A woman should not have to die before a church admits it may have misunderstood the man in its pulpit. But too often that is exactly what is happening.
I keep thinking about the people who want to believe someone has changed. Many of us know that hope. We have prayed for somebody, watched for improvement, and wanted so badly for the good we saw to be the good that would last.
But when a man has committed brutal violence against women, our hope cannot carry more weight than what he has already shown himself capable of doing. Other people’s lives depend on us understanding the difference.
Before the pulpit, there were women he harmed
In 1980, John Douglas White stabbed his 17-year-old neighbor, Theresa Etherton, 15 times. She survived. Years later, she recalled him saying during the attack: “But what the f—, you’re just a woman.”
Please sit with what he was telling her. In her account, he dismissed the value of her life while trying to end it.
Then came Vicky Sue Wall, a 26-year-old woman whose death led to his manslaughter conviction. He served nearly 12 years before his release in 2007. By the time a congregation welcomed him into pastoral leadership, his history included both a teenage girl who survived his violence and a woman who did not.
These were hellacious crimes. Calling them “his past” does not adequately describe what those women endured.
They believed he had changed
Donna Houghton, who helped hire White at Christ Community Fellowship, said the congregation knew about his criminal past. She described him as contrite and pointed to his good work in the community. She explained their belief this way: “All kinds of people turn around and meet the Lord and they are a different person.”
I can recognize that Christian hope without accepting the judgment that followed it. We need to examine this because churches still make decisions about whom to trust, whom to elevate, and whose concerns to take seriously.
Violence against women and children cannot be weighed as casually as a story about stealing material things and later finding God. Theft can devastate a family, too. But someone who repeatedly stabs a girl has demonstrated a capacity for intimate, deliberate destruction that a friendly congregation may be profoundly unequipped to understand.
We do not have to know everything happening inside that person to recognize the limits of our own knowledge. Sometimes faithful judgment begins with admitting, “We do not know enough to declare him safe.”
Then Rebekah lost her life
In 2012, White killed Rebekah Gay, a 24-year-old mother, in her home. Her three-year-old son was there. White was engaged to her mother and had regularly cared for her child. He had become someone trusted with the ordinary, precious details of family life.
Rebekah had a little boy to raise. There should have been more mornings together, more birthdays, more opportunities for him to call her name and hear her answer.
After killing her, White asked church members to begin a prayer chain for her return. They prayed for a woman whose whereabouts he already knew.
Even his cooperation came with proposed conditions: he reportedly offered information about Rebekah in exchange for life imprisonment and separation from other prisoners.
Consider the attention he could still give to the conditions of his own future after taking hers.
Women belong at the center of our Christian concern
What happens when a church becomes so invested in a man’s redemption story that the women he harmed become background characters?
We learn how sorry he seems. We hear how helpful he has become. Meanwhile, a Survivor is still living in the body he injured, and another family is still missing the woman who never came home.
Their suffering must have authority in the room. A man’s testimony cannot erase the evidence written into other people’s lives.
For those of us accustomed to putting everyone else first, this can be difficult. We may worry that refusing someone access makes us unforgiving, or that questioning his suitability for leadership reveals a weakness in our faith. But women do not owe a man their trust, their presence, or their children to demonstrate confidence in God.
A pulpit carries the church’s endorsement. People hear more than a sermon when someone stands there. They hear that this community has entrusted him with spiritual authority. Churches must reckon with the trust that endorsement creates.
Protection belongs in our understanding of faith
I am not asking Christians to abandon belief in transformation. I am asking us to take the lives of women and children seriously enough that belief does not become permission to gamble with them.
A congregation can offer spiritual care while maintaining firm boundaries. It can recognize that assessing serious violence requires expertise beyond its own goodwill. A man can receive prayer without receiving a position of authority.
Women bear the image of God before any man begins telling the story of how he found his way back to church. Their bodies are sacred. Their futures deserve protection.
The woman who wants to live long enough to raise her child has a claim on the church’s conscience, too.
