A pastor’s #MeToo story

ROCHESTER (NY)
The Christian Century

December 4, 2017

By Ruth Everhart

“What can we do to make this go away?” a member of the personnel committee asked.

ur culture is facing a new accountability. Each day brings a tale of some powerful perpetrator brought low. Victims tell of unwanted sexual advances that made them feel less than human, less than holy. The stories are not new, but they are newly being heard.

Like so many women, I have unsought expertise in this subject. Decades ago I was raped at gunpoint. Writing a memoir about that event brought me into contact with dozens of other survivors. What strikes me is how our stories echo Tamar’s story in 2 Samuel 13. Our agency was stripped from us by multiple men—not only the Amnons who abused us, but the Jonadabs who connived to set us up, and the Absaloms who silenced us, or even exploited our trauma for their own ends. And in church contexts there was all too often a powerful King David, whose abuse of Bathsheba was visited upon the next generation.

I wrote my memoir to reclaim my own agency. Now I have another story to tell. In many ways, this one is even more difficult to set down on paper. The offender was not a stranger who broke into my home, but a person who’d been charged to care for me. This offender was my boss, my senior pastor, the person privileged to lay his hands on me to ordain me to my first call.

Zane Bolinger was the beloved senior pastor of Penfield Presbyterian Church, a thriving suburban church near Roches­ter, New York, when I received a call to be its associate pastor for children and youth in 1990. “From here you’ll be able to go anywhere!” ZB told me the first time we talked. “The sky’s the limit!” I felt lucky to receive a first call to such a healthy church. My new boss was a recent widower, 62 years old—twice my age—and serving as the moderator of the presbytery. He assured me I would soon be in positions of power, too.

Ministry was the vocation I desired with all my heart. My husband, Doug, and I relocated to upstate New York with our two daughters, a preschooler and an infant. Doug’s teaching credentials did not transfer smoothly so we decided that, for the first few months at least, he would be a stay-at-home dad and I would support the family. We would have to live paycheck to paycheck.

That October, ZB was to preach my ordination service. He said it was important that we get to know each other before that. He took me out for lunch weekly, to nice restaurants, where we talked about church in only cursory ways. Mainly he probed me about my history, especially my story of rape at gunpoint, which I was very private about at that time. He pressed me for details in a way that only the detectives and prosecuting attorney had ever done. ZB wanted to know how I managed to have intimate relationships with men, considering this history. I felt beholden to answer because he was my boss and, I thought, a man of wisdom and power.

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