaponized it to
demand pictures or other sexual content. For example, he repeatedly asked me to
video call him while I was in the shower, even though I repeatedly said no. On
multiple instances, he tried to pressure me into going to meet and hook up with
random strangers from the internet, even though I repeatedly said no and asked
him to stop bringing it up. He was consistently trying to pressure me into
uncomfortable or unsafe situations so that he could get off or gain more
leverage over my identity. I didn’t give Jack any say in my sexuality, or
participate in any of these unsafe situations he tried to arrange. I did not
take any of his behavior as threatening, because he normalized it. It’s
important to make clear, he did all of this in the context of friendly
conversations that didn’t feel overtly threatening. Though I see it as
psychological abuse now, it didn’t feel like abuse or manipulation at the time.
I usually walked away from those interactions feeling mildly annoyed, not
violated. Sociopaths and serial abusers are intelligent, they don’t show up at
your door one day out of the blue and assault you. They find weak spots, bring
them up in conversation till it feels normal, casually tease you about your sex
life, flippantly throw out vague comments about their own baggage so it feels
like two friends venting… they play the long game until they can create a
situation in which your guard is down, and they can overpower and control you.
If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will panic and jump out instinctively.
But there is an old wives’ tale that you put a frog in water that’s room
temperature, and eventually raise the temperature, it will sit until it boils
to death. You can’t control women you scare away, and in Jack’s case, he
invested time, mental energy and careful planning in raising the temperature
and the degree of abuse.
On
August 12th, Jack Tinker created a situation in which I was vulnerable,
and he was able to overpower and exert control. He had not been able to control
me sexually prior to this point, and hid his frustration under a veil of
casual, platonic friendship. I had expressed to Jack multiple times that I had
no interest in a physical relationship with him and that I wanted him to stop
asking me. He pretended that this was OK, that he had no interest in me
sexually, and that he would respect the boundary I had set. This was a lie, and
when my guard was down, I was sexually assaulted. (HCSO Case Number: 2020-554779)
To
complete the entire picture, let’s rewind to about fifteen years ago at
Idlewild, when Jack and I were high-school age and attending Idlewild. It was
around this time that Eddie Struble was leaving Idlewild after several years of
allegedly preying on young students in the student ministry. You would think
that his leaving would have been the result of the police being called, an
investigation being done, and him being publicly fired, but this was not the
case. After several years of reports being made that the music pastor was
engaging in inappropriate behavior with underage students, and several years of
covering it up, Eddie took a different job at a different church, with a mostly
unscathed reputation. Why was a pedophile allowed to remain on staff, evade
accountability, and walk out the door free to harm others?
Shortly
after Eddie’s departure, Leo Villanueva was hired as the youth music Pastor.
Handsome, married with a daughter, talented and the recipient of a “Dove
award,” it seemed like Leo would be a great change of pace. Leo started
grooming me when I was 17 years old. After a breakup with a boyfriend, Leo took
the opportunity to capitalize on my vulnerability and initiate an emotional
affair with me. What started as flirtation turned into emotional and mental
abuse: demanding responses, pictures, telling me he loved me and becoming rude
and vindictive if I didn’t say it back fast enough. Extremely immature tactics,
but always making sure that I knew if I really cared about him, I wouldn’t tell
anyone about “us.” Leo began working to create opportunities for us to be
alone, to drive out of town on various student events together, after I turned
18 in the Fall, of course. I genuinely believe that, had I not shared with
friends that this “relationship” was going on, leading to his behavior being
reported to the other pastors, he would have coerced me into a sexual
relationship very soon.
I
wish I was exaggerating; I wish I didn’t have this story to tell. I wish that I
could say I flourished at Idlewild feeling safe, feeling like I was cared about
as an individual, but I didn’t. When Leo’s relationship with me was
investigated, Idlewild was given access to our texts, emails, photos – they had
concrete proof that the story I’m telling today is true. But instead of holding
Leo accountable in a way that restricted his access to students he was a danger
to, he was left in place, and I was told to leave if I was uncomfortable being around
him. Because abusers don’t act in isolation, this behavior continued with
others, multiple times, until he was allowed to resign, unscathed, and similar
to Eddie, continued working in churches and youth ministries for several more
years. After several more years at Idlewild, most of which were shared in
congregation with my abusers, I left Idlewild and never went back.
These
are my experiences – this is what I have endured and witnessed. If we were to
go over every single instance in which Idlewild turned a blind eye to women who
experienced abuse, manipulation, exploitation and harassment under their roof, I
would run out of time. I’ve heard from women who reported domestic/emotional/verbal
abuse and were told the solution was to pray for a change of heart in
themselves. Women who experienced extreme harassment, stalking, other
violations of their persons and autonomy from men in the church, were told to
leave if they were “uncomfortable” attending church with their abusers. There have
been trivial accountability measures put in place, measures that should have
been in place in the first place if the church was ever to be a safe place for its
women, and these men were generally unaffected by any consequences of their
actions.
Before
you get angry with me, blame me for what I’ve survived, skip to the end to write
some scathing comment about the wonderful experiences you had at
Idlewild, HEAR ME: If we were to talk to women within the church about amazing,
divine, healing, empowering experiences they had within the church, I’m sure we
could make 1000 blog posts. But your positive experiences do not invalidate these
men’s victims. Your experience feeling safe inside of the church does not cancel
out the fact that for hundreds of women, and some children, Idlewild has not been
a safe space, and the staff frequently did nothing to make them feel safer in
their church home after they were violated. The fact that you had positive
experiences at church does not mean that Idlewild had less of a biblical
mandate to hold its people accountable for abusive behavior.
Abusers
do not typically act in isolation. Every single one of those men had more
victims who never came forward, regardless of the reasons, and so did Jack
Tinker. Jack was reported for rape in Hillsborough County in 2016, a fact which
Ken Whitten was made aware of shortly before he dismissed the victim and took no
measures to look into the allegation made against Jack. At the time, Jack was a
well-established employee of Idlewild.
Boys
like Jack grow up in churches like Idlewild, and they watch over and over again
as their female peers endure normalized abuse, and are quieted down and neglected.
Some young men see this and decide to do better, to grow into men of character,
safe men who develop a moral compass grounded in ethics and biblical principles.
More often, young men see this and internalize the values they see
demonstrated: they conclude that women don’t deserve as much respect, don’t
have as much of a voice, and are less autonomous than them. These are men that
might not ever physically assault women in adulthood, but they won’t respect a woman
as their equal in God’s image, they won’t value her, they do not honor her autonomy.
They often become frustrated with their inability to control the women in their
lives, and end up with anger issues, chemical and pornography addictions, anything
that allows them to feel as if they have some false sense of control that they
were never entitled to in the first place. But when their church, which should
be the safest place that young boys and girls spend time, instead decides that
the reputation of men who have proven themselves to be undeserving of trust or
respect is more important, what difference does it make if they harm the women
in their life emotionally or mentally? If women’s voices are less valid, and
their bodies less self-governing, and their ideas less valuable, and their
testimonies less trustworthy, why would men who feel angry and entitled bother
to do right by them? This is rape culture at work. This is a disease. The
third type of man that walks out of a place like Idlewild is a man like Jack Tinker.
Men who watched women get assaulted, and watched their claims get ignored. They
watched other abusive men prey on vulnerable women, learned the wrong lessons and
learned how to capitalize on weakness in the same ways, and worse.
I
am not the only woman whom Jack has assaulted – I wasn’t even the only victim
from when he was in town that week – and I genuinely believe that if I do not
publicly tell the truth, I will not be the last either. I have nothing to
personally gain from damaging Jack’s reputation, or the reputation of Idlewild,
but the truth needs to come to the light so that this can stop happening. I’m
calling on Pastor Ken Whitten to get his house in order. This is the pastor
who married my husband and me, who dedicated our babies, and I know his desire
is for the church to be stronger and holier. I’m calling on the leadership at
Idlewild to stop allowing men who abuse their power to stay in leadership. I’m
calling on Idlewild to hold its men to a biblical standard of behavior, across
the board, without exception.
“If
you show favoritism, you commit sin, and you are convicted by the law as transgressors”
-
James 2:9
“Mankind,
He has told you what is good and what it is the Lord requires of you: to act
justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
-
Micah 6:8
During
Jesus’s ministry on earth, He radically changed the way that society,
particularly religious leaders, viewed and treated women. He sought out the
broken women who had been abused, who were promiscuous, who were neglected, and
advocated for them publicly. When male religious leaders wanted to publicly
punish women, Jesus stopped them, forcing them to examine their own behavior
before casting the first stone. He didn’t call them into a quiet room, and
gently explain to them that it would look bad to publicly stone this woman. He
called it out publicly. He cared more about the behavior that happened within
the church than the world’s perception of the church. He knew it would be frowned
on, but he sat and fellowshipped with women, he listened to their opinions, and
he called out any men who criticized or questioned him for it. If women were
valuable to Jesus, why aren’t they valuable to the church? If women’s voices were
valid with Jesus, and their safety worth advocating for, why isn’t this true of
the church? Moreover, why isn’t the church striving to be a safe place where
anyone who deliberately causes harm to those he was given the responsibility to
shepherd is no longer allowed to shepherd them? Why is it more important to
preserve the reputation of the church BUILDING than to protect its members? If
all people are made in the image of God, and this is the truest thing about
their identity, why are men in leadership treated as if they are more
important, or their reputation more valuable?
“…and
when they persisted in questioning Him, He stood up and said to them, “the one without
sin among you should be the first to throw a stone at her.”
-
John 8:7
All
I’m really asking for is for the church to act like Jesus. To honor, protect
and believe its women. To openly advocate for their value and validity and to
publicly call out people who would cause them harm. Patriarchy is not God’s
dream for humanity, and rape culture was not God’s vision for the church. This
is why now, at thirty years old, I have left the church, and chosen Jesus
instead.
