There is no denying that the arrival of Western civilization in the Americas has brought with it the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ to those who would have never otherwise heard it. While such evil things — unjust killings — certainly happened, in God’s sovereignty, He used this to bring about a greater good.
….
If these people [America-hating Evangelicals] were truly Christians, they would be thankful that God used such a broken man as Christopher Columbus to bring the gospel to the Americas. North America, much like the continent of Africa, was filled with idolatry of the worst kind. Native Americans, especially in Central and South America, practiced some of the worst affronts to God. Not that America today doesn’t still practice such idolatry — but before the arrival of Western civilization, there was absolutely no gospel to confront it.
The fact that God allowed Westerners to come to the Americas is an enormous act of mercy and grace on His part. He could have completely given them over to their idolatry, or worse, completely wiped them off the face of the Earth. But he didn’t. He chose to show them mercy and by allowing the gospel to be heard in a land that had never heard it before.
Indigenous people should, as every year, be thanking God for colonization on Columbus Day. The Great Commission as promised by Jesus – to spread his name and message throughout the world – has largely been the byproduct of the expansion of Christian empires through colonization. And through colonization, disadvantaged parts of the world have thrived by the influence of God-fearing nations.
….
Native peoples around the world are far better off, more happy, more healthy, and more at peace than they ever would have been before, if it were not for colonization of the New World and the expanse of Christendom throughout the world. Although Columbus himself was a Romanist and not a real believer in Jesus, his voyage across the Atlantic brought the competition of religion between Romanists and Protestants, and set-off the race to Christianize the savage in the New World.
I put out the call to readers, asking them for questions they would like me to answer. If you have a question, please leave it here or email me. All questions will be answered in the order they are received.
Troy asked:
In a local village forum on Facebook, a local Christian counselor spammed his services. I started a bit of a controversy by linking your warning about Christian counseling. I’m not against such religious counseling, but I do think people need to be warned that they aren’t licensed by the state. This guy retorts that he has a masters from a dual accredited school and offers anecdotes of high success rate with some that have tried secular counseling previously. It isn’t really mentioned in your own blog post, but I’d be interested to see your opinion on it, in particular about the dual accreditation.
Troy asked me this question on Facebook, but I thought it would make an excellent question for me to answer publicly. Before reading this post, you might want to read the post Troy mentions, Beware of Christian Counselors. In that post, I give an in-depth look at how utterly unqualified many Evangelical pastors are to provide counseling services. Thanks to the separation of church and state, the federal government and many state governments take a hands-off approach to what happens at houses of worship. Here in Ohio, pastors are free to provide counseling services to anyone who asks for them. In the early 1980s, I was the assistant pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Buckeye Lake, Ohio. I was in my twenties at the time. One young adult — who attended the church from time to time — would frequently stop by my office to talk to me. On numerous occasions, he told me that he was thinking about killing himself. Red light, warning sign, right? This man told me that the only thing holding him back from ending his life was not knowing whether suicide was the unpardonable sin. He was afraid that if he killed himself, God would send him to Hell. This went on for weeks until one day I told him, why don’t you kill yourself and find out? Even now, as I read these words, I am horrified. It matters not whether the man was serious about ending his life or just wanted me to listen to him talk. If the man had actually killed himself, I know that I would have been culpable in his death — but protected by the clergy-congregant seal. Having battled depression and suicidal thoughts much of my adult life, I can only imagine how I might have responded if a pastor told me, why don’t you kill yourself and find out? This is one of those times where the only thing I can say is that I was a stupid young man who allowed my busyness and impatience to affect my relationship with a congregant. The young man, by the way, never “bothered” me again.
Many Christian colleges and universities are accredited. However, it is important to ask who, exactly, is the accrediting body. More than a few Christian colleges are accredited by groups that were established for the express purpose of giving Evangelical institutions cover when being questioned about accreditation. The best way to determine if an institution’s accreditation is of any value is to find out if they accept Pell Grants or VA Education Benefits. If they don’t, it is likely that their “accreditation” is little more than wallpaper covering a hole in a wall. Looks nice, but structurally there are likely to be problems.
Let me be clear, I am not anti-Christian education. Evangelicals are, for the most part, anti-culture. They have spent the past hundred years building a subculture that caters to the wants, needs, and whim Evangelical Christians. I call this subculture the Christian Ghetto. What Evangelicals do is take what the secular world offers and slap the word Christian in front of it: Christian bookstore, Christian music, Christian coffee shop, Christian TV, Christian radio, etc. Sometimes, the word Christian is omitted, and icons are used instead: a cross or the ichthus (fish) symbol. The icons are meant to say to people, “Hey, I am a member of the Jesus club, spend your money here!” As an atheist, when I see such signs, I immediately look elsewhere. Even as a Christian, I frequented businesses based on the quality of their work, and not whether we shared a common faith.
People who live in areas where Evangelicalism has a strong presence can find it difficult or impossible to find a counselor who is not a Christian or doesn’t use “Biblical” methods with clients. One of my sons is a former drug addict. For several years, he drove to Toledo to attend group therapy. The program director was a state-licensed social worker who also happened to be an Evangelical Christian. Most of her techniques were standard operating procedure. However, on more than a few occasions, the woman would tell the group that if they truly wanted deliverance from their addictions, then JESUS was the answer. She would then invite the group to visit her church, where the — wink-wink — “real” answers could be found.
And therein is the problem when you have Evangelical counselors who have state licensure but also have devout religious backgrounds. Rare are Evangelical counselors who can compartmentalize their religious beliefs. I don’t fault them for being unable to do so. Christianity for Evangelicals is more than clothes you wear on Sundays; it’s a worldview, a way of life. Evangelical counselors can no more separate themselves from their beliefs than skunks can separate themselves from their smell.
If Evangelicals want Christian counselors to talk to, that’s fine. That said, pastors and counselors should be required to tell counselees the extent of their training and licensure. And this goes for Evangelicals who are licensed social workers. Such people can’t work in secular settings unless they are willing to build a wall between their religious beliefs and accepted counseling practices. Unfortunately, many Evangelical social workers feel led by God to reach those in need with the gospel and teachings of the Bible. Evangelical social workers know they can’t outwardly and publicly share their faith, so they, instead, look for low-key, behind-the-scenes opportunities to put in a good word in for Jesus. For example, an Evangelical social worker with the welfare department might have a client whose pregnant and already has five young children. The woman asks the social worker what services and programs are available to her. A conscientious social worker would tell the overburdened woman about ALL her options — including abortion. The Evangelical social worker, however, is anti-abortion, so she refers the woman to the local pro-life crisis pregnancy center.
There are countless ways a counselor’s Evangelical beliefs can get in the way of competently helping a client. In the above-mentioned scenario, the social worker committed malpractice and should be fired and have her license revoked. As for the counselor mentioned by Troy, I would want to know where he received his training and licensure. As far as his religious approach to counseling being superior and producing “better” results than secular counseling, I would want more than anecdotal stories to prove his claims. For Christians, Jesus ALWAYS produces superior results, so I suspect that this man likely doesn’t have empirical evidence to back up his claims. He just knows it to be true!
About Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 62, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 41 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve 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. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.
Are you on Social Media? Follow Bruce on Facebook and Twitter.
Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section. If you are a first-time commenter, please read the commenting policy before wowing readers with your words. All first-time comments are moderated. If you would like to contact Bruce directly, please use the contact form to do so.
Donations are always appreciated. Donations on a monthly basis can be made through Patreon. One-time donations can be made through PayPal.
In communities where Evangelical Christianity dominates the culture, it is often hard to find a counselor/psychologist who is not a Christian. It stands to reason that, in a predominantly Christian culture, most counselors would be Christian. This is not a problem if the counselors are able to compartmentalize their religious beliefs, but many counselors who are Christian can’t or won’t do this.
When counselors believe the Bible is an authoritative text, and the standard for moral and ethical conduct, it’s impossible for them to counsel someone objectively. No matter how much they tell themselves otherwise, sooner or later their religious beliefs will affect the advice they give to their clients. The skunk/smell analogy applies here. You can’t separate a skunk from his smell, and neither can you separate an Evangelical Christian from his or her presuppositions and beliefs.
Back when I was still an Evangelical pastor, I started taking classes to become a licensed social worker. It wasn’t long before my Bible-based beliefs conflicted with what I was being taught in class. I asked the dean of the department:
Suppose I am a licensed social worker and I am working for the Department of Human Services. The client is pregnant and is thinking about getting an abortion. Since I am a Christian and I think abortion is morally wrong, would I be able to counsel the woman according to my pro-life beliefs?
The department head made it very clear that, based on my religious and moral beliefs, I would have a hard time working in a secular/state environment. She suggested that I might be able to work for a private, religious service provider, but my religious beliefs would likely preclude me from working in a secular setting.
Of course, this offended me. I thought that I should be able to push my religious beliefs on others. I now see that the department head gave me sound advice. Evangelical Christians often demand they be permitted to work any job in any profession and not be forced to compartmentalize their beliefs. (A current example of this is Evangelical pharmacists who want the right to withhold morning-after drugs from women who might be pregnant.) However, there are some professions where people’s religious beliefs would preclude them from working in that field because their beliefs would not allow them to provide a client or a customer certain services or goods.
Many pastors provide counseling services. Here in Ohio, a pastor is not required to have ANY training before counseling someone. The fact that the counseling is done through the church exempts the pastor from governmental oversight. I knew several pastors who were high school dropouts, with no theological or counseling training, who regularly counseled people — both in and outside of their churches. In the twenty-five years I pastored churches, I never had one person ask me if I was qualified to be a counselor. If asked, I would have told them I took a one-semester counseling class that was more about debunking secular counseling than techniques to help people. (The professor was a pastor who had no training in counseling.) I did, however, get an A in the class.
Many pastors don’t think they need specialized training to counsel people. After all, the inspired, inerrant, infallible Bible has the answer to every question and problem. All a pastor needs to do is figure out what the problem is and find the appropriate Bible verse that addresses the issue. Every difficulty is reduced to obedience/disobedience, sin/righteousness, God/Satan, flesh/spirit. These kinds of pastors are dangerous because they give simplistic answers to complex problems. It is not uncommon to find pastors counseling congregants who have medically diagnosed conditions, but want “God’s help” to overcome their mental illness.
Before seeing a pastor for counseling, a prospective client should ask about his training and qualifications. Even if a pastor has college-level training, the value and extent of that training depends on where he got the training. Many Evangelical colleges have counseling programs that do little more than teach pastors how to proof-text any problem. Many Evangelical colleges teach some form of nouthetic counseling:
Nouthetic counseling (Greek: noutheteo, to admonish) is a form of pastoral counseling that holds that counseling should be based solely upon the Bible and focused upon sin. It repudiates mainstream psychology and psychiatry as humanistic, radically secular and fundamentally opposed to Christianity. Its viewpoint was originally articulated by Jay E. Adams, in Competent to Counsel (1970) and further books, and has led to the formation of a number of organizations and seminary courses promoting it. The viewpoint is opposed to those seeking to synthesize Christianity with secular psychological thought, but has failed to win them over to a purely Biblical approach. Since 1993, the movement has renamed itself Biblical counseling to emphasize its central emphasis on the Bible. The Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology and Counseling states that “The aim of Nouthetic Counseling is to effect change in the counselee by encouraging greater conformity to the principles of Scripture.”
Ponder, for a moment, the aim of nouthetic counseling: “to effect change in the counselee by encouraging greater conformity to the principles of Scripture.” In other words, get right with God, and obey the teachings of the Bible (as interpreted by the pastor/church). Imagine being a woman and seeing a pastor for counseling who just so happens to endorse patriarchal thinking, complementarianism, and Quiverfull philosophy. Women not indoctrinated in such teachings will find themselves at odds with their counselors (pastors) and churches. If a woman has egalitarian beliefs, what should she do? Her trusted advisor’s goal is not to “help” her per se, as much as it is to get her to conform to certain theological beliefs.
Some Evangelical pastors go so far as to say that mental illness is the result of demonic oppression or possession. Again, the Bible becomes the solution to whatever problem a person may be having. Whether the problem is due to sin or a demon, God and the Bible are always the cure for whatever ails the person. This approach rarely addresses core issues and, in some cases, can lead to more problems, including suicide.
Imagine for a moment, an Evangelical woman going to her pastor for help. He listens to her “confession” and then prescribes whatever Bible verse is appropriate. The woman profusely thanks the pastor, and leaves his office determined to put the Word of God into practice. Perhaps this works for a day, a week, or a month, but, sooner or later, the problem returns. She goes back to the pastor, and he reminds her of what the Bible says. He tells her that she needs to repent, walk in the Spirit, be filled with the Spirit, put on the whole armor of God, withstand the devil, etc. The message is clear: Ifyou are still having a problem it is YOUR FAULT!
I know some pastors will be offended by what I am about to say next, but I need to be clear: Most Evangelical pastors are unqualified to counsel people. They lack the necessary training to provide counseling competently, and their commitment to the Bible keeps them from properly helping people. It’s one thing if people have questions about the Bible or are questioning their faith. Certainly, those people should seek out their pastor’s counsel on spiritual matters. However, many so-called “spiritual” problems are actually mental/physical/emotional problems which pastors dress up in religious garb. An untrained pastor has no business counseling people who have mental/physical/emotional problems.
Sadly, many people think pastors are experts on everything. Little do they know that many pastors aren’t even experts on the Bible, let alone anything else. Many Evangelical colleges have turned their pastor-training programs into business and marketing programs. Actual training in the fundamentals of the ministry and the Bible is often quite limited. Many pastors-in-training will graduate from college without ever having studied most of the books of the Bible (and OT or NT survey classes don’t count). Many Evangelical pastors-in-training only take one or two counseling classes. Yet, because they have taken these classes, these pastors think they are qualified to be counselors. They may not be counselors, but they did stay at a Holiday Inn, right? I know several pastors who got counseling degrees from Christian mail-order diploma mills (along with other advanced degrees, including doctorates). (Please see IFB Doctorates: Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Everyone’s a Doctor) They proudly let everyone know that they have a degree in counseling and are qualified to counsel all comers, yet truth be told, they are as ignorant as backwoods moonshiners.
Over the years, I counseled hundreds of people. Not one time did I tell people that they needed to see a medical professional or a psychologist. I firmly believed the Bible had all the answers. My judgment was further clouded by the fact that my mother was mentally ill, was on all kinds of drugs, was treated by psychiatrists, and attempted suicide numerous times before eventually killing herself at age 54. (Please see Barbara) I considered psychologists and psychiatrists to be enablers who encouraged people to continue in their sin.
In the late 1980s, I was visiting with a fellow pastor in his office when a severely agitated young man came into the office. The man was either high on drugs or mentally disturbed. I thought my pastor friend would try to calm the man down and offer him some Biblical counsel. Instead, he told the man that he needed medical help. My pastor friend took him to the hospital in Zanesville and dropped him off. I was shocked that he did this. When I questioned him, he told me he was unqualified to help the man. He was the first pastor I ever heard say such a thing. I now know he was right.
I did have two members who ended up seeking treatment at a stress center. I had tried to help them, and when I couldn’t, they had sense enough to seek out competent help. Both of these women stopped going to church after they got out of the stress center. At the time, I saw this as an example of what happens when you go to the “world” for help. I now know that these women learned for themselves that the Bible was not the answer to their problems.
Most of the people I counseled learned to play the game that long-time Evangelicals are experts at playing; they learn to pretend. The Bible, God, praying, confession, and self-denial, are of little help to them; they can’t seek help outside the church, so they learn to fake having the “victory.” This leads them to live schizophrenic lives. Sadly, the person’s spouse, parent, or children know that their loved one doesn’t have the “victory” because, at home, that person can’t or won’t hide his or her mental health problems. It is one thing to pretend for an hour or two on Sundays, but rarely can a person pretend every hour of every day.
I spent most of my adult life playing the pretend game. I struggled with depression, perfectionism, and OCPD, and while I could hide it while at church, it was impossible to hide it at home. My wife and children suffered because I couldn’t get the “victory” over sin, the flesh, or whatever else the Bible and preachers said was “wrong” with me. I lived this way until 2010, when I finally decided that I needed to see a counselor. Next to marrying Polly, this was the single most important decision I ever made.
The psychologist I see has not “cured” me, but she does help me deal with depression and the mental and emotional struggles I have as a result of being chronically ill and in constant pain. I consider her to be a lifesaver. She has helped me to embrace my life as it is, and has also helped me come to terms with my religious past. I know that I can talk to her about anything. She listens and then tries to constructively help me. Sometimes, she listens and says nothing. He knows that sometimes the help I need is just having someone to talk to. My therapist doesn’t view me as a problem that needs fixing, and she allows me the space to be my authentic self. If I have learned one thing in counseling, it is who Bruce Gerencser really is. Before this could happen, layer after layer of religious belief and thinking had to be peeled away. At the heart of my difficulties were Evangelicalism and the Bible, and they had to be confronted head-on. Even now, as an atheist, my religious past and the beliefs I once held affect how I think and reason. I now realize that the scars of my religious past will always be there. The longer I live without religion and the Bible, the easier it becomes, but these things can, when I least expect it, come to the forefront and cause emotional and mental problems.
I know that some readers of this blog have similar pasts and are all too familiar with pastoral counseling and how the Bible is not the answer to whatever ails a person. If you can do so, please share your thoughts in the comment section. I know that others will be helped by you sharing your story.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
As a field, apologetics bears quite a few problems. It’s actually not easy to say exactly which might be its worst. But I see this one as a big problem: apologists’ processes never actually land where apologists insist they do. Almost every apologetics argument can be negated right out of the gate through the identification of its logical fallacies, manipulation attempts, or basic cognitive biases. Of the few remaining, they don’t whisk us away to the Happy Realm of Jesus-is-Real. Instead, apologists land themselves in the Iffy Realm of SOMEONE-Might-Be-Real and then simply declare they’ve reached their destination.
In the past, I’ve called this the Unicorn Test: any given apologetics argument not knocked out of the running through illogical reasoning accidentally demonstrates the validity of not just Jesus, but also of Santa Claus, Zeus, Space Princess Cassidy, Thor, Wonder Woman, leprechauns, Harry Potter, the state of Wyoming, and Russell’s Teapot. Substituting other names for “Jesus” in their arguments reveals the truth.
Christians have a really tough time moving from the claim that gods are not, in the main, logically ridiculous to demonstrating that their particular god simply must exist–while simultaneously demonstrating that these thousands of other deities absolutely do not. Apologists take as a given that once they demonstrate that gods in general might exist, they’ve already conclusively demonstrated those other points–and thus clinched their sale.
I spent the first fifty years of my life faithfully attending Christian churches. In the mid-1970s, I enrolled in classes at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan. I spent twenty-five years pastoring Evangelical churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. I think I can safely say that Christianity has made a deep imprint on my life — good and bad.
Many of my posts deal with the negative aspects of Evangelical Christianity. Inherently Fundamentalist, Evangelicalism causes untold pain, suffering, and dysfunction. (Please see Are Evangelicals Fundamentalists?) It will be a good day when a future generation of freethinkers finally suffocates the life out of Evangelicalism. Already in the early stages of death, there is coming a day when the Fundamentalism many of us knew so well will no longer exist. Not today, not tomorrow, nor a year from now, but the signs are clear — at least to me — that Evangelicalism is rotting at its core and will one day tumble to the ground. All praise be to Loki!
This doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t have many fond memories of the time I spent attending and pastoring Evangelical churches. In fact, my good memories far outnumber the bad ones. I found the work of the ministry quite satisfying. I suspect this is due to the fact that I enjoy helping people. In another life, I might have been a social worker, aid worker, or done some other work that put me in close contact with needy people. I am what you might call a fixer — someone who loves taking on rehab projects. Unfortunately, this impulse led me to take on several broken, dysfunctional churches that didn’t deserve my labors. The best thing that could have happened to these churches — here’s looking at you, Victory Baptist — is that they died a quick death. They didn’t deserve to have me as their pastor. While I would like to think that I have gotten smarter over the years, truth be told, I am still attracted to helping others, even when it is not in my best interest.
Being a pastor gave me opportunities to be around likeminded people. I thoroughly enjoyed communal events. One such event was Sunday Night Hymn Sings. Several times a year, I would schedule a night where all we did was sing. No preaching, just singing. There was no agenda, no program. I would take song requests from congregants. If the pianist couldn’t play a song, we would sing it acapella. Sometimes, only the men would sing, or the women. Sunday Night Hymn Sings were always a highlight of the year.
I can read music, and there was a day when I had what others called a golden tenor voice. Unfortunately, years of preaching and throat infections ruined my voice. It saddens me to think that my grandchildren will never hear me sing, never listen to Grandpa and Nana sing a duet (Polly was a member of a traveling music group during our Midwestern days). Such is life.
Last week, I was listening to some Southern Gospel music on YouTube. One of the songs was a thirty-minute recording of a Baptist hymn sing. Oh my, the memories that came flooding back to me. As tears filled my eyes, ruined voice or not, I sang along with the church and its music leader. I have mentioned before how connected I still am to the religious music of my past. While I don’t believe its lyrical content, there’s something about the music itself that elicits deep emotional feelings from me. I suspect I am not alone in having such feelings. Ironically, Polly HATES religious music — apart from Christmas music. She’s even gone as far as to ask me NOT to play hymns, Southern Gospel, and Contemporary Christian music while she’s home. Some readers might be surprised to know that many of my posts are written while Christian music is playing in the background. Not today. I am in a The Band Perry, Dixie Chicks, and Shania Twain mood.
Our Sunday Night Hymn Sings would last anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours. We would sing, and keep on singing until congregants stopped offering up requests. I found these sings to be emotionally — and at the time, spiritually — satisfying. There’s something about music that reaches deep into our beings. I can’t explain it, I just know that music is an essential part of my existence. If I had to name several things I miss from my Christian days, one thing would be hymn sings — especially those from my days as pastor of Somerset Baptist Church in southeast Ohio. (The building was built in 1831, with oak floors and a 25-foot ceiling peak. The acoustics were phenomenal.)
Did the churches you grew up in have hymn sings? If you are an Evangelical-turned-atheist/agnostic/humanist/Pastafarian, do you miss the music? Do you miss belting out What a Friend We Have in Jesus or Amazing Grace? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
About Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 62, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 41 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve 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. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.
Are you on Social Media? Follow Bruce on Facebook and Twitter.
Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section. If you are a first-time commenter, please read the commenting policy before wowing readers with your words. All first-time comments are moderated. If you would like to contact Bruce directly, please use the contact form to do so.
Donations are always appreciated. Donations on a monthly basis can be made through Patreon. One-time donations can be made through PayPal.
This is what they [liberals, progressives, Democrats, socialists] do, folks. They do this to shut you down, to shut you up. They do this to try to marginalize you. They do this to try to damage your reputation. They do this to try to convince others that you’re a person not worthy of being heard because you’re full of hatred, and anger, and bitterness, and you’re a danger, and you’re violent.
We really are at a political disadvantage in dealing with the left. You know why? Because they have no morals and we answer to God. That puts us at a political disadvantage because it means that they will do anything and we will not. They will lie, steal, cheat, deceive, I dare say commit murder if they think they can get away with it.
When you come for a philosophy that teaches that there is no absolute morality, that there is no absolute good or evil, right or wrong, then the ends justify the means. That’s exactly what Marx taught.
It was heartbreaking to see so many Christian women claim that this man who had sex with his wife in the middle of the night without her consent, agreeing with the masses that he had raped her. Where is grace in the marriage? Where is forgiveness, bearing with him, and enduring all things as clearly stated in 1 Corinthians 13? Where is a biblical marriage? This happens one time and most of the women jumped on the worldly train claiming he raped his wife.
Some women did get it, however. They love freely by giving their husbands sexual intimacy and wouldn’t mind if they were woken up in the middle of the night having sex with their husbands. They can’t understand the women who deprive their husbands sexually and claim that this man committed marital rape. These women are living sacrifices as God calls them to be and love being help meets to their husbands in every way. They truly love their husbands!
Some said that what this man did wasn’t marital rape but it was inconsiderate and wrong. Isn’t this the time that we, as God-fearing women, believe in showing grace and mercy for this one discretion? What if he did this several times a year? Then do we call it marital rape and help tear this marriage down? Let me ask you, how many times has God forgiven you? How many times are we told to forgive others? If you don’t know, please begin reading your Bible.
The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
Victor Trevino Sr. was sentenced Thursday to 80 hours of community service for not reporting the abuse allegedly done by his son.
Trevino Jr. is a youth pastor at the Bread House South church. Prosecutors say he had inappropriate contact with a minor between 13 and 16 years old.
He faces nine charges, including four counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, one count of child sexually abusive activity, one count of accosting a child for immoral purposes and two counts of using a computer to commit a crime.
He’s also charged with five counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a child under 13 years old and one count of second-degree criminal sexual assault in a different case.
Andrea Bitely, a spokeswoman for Trevino said, “Pastor Trevino is committed to performing the community service ordered today and offers prayers of healing and strength for all involved.”
Trevino Sr. pleaded guilty in August to the misdemeanor and must also pay $400 in fines and costs, said Scott Hughes, an Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman.
The good pastor “offers prayers of healing and strength for all involved.” Really? How about reporting allegations of sexual abuse the moment you hear of them? How about protecting the children in your church? While it is refreshing to see a pastor prosecuted for failing to report, I am not sure a $400 fine and eighty hours of community service fit the crime. Just once, I would like to see an offending pastor do actual jail time for failing to report abuse. In Trevino Sr’s case, once he completes his community service hours and pays his fine, it is likely charges will be dismissed. Can’t do anything to besmirch the character of a man of God, right? I wonder if The Bread House South and its denomination will discipline Trevino, Sr. for his sin? Lest everyone involved forgets, the Bible says in James 4:17:
Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.
Trevino, Sr. knew to “do good” and did it not. God calls that sin. I call it a gross abrogation of personal responsibility for church children.
The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
In June 2019, Victor Trevino, Jr, a youth pastor at The Bread House South in Lansing, Michigan, was accused of sexually assaulting two minor girls.
A youth pastor at a church in Lansing has been charged with sexually assaulting a minor in 2 separate cases. Victor Albert Trevino Jr. has been arraigned on a total of 15 charges between the two cases.
Trevino is a youth pastor at the Bread House South church. Prosecutors say he had inappropriate contact with a minor between 13 and 16 years old. They also say Trevino repeatedly tried to convince her to have sex with him. He’s facing 9 charges in the Lansing case.
In August 2019, Trevino waived his right to a preliminary hearing.
WILX reported in June, 2019, that a girl younger than 14 came forward with allegations that Trevino repeatedly molested her at his family home in Holt.
She said Trevino often hosted sleepovers for kids from church.
The girls said he touched her inappropriately six times between October, 2018, and March, 2019.
After the girls mother was informed, she took her daughters phone and recorded pictures and videos on Snapchat from Trevino that included images of male genitalia.
