Susan D.

Texas

I was 15 years old in 1982 when my small-town Texas church hired a new Youth Minister. No one seemed concerned about this man’s “engagement” to an under-aged girl at his previous church. He was a SBC “Golden Boy”; went to HBU on a full-pay scholarship because he was considered such an asset to the ministry.

…and no one thought to distrust him when he began to make requests of my family to always bring me home latest after youth functions. Not even as he began to give me short “sex education” lessons (grooming me, desensitizing me). 

I lost my virginity, my dignity, my innocence on the couch in the pastor’s office at 15 years old.  

After he would satisfy himself, he would always pray with me for forgiveness and pledge me not to tell, because we were ‘married in God’s eyes anyway’ and because ‘some people wouldn’t understand and if I told’, they would ‘lose faith in church and their redemption would be lost’.

This man did marry me the very week I turned 18; partially I believe to further insulate him from the criminal charges he should have faced. I bore him two children.

When I met this man, I was full of all the promise of youth. I was at the top of my class at a small Christian school, was competing in the Miss Teen Texas pageant, and already had several colleges trying to woo me. By the time I’d been with him for three years, I was a high school drop out, was working as a bar maid making $3 an hour trying to pay back a small Christian store he’d embezzled $38,000.00 from, and was suffering from severe depression. Our sham of a marriage was wrought with deceit, pornography addiction, and sexual abuse in most every form. I did not know how to escape the trap I was in.

I was treated with every anti-depressant known throughout the next several years. I finally attended a conference in Colorado that somehow gave me the strength to break free, but not soon enough to salvage my youth, education, or the years that I spent trying to understand how something so horrific could have happened to me. How could God have let me suffer so, and why did the church not protect me? Why don’t they still? Why are other children still suffering? And if I’m willing to bear my soul in this way, to acknowledge this shame and hurt, why won’t the church embrace me as a child of God, listen, and use my experience to help protect others?
____________________________________________

[Susan also told me that she tried to report her perpetrator to the Baptist General Convention of Texas, but received no help in trying to warn others.]