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Religion News Service - Missouri School of Journalism [Columbia MO]
October 27, 2025
By Abbi Nye
The crucial truth to remember is that when someone comes forward and tells the truth about abuse, they are not the one causing harm to the church.
Facing allegations he mishandled abuse incidents in his Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of the Upper Midwest, Bishop Stewart Ruch wrote to then-Archbishop Foley Beach in January 2022, “Both my diocese and the ACNA got hit this summer by a vicious spiritual attack of the enemy. I believe this is the case because both entities are doing robust Gospel work, and Satan hates us.”
The extent of Ruch’s abuse mishandling was exposed in a Washington Post report last week, and he’s on trial within the church for those allegations. The Post also broke news that current ACNA Archbishop Steve Wood faces allegations of sexual harassment, bullying and plagiarism.
For Ruch and his fellow bishops, the “vicious spiritual attack” is not the abuse they have swept under the rug. Rather, to them, it is the survivors and advocates who expose abuse claims and call for accountability.
In summer 2021, a fledgling group called ACNAtoo brought to light multiple alleged accounts of sexual abuse within the Upper Midwest Diocese, my diocese of 17 years, claiming that leaders at my former church had badly mishandled the cases. I found ACNAtoo’s extensive documentation convincing, but I’m an archivist, which means I check my sources.
For two months, I methodically went through 20 years of website crawls. I analyzed years of Vimeo and Issuu caches of videos and publications. I went back through blog posts and social media profiles. I searched for 501(c)(3) filings and data. I even ran background checks. I saw enough to confirm what I hoped would not be true: the patterns of abuse were all there — the concentration of power, elitism, manipulation, secrecy, excessive control and forced accountability. So I became an advocate with ACNAtoo.
In the last four years, ACNAtoo has expanded our mission to support survivors of abuse throughout the denomination. We are an all-volunteer organization of fewer than 10 people. The vast majority are current or former ACNA parishioners and survivors of abuse ourselves. We have no leaders or official titles — we simply identify ourselves as advocates and we make decisions as a team. We are united in our determination to fight abuse in all its forms by centering the needs of survivors and educating those around them to do the same.
Our tiny band of advocates never expected that we would hear more than 120 cases of abuse and mishandling — involving 240 victims, according to our records — from across the denomination; almost half the cases came from outside the Upper Midwest Diocese. The cases allege clergy sexual abuse of adults and children, clergy sexual harassment, domestic violence and child abuse, financial coercion and malfeasance, workplace bullying, and pervasive clergy spiritual abuse of parishioners. In most of these cases, it is the clergy and bishops who are named as abusers themselves. How many of them have been disciplined by the ACNA? Almost none.
Advocating for survivors of church abuse is hard. It means listening to stomach-churning stories, walking alongside survivors as they process their trauma and supporting survivors when they seek justice through a church’s official channels.
Helping survivors navigate church systems would transform a saint into an atheist. We carefully gather documentation, spend hours revising emails with the assumption that anything could be published online or in a lawsuit, sit in Zoom meetings where church lawyers attempt to discredit survivors, and in the end, it’s mostly futile.
In the past week, The Post has published explosive stories that usually result in immediate termination or resignation in the secular world. But in the ACNA, some leaders are casting the presentation of allegations as evidence of a healthy disciplinary process, rather than what it truly is: the rotten fruit of a denomination that refuses to take abuse seriously.
In this upside-down world, advocates are the problem, not corrupt and abusive bishops. When the child sexual abuse scandal first broke in Ruch’s diocese, ACNA Rev. Matt Kennedy, rector of Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York, wrote on X that survivor advocates “are not seeking justice. They want power and they want to settle political scores.”
ACNA Rev. James Gibson, vicar at the Church of the Holy Trinity Grahamville in Ridgeland, South Carolina, went further. On X, he wrote of ACNAtoo advocates, “Best to treat them as the unreasoning brutes they are. We’ve heard these arguments before. We know where they come from. And the smell of burning sulfur is palpable.”
Too many Christians experience horrific abuse in church and tell themselves that it’s just that one church. It was an unhealthy church, a cult, a high-control group, and other churches are safer. Refugees fleeing the Southern Baptist Convention, Presbyterian Church in America and other fundamentalist Christian groups see the ACNA as a haven. Instead of finding sanctuary, they often encounter church leaders who are unable to care for them. These churches do not understand the dynamics of abuse, and they are incredibly unsafe for wounded people.
“The Christian Church has had 2,000 years to get this right,” wrote survivor and advocate Joanna Rudenborg to the ACNA in 2021. “If any church’s reflexive posture is not that of tending thoroughly to survivors (which includes actively figuring out how to do so, without further harming the survivors), I personally recommend the survivor flee that church community as soon as they are able and find Good Samaritans wherever they are to be found.”
It takes courage for survivors to come forward with their stories. As strange as it may sound, they offer a gift to the community when they expose abuse and warn us about the predators hiding in our midst. It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge that our churches are not safe places, and we often shun courageous survivors instead of accepting their gift.
The crucial truth to remember is that when someone comes forward and tells the truth about abuse, they are not the one causing harm to the church. We do not blame a doctor when they deliver a grim diagnosis, and survivors are not the ones to blame when they divulge their abuse. The perpetrators alone are responsible for that pain. Abuse corrodes a church, whether it is spoken aloud or not. Naming the abuse, if anything, allows churches the opportunity to come to terms with the truth and begin the healing process. We cannot treat what we cannot name.
Our churches need to wake up. Advocates and abuse survivors aren’t the devil’s employees. If you want to find the devil, follow the church leaders who leave a trail of broken bodies in their wake. That is the road to hell.
(Abbi Nye is an advocate with ACNAtoo, a grassroots group created by and for survivors of abuse in the ACNA. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)