As the #MeToo movement has gained steam, a parallel movement has ramped up in the evangelical world, “#ChurchToo”—calling out sexual abuse in evangelical churches. Many of you know that the movement claimed its highest-profile scalps this summer, when the entire top leadership of Willow Creek Community Church resigned after it emerged that it mishandled allegations of sexual assault by founding pastor Bill Hybels.
But we got a sobering reminder earlier in the week that a lot of work remains to be done. Earlier this week, Evangelical Christian Predators, a blog that turns the hot lights on the large number of sexual predators still lurking in the church, turned its attention to John Longaker, pastor of Fellowship BIble Church in Castleton, Vermont, near Rutland.
Several church members, including Longaker, were on hand to defend a member of his church who was hoping to get off Vermont’s sex offender registry. But it turns out that Longaker has skeletons in his closet as well, as documented by Dee Parsons at Wartburg Watch.
Longaker spent most of the 1990s as a teacher at Faith Christian Academy in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. Starting around 1992, he began counseling one of his students, Kelly Haines. The sessions took place both in his classroom and at Faith Baptist Church, the independent Baptist church of which the school was a ministry. Kelly also frequently worked as a babysitter for the Longakers’ adopted son.
Part of Longaker’s “counseling” involved a level of touching that would seem way off even by 1990s standards. By her junior year, his contact became unmistakably sexual in nature. By the time Kelly graduated, Longaker had moved to New Hampshire and taken a job at a Christian school in nearby Massachusetts. On a trip back home from college, Kelly noticed Longaker showering the same attention on girls that he had with her.
When she told a friend what happened, they immediately alerted their church’s pastor, who called the police. Confronted with the evidence, Longaker confessed. Read his confession here.
According to the (Allentown) Morning Call, Longaker was initially charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault, child endangerment, indecent assault and corruption of minors. If any of those sound familiar, those are among the charges for which Jerry Sandusky was convicted.
However, prosecutors feared that Kelly did not have the emotional stamina for a trial. Ultimately, they hammered out a deal in which Longaker pleaded guilty to child endangerment and corrupting the minors of a minor. He was sentenced to one to two years in prison, the last half of which was spent on probation. Considering what he could have faced, he got the deal of a lifetime. By my admittedly uneducated guess, Longaker was staring down the barrel of 20 years minimum if convicted on the original charges, as well as having to register as a sex offender.
I talked with Kelly earlier this week, and she told me that she was so traumatized at the time that she initially said Longaker’s behavior started after she turned 16. That’s significant, because the penalties are far harsher for abusing a child younger than 16—an outgrowth of the age of consent being 16 in Pennsylvania.
But prosecutors would have had a hard go of it in any event. Despite a smorgasbord of depositions from people who made accusations against Longaker, no one else was willing to testify. This didn’t come as a surprise to me at all, considering what I know about the nature of rape culture in the independent Baptist world. All too often, when accusers come forward, they’re told that they speak up, they risk “damaging the cause of Christ” because they would be held responsible for sending their assailant to hell. Additionally, a sexual assault victim is considered a “strange woman” in many IFB circles. That phrase in the KJV version of Proverbs appears in more contemporary versions as “adulterous woman,” “wayward woman,” or “immoral woman.” Faced with that, is it any wonder that anyone who wanted to testify would have gotten cold feet?
But you would have thought that even with the plea to a lesser charge, such outrageous behavior would have been a bridge too far for any church, even an IFB one—especially in the wake of the Tina Anderson and Josh Duggar scandals. Apparently not, because Kelly discovered in 2015 that Longaker had taken up the pulpit at Fellowship BIble Church.
She reached out to several church members, but the only response was from a guy named Mike Adams. His response is classic victim-shaming and victim-blaming, saying she acted out of “cruel, heartless and selfish desires.” When Wartburg Watch’s Parsons saw this, she suspected that Longaker coached “Adams” on that letter—and may very well be Adams himself.
As you might imagine, the last two decades have been a bumpy time for Kelly emotionally. She was so traumatized by Longaker’s debauchery that she believed Longaker was stalking her for much of 2005 and went to the police. Even though she tried to explain how she’d been traumatized, she was charged with false reporting. She was sentenced to one year of probation, and the charge was scrubbed from her record. She has since been diagnosed with PTSD and dissociative identity disorder, and has been in counseling for some time since then. Indeed, Parsons suspects Longaker either coached “Adams” on that email or wrote it himself because “Adams” knows about that arrest and other details that only Longaker would know.
Parsons talked with Longaker to get his side of the story. His take on this is staggeringly tone-deaf. He claims that he was railroaded by prosecutors who had it in for Christian schools, as well as a defense attorney who thought it was his only shot at probation. He also claims that he and his wife are the real victims.
Kelly told me that she doesn’t think anyone really looked into Longaker’s background before offering him the job. A simple search would have turned up that article in the Morning Call detailing the original charges, as well as his guilty plea. It says a lot that even with her story now out, church officials don't seem to have budged.
Simply put, Fellowship Bible Church has some explaining to do. How did it see fit to allow a convicted child molester in its pulpit? All available evidence suggests this church had a chance to draw a line in the sand regarding abuse in the church—and blew it eight ways to Sunday. Let them have it via the church’s contact form, or via email at castletonfbc at comcast dot net.