It’s Sunday now, and on all of day sixty-nine, Saturday, May 17, 2025, in the countdown to a woefully unprotected Camp-Meeting, my mind was partially focused on the quality time that I was spending with my daughters, and partially wrestling with how and if to tell the story at the core that drives me to advocate for change in the British Columbia Seventh-Day Adventist Child Protection Policy related to sex offenders.
This is hard. And I’m doing it anyway.
Because across the globe, from the islands of Micronesia to the campsites and classrooms of British Columbia, a chilling pattern has emerged within the Seventh-day Adventist Church—one in which the mantle of spiritual authority has been used not to protect the vulnerable, but to shield the guilty.
Testimony: The Father, The Son, and the Hollow Church
This isn’t just a cause to me.
It’s my life.
My survival.
My sacred knowing.
I was a teenager when I was sxually assulted.
Not by a stranger.
By someone raised in the church.
Someone groomed by power.
Someone who learned, intimately, how to silence conscience and override boundaries–because that’s what he saw modeled, sermon after sermon.
His father was a prolific abuser.
A man who preached with fire
while his hands were full of ash and ruin.
He led the church.
He led the flock.
He led the lie.
He passed down more than scripture.
He passed down entitlement.
Control.
The belief that spiritual authority gave him access to bodies, not just pulpits.
And the son learned well.
He carried the mantle of manipulation like a birthright.
I wasn’t his first.
I wasn’t his last.
But I was silenced–like the others–by the machinery of respectability, shame, and sanctified denial.
When I tried to say no, I did twice.
I fought and won.
And then he waited–until I was unguarded.
Until sleep wrapped me, and trust had not yet learned to scream.
And then he took.
And the worst part?
I had been trained to ignore the alarms in my own soul.
To forgive too quickly.
To submit.
To assume that silence was safer than truth.
Because the church had already taught me that obedience was holier than boundaries.
But I am breaking the silence now.
Not just for myself,
but for the ones still hiding under pews of shame.
For the ones still told to “leave it with God” when justice is demanded.
For the ones who are still learning that God is not the same as the church.
The father harmed many. The son harmed many.
And the church–
The church kept letting them lead.
Emboldened by the silence of the abused.
So I testify:
This is not the will of God.
This is the work of systems
that substitute charisma with character,
and repentance with reputation management.
And I will not protect them with my silence anymore.
As the Adventist Church leaders who are policy decision makers have remained silent, ignoring all communication around the concern for safety at BC Camp-meeting because sex offenders are allowed to attend with conditions that are not adequately protective, I have created a petition to seek engagement towards progress. Please sign if your conscience speaks to you:
The Hollow Comforter
(The Church Edition)
by Saran Lewis
You came with scriptures on your lips
and policies in your pocket—
robes rustling like they were holy,
like they hadn’t brushed past bruises
to get to the pulpit.
You offered me comfort
with hands that clutched
the silence of my suffering
like a relic.
You preached redemption
while tucking away
the names of the men who broke us.
You offered prayer
while kneeling on the graves
of the warnings I gave you.
You said:
“We are here for you.”
But only if I whispered.
Only if I bled quietly.
Only if I let your stained glass version
of forgiveness
rewrite the truth
until it fit neatly into your service schedule.
You called me a “survivor”
but flinched when I spoke like one.
You said “God loves justice,”
but only when justice
didn’t stain your carpets.
You wanted my testimony,
but not my trembling.
My healing,
but not my fury.
My strength,
but only after you repackaged my pain
into something “edifying.”
You wanted me
cleansed, not crying.
Forgiving, not fierce.
Silent. Not sovereign.
But I have learned the language of God
in the dark.
And God does not sound like you.
God did not erase me.
You did.
God did not demand my silence.
You did.
God did not call me too much,
too angry,
too broken.
You did.
You are not the comforter.
You are the cloak
behind which the predator prayed.
You are the hymn that drowned out
the sound of children weeping.
You are the hollow thing
offering comfort
with the same hands
that signed the silencing orders.
And I—
I am the altar you tried to burn
but could not.
My grief is not your enemy.
It is your reckoning.
In 2013, when Alicia Koback filed suit against the church, I sat in a Sabbath School class and seethed. A man sneered and called her a money grabber. I didn’t know who Alicia was—I’d never met her—but that article is seared into my mind forever. And I knew that man. He was one who had been protected.
What made it worse was that his sneer directly contradicted the church’s own official statement, published in response to a Vancouver Sun reporter’s inquiry. The statement claimed that the church had a policy of reporting abuse as legally mandated.
And yet, this man—speaking so casually, so assuredly—so disparagingly of a survivor seeking accountability knew that the church had protected him when he was found as a leader to have had inappropriate relationships with multiple minors.
Policy on paper is hollow when it isn’t practiced in truth. Many have been harmed, and many continue to be harmed, while the church crafts polished statements that remain unfulfilled.
And children continue to be harmed
Children continue to be harmed
while leadership pilots whited sepulchres—
not tombs of stone,
but policies and PDFs,
gleaming with performative righteousness
and empty of repentance.
In 2025, the culture of closing ranks persists—
silencing survivors, shielding abusers.
It has become painfully clear:
the policy on paper was never meant to protect the vulnerable.
It was designed as a smokescreen,
a public relations shield to deflect liability,
not a refuge for the wounded.
Within the Seventh-day Adventist community,
great good is done—
and great harm is buried beside it.
Harm that leaves deep generational wounds
and continues to expose little ones—
like the child whose hand
an attending offender held
as if he were her hero,
while yearning to pick her up.
And with the complicity of local pastors,
the leadership executives of the local, regional, and global church remain silent.
Policy and practice need to be ethically constructed and implemented with integrity .
Read the article in the Kandit News for context. If we the people speak up there is hope for progress.
Nurturing Kindred 