New Life Church in Cumberland, Indiana — a United Pentecostal congregation — recently found itself under scrutiny after it came to light that a worker at the church’s daycare was giving Melatonin gummies to children taking naps.
Paul Caudill started noticing behavioral changes in his 3-year-old daughter about Christmastime.
“She would have random outbursts of emotion and it would always be toward bedtime,” Caudill said. “She wouldn’t eat. She would complain about headaches.”
Caudill said his wife was ready to take the toddler in for medical testing when Pastor David Faulk at New Life Church in Cumberland pulled him aside on February 1st as he dropped his daughter off at daycare on her birthday.
”He pulled me into his office and he had explained to me that one of the employees had been giving my daughter melatonin,” said Caudill. ”I was like, ‘So, you mean that somebody had been drugging my daughter?’ He said, ‘Yeah, well, it’s been brought to our attention that one of our associates has been administering melatonin to a number of children for sixty days.’
”There was a lot of anger that came in towards the end of it but I was in a church with a pastor.”
Tonya Rachelle Voris, 52, was fired in late January as the executive director of Kidz Life Childcare Ministry and now faces a felony charge of neglect of a dependent and a misdemeanor charge of reckless supervision.
In a Probable Cause Affidavit, Cumberland Police indicated they had interviewed most of the parents of the 17 children identified by the pastor as having likely been dosed with the over-the-counter sleep medication.
Many of those parents told detectives that their children had also suffered side effects from the unauthorized doses.
In the PC, CPD determined that, “Voris dispensed the Melatonin gummies to forcefully induce sleep in several children for her personal gain in not having to deal with fussy or problematic children who would not sleep during naptime which was characterized by several staff members as their break-time.”
While Pastor Faulk said Voris admitted dispensing the medication to the children, one of whom was just a 1-year-old, she refused to talk to investigators.
What stood out to me in this story was a statement by Paul Caudill. Caudill’s daughter was one of the children drugged at New Life’s daycare.
With it being a church organization, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether my daughter is safe at that facility.
Caudill’s statement reveals a common belief about churches: that churches are safe places, especially for children; that churches and pastors are trustworthy and safe. This sentiment is common among believers and unbelievers alike. Few people seem to question whether these things are true.
Churches are wrongly viewed as bastions of morality; church members, pastors, youth directors, Sunday school teachers, worship leaders, ministry workers, and Christian school and daycare workers are moral and ethical. Few people ask “how do we know this is true”? Does the evidence at hand support the notion that churches and pastors should, without qualification, be trusted? I contend it does not.
Part of the problem is that religion, in general, is viewed as the wellspring of morality. In the United States, Christianity, a text-based religion, is viewed as the de facto standard for morality and ethics. While I am an atheist and a humanist, I fully recognize the deep imprint Christian morality has made on my life. An increasing number of public schools are posting the Ten Commandments on the walls of their classrooms. Evangelical parents are clamoring for Bible-based religious instruction in schools. Why? These parents think that the Bible’s teachings and morality are one and the same.
Churches, then, are viewed as dispensers of morality. It is assumed that those dispensing these teachings are themselves “moral.” Surely, if a man stands in the pulpit on Sundays dispensing moral truth, he practices what he preaches, right? Surely other authority figures in churches do the same. Or so the thinking goes, anyways.
I was in the Evangelical church for fifty years. I was a pastor for twenty-five years. I have intimate and extensive knowledge about what goes on behind the scenes in churches. I know where the bodies are buried. I know about cover-ups meant to protect church reputations over children and vulnerable adults. I have been critiquing Evangelicalism for decades. Since 2017, I have published the Black Collar Crime Series. One thousand stories strong, this series lays bare the notion that churches are safe havens; that pastors can and do commit crimes; that no one should be trusted by default.
Just because churches do background checks doesn’t mean they are safe. All background checks do is check whether someone was convicted of a crime. If a sexual predator, for example, is never arrested or convicted, his background check will come back clean. Further, nothing stops someone from committing crimes after his background check. Most predators are repeat offenders. Rarely do they get caught the first time — despite offending preachers swearing before God and their churches that they only did what they did once.
I am not suggesting that churches are, by default, “evil” or havens for predators. I am saying, however, that people shouldn’t uncritically trust churches, pastors, and other authority figures. Churches are easy places for predators to hide in plain sight. Youth pastors, in particular, are notorious for taking advantage of teen girls. And just because a so-called man of God preaches rousing sermons on morality, it doesn’t mean that he, himself, is moral.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I would go ballistic if someone habitually drugged my child at daycare!!!
You’re correct -an inordinate number of people place absolute trust in churches and Christians as defacto upstanding citizens. However, more people are becoming wise to the fact that many people in churches do terrible things.
SSDD. here in PA, the JWs are under investigation. https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/acting-attorney-general-henry-announces-charges-against-five-men-for-sexual-abuse-of-children-across-pennsylvania/
Child abuse at daycare, or any form abuse by a caretaker, is sadly and frustratingly pretty much universal in occurrence. Secular care facilities struggle with the same issues. I don’t have data on how common such incidents are, but I’m sure a diligent search would turn up results pretty quickly-I hope this sort of stuff is rarer than the media surrounding it makes it out to be, I fear it is not.
That said, operating a service such as childcare under the auspices of a religious institution (assumed to be Christian in this case) implies a level of trust that supersedes mere background checking. Presumably the Holy Spirit is indwelling the faithful, influencing choices and behavior. When the very spirit of God cannot restrain abuse, that should raise serious questions among those faithful. If the response is that “only God knows the spiritual condition of an individual” (i.e.: a non-saved person slipped slipped through the screening process) the next question should be “why didn’t the Holy Spirit provide discernment to church leadership overseeing the caretaking service to recognize the viper in the their midst before harm was done?”
Most evangelical churches include the indwelling of the spirit as part of their doctrinal foundation statements. Where abuse is taking place within the church against children, youth, vulnerable members-anyone putting their trust and safety in the hands of the church leadership, where is God? Churches I am familiar with supposedly “bathe” their ministries in prayer. If something like the scenario in this post occurs, the pastor should be challenged over how they and how God allowed it to happen. Of course, we know how that is often answered.
I will give this pastor credit for exposing the abuse, but that is small comfort to parents.
JW–How does anyone know whether someone else is “indwelt” with the Holy Spirit? If forensic background checks don’t always reveal actual or would-be criminals, how can a standard not based on any sort of empirical evidence tell us anything at all about a person’s fitness to be around children?
Drugging children? That’s a new low, even for a church.
I would argue that if such a thing exists, the proof would be self-evident. It is clearly not. The very existence of Bruce’s Black Collar Crime series demonstrates that if there is a Holy Spirit it is impotent, neither influencing nor granting discernment to believers or, as seems more likely, not there at all.