Why #ACNAtoo?

Dear ACNA survivors, members, leaders, friends, and allies,


Thank you for being here. 

#ACNAtoo is a grassroots movement in support of survivors of abuse by ACNA leaders. They are joined by their advocates, friends, and current and former members of ACNA. Like #MeToo, #ChurchToo, and #SBCtoo before us, we seek to make the voices of survivors heard so we can learn from their stories and serve them well as they pursue recovery and justice. 

We also seek to prevent the unspeakable pain they have experienced from ever happening again at the hands of ACNA leaders or members. We hope to always be a people who are learning and growing in wisdom in Jesus so that we can be wise in preventing abuse when possible. When a predator manages to sneak through even our most vigilant defenses and abuse tragically occurs, we want to care for survivors well and provide them with the care that they need. We also know that many ACNA members are survivors of abuse perpetrated outside of ACNA. We want to listen to them, learn from what they have to say, and serve them well.


When survivors do report abuse, we want to see policies in place to make sure that the allegations are investigated in ways that make it safe for unknown victims to come forward. We want to make sure that leaders who feel threatened by what the investigation might reveal about their own choices or those of their friends do not have control over the investigation or its final report. We want to make sure that the first concern of any diocese that receives a report of abuse is to prioritize the well-being of the survivors of abuse rather than protect the reputations of church leaders and institutions. We want our ACNA leaders to respond to allegations of abuse not as “legal challenges” but as a call to embody the character of Christ to all those involved. 


I love my ACNA parish. I love my ACNA clergy. I’ve never met my bishop, but everyone I know in my parish thinks well of him.

I am not here to attack ACNA members, volunteers, employees, deacons, priests, or bishops.

We are all on the same team, even if we do not have the same strategies for how to win this game.


I am sure that there are some of you who are concerned that the existence of a grassroots ACNA reform movement like #ACNAtoo expresses a lack of confidence in the willingness of our bishops to do the right thing.


Speaking for myself, this is not entirely the case. For the most part, I am confident that the vast majority of our bishops, clergy, and laypeople agree that we want to be a denomination that holds ourselves to the highest standards of policy, training, and practice in abuse prevention and response to abuse allegations, especially in the care of survivors of abuse. 


I also believe that our leaders cannot do this work on their own and that it’s not realistic for us to expect them to do so.


Leading the province of ACNA is a complex operation that requires a great deal of labor and expertise. Insuring the safety of our churches and the care of abuse survivors is only one aspect of what they are called to do as leaders of this province, though it is an important aspect and one that demands urgent attention from us all when we discover a problem.


Preventing abuse in our churches is everyone’s job. Caring for survivors well is everyone’s job. We all have some level of learning that we need to do in the near future to accomplish this goal.


I believe that Jesus has equipped His body with everything that it needs to care for its people. We cannot ask for our bishops to instantly be experts on abuse prevention, best practices for responding to abuse allegations, and survivor-sensitive standards of caring for those who have been abused and their families.


I do not have expertise in these areas either, and neither do most of you. We do have experts among us who are therapists trained in trauma-informed responses to abuse and survivor-sensitive support practices. We have attorneys who can guide our denomination in making sure that our safety training and responses to abuse allegations free us to be the church rather than an organization trying to protect itself from legal liability by holding survivors of abuse and their families at arms length. We have volunteers and staff members who are well-versed in survivor-sensitive best practices for abuse prevention. We have clergy in every level of the ACNA hierarchy that love us and want to support us in becoming more like Jesus. We have theologians who can help us find language for how Jesus understands abuse, recovery, and the role of the church in becoming a place that is hospitable to those who have been abused while hostile to predators. We have survivors who can tell us what kind of help they need as well as what kinds of responses have compounded the harm done to them by their abusers. We have people who have left our churches because we lost their trust with our previous failures. If we are willing to listen, they might be willing to tell us what it would take for us to make amends for our mistakes so we can become people who won’t make them again.


We have a God who is a Father who loves us and sent us Jesus, who gave himself up for us. We have the Holy Spirit, who guides us and empowers us so that we can be conformed to Jesus and not only know what a Good Father is like, but embody something of that goodness to others.


I am a hopeful person because I have experienced profound healing from trauma thanks to God using an Anglican church that loved me well over twenty years ago. They didn’t always know how to help me. However, they were always confident that Jesus knows how to help. Jesus knows how to guide us to people who already know how to help, and he knows how to meet us when no earthly help is to be found. I am alive today because my Anglican parish demonstrated the love of Jesus and showed me over many long years that they were willing to do whatever it took to become people who can help. 


I am also a person that carries what I hope is an appropriate level of suspicion about our good intentions. Very few people are sincerely opposed to good abuse prevention practices. Very few people intend to mistreat survivors. Most people sincerely wish to prevent abuse and be helpful to survivors. 


Most abuse happens because sincere and well intentioned people lack the practical wisdom to live out their good intentions in ways that produce good fruit. The process of becoming wise and being able to live out our good intentions means we have to acknowledge that we have not yet arrived at our goals. We have to troubleshoot when we realize we have made mistakes. We have to regularly ask the Holy Spirit to shape us so that we can learn to see our mistakes because we all have blindspots and don’t know where they are yet. We need to repent of our errors and make amends. We need to be people who continue to grow so that the seeds of our good intentions, watered by the Spirit, yield the good fruit that all want to see.


Sincerity is good, but it is not enough.


Good intentions are essential, but they do not guarantee a good impact.


I am confident that most people who read the pleas that survivors of abuse in ACNA have recently shared on Twitter believe them, are heartbroken, and want to help them find justice and healing.


I also know that some of you are confused and are not sure who to believe. Believing the survivors might mean that you have also believed things about people who you love that you do not want to be true. The things that you are hearing from survivors may not seem consistent with the best experiences that you have of them or your knowledge of their sincere good intentions. None of us are reducible to our worst moments, but we are also not reducible to our best moments when the Holy Spirit uses us to manifest the love and power of God to others. Wonderful people who Jesus has used to love us can also have blindspots and areas where they still need to grow. They can still hurt people who get caught in those blindspots. The harm that they have done can be real and the love that they have shown you is real. The good fruit that you have experienced from their ministry can be real and the bad fruit that the survivors and their support team have shared with us can be real at the same time.


Very few people who cause harm are hardened predators, though we have seen that those exist in our midst as wolves in sheep’s clothing, seeking to devour the most vulnerable in our midst.


Many of those who cause harm are not predators, or at least do not start out that way. They are people who have good intentions but are overconfident in their current capacity to follow through on those good intentions. They are people who are sincere, but do not listen to those they are trying to serve. They are people who cover up their mistakes because of deep shame or fear of the consequences if their mistakes are exposed. They are people who may not be aware at all that they have done profound harm. In their love of their own ability to see clearly, they may have deafened themselves to the cries of people in pain because they have already decided that the survivors are not credible witnesses. 


Our awareness of culpability does not become more evident when our guilt is increased or our repentance is postponed. We become less sensitive to the harm we have done. What is left are the parts of us that evade profound shame because it exceeds our current ability to hope that Jesus can forgive and restore us. What is left is a profound sense of one’s own sincerity and a wounded indignation that one’s good intentions are not being given the weight we think they deserve.


When we operate in sentimental sincerity as a means of avoiding shame, we construct a shared fantasy world in which truly wicked predators can play and cause further harm. No one is so easily deceived by a predator who can perform the appearance of sincerity like leaders who have deceived themselves about the power of their own sincerity to change the world.


I believe that the tragic injustices that the survivors of abuse in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest have brought to our attention are primarily the result of leaders being sentimental about their good intentions and lacking the capacity to deal with a burden of shame that has exceeded their real hope in the power of Jesus to set things right.


I believe they must be held accountable for their actions and inactions that have caused harm to survivors and others. I believe, though I don’t know them, that they love Jesus and didn’t mean for this to happen. I believe that they need to see us walk in the light so they can distinguish the Light of Christ from the false light of their sincere good intentions.


I do not know the leaders of the Diocese of the Upper Midwest, Church of the Resurrection, and Christ our Light Anglican. Though I am angered at the way they have responded to abuse survivors, I doubt that they are monsters. However, the documentation shared by the survivors in their pleas for our help demonstrate that they have done monstrous things. The mistakes they have made both individually and corporately are mistakes that sincere believers in Jesus can make when we are not wise. They could be me under the wrong circumstances. Perhaps they could be you as well.


I also do not know our bishops. I want to believe that they are all good men who are sincere and have not only good intentions, but the commitment to become people who can live out their good intentions. However, when one bishop fails us, our trust in all of our bishops is potentially damaged. It is the responsibility of all of our bishops to hold Bishop Ruch accountable for his behavior. He has not only damaged his own witness, he has damaged the credibility of us all, including that of his fellow bishops. 


No one cares about our sincerity and good intentions if we cannot show them good fruit.  I am willing to extend enough trust in our leaders to give them a chance to demonstrate that the behavior we have seen from Bishop Stewart Ruch III does not reflect the character and capacities of the rest of the bishops in our province. But I will not trust them entirely until their good intentions grow into good fruit and can be harvested for the glory of God, the to the benefit of the church and world we are called to serve.


I believe in you, but the Lord is going to have to help my unbelief until I see healing for ACNA and the survivors who are pleading with us to seek justice.


I also understand that there may be leaders and laypeople who do not understand, value, or support our goals, let alone the methods we have chosen to raise awareness and to encourage ACNA to take action. I hope that if you don’t share our goals of caring for survivors and protecting our people, you will reveal yourselves quickly so we can know who you are and can take steps to protect our people from you. If you don’t care for our methods, that’s fine. I don’t need you to. Please spend your energy and time working to achieve our shared goals in whatever way you think is best. If you don’t like our methods and aren’t working to achieve our supposedly shared goals, I don’t have time or energy for you or for your sentimental indignation. My time and energy goes to the people who Jesus wants us to serve, not to you.


Every person who shares on this website is speaking for themselves. We do not agree on everything and we don’t need to in order to collaborate to reach our shared goals. If you think a different perspective is needed on a particular area of concern, you are welcome to share it. We are not “employees” of ACNAtoo and have our own full-time responsibilities outside of this website and outside of these issues. This website and all of its content were built over the course of a few days by volunteers who heard the pleas of the survivors as they began to release their statements. We chose to do something about it with the time, energy, resources, and skills we had available. You can do something about it with the resources you have available, and you don’t have to wait for us to tell you what to do. 


We have given you suggested action steps, but don’t wait for us to approve other ideas that you might want to share. We are not in authority over you. We need you to do what is in front of you. Join us by taking action and organizing your own responses to these issues in your local communities. This website is not an indication that other people have done the work that needs to be done and that you can breathe a sigh of relief. This website is an invitation for you to join us in this work. We cannot do this ourselves and we need you to do your part.


We all have a responsibility to the survivors in our midst. We have a responsibility to every person under authority to make sure that their leaders do not harm them with the power that comes with authority. When we make mistakes, particularly as leaders, we have a responsibility to repent, to repair the damage we have done, and to do what it takes to become people who can help.


We need to all ask Jesus to do whatever it takes to make us into people who can help instead of harm. We need to ask him to make us into people who can repair harm when it occurs through our own choices or through those of others. When this happens, we may no longer longer need an #ACNAtoo because at least for a time, we will be ACNA 2.0. The progress of ACNA 2.0 will only be sustained if its leaders train their successors to imitate Christ and bear good fruit. That will be their job. 


Today, our job is to lament without stopping at lament. We must think and pray, but our thoughts and prayers are meaningless without obedience to walk in truth. We will do this together, with Jesus, because Jesus knows how to help.


Jesus is Lord.

In hope of the resurrection and ACNA 2.0,


Heather Patton Griffin

#ACNAtoo volunteer & advocate
Duke Divinity School MTS candidate, ‘21
Duke Divinity Theology, Medicine & Culture Fellow, 2017
Member, All Saints Church, Durham, NC



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