Dear Brother Hawkins,

I listened in shock to your conversation with Elna Baker on the recent episode of This American Life.

And look, I get it. You’re between a rock and a hard place. You serve an institution that neither apologizes nor seeks apologies–a statement that of all the theological innovations that set it apart from Christian orthodoxy is the most profoundly un-Christian of all–but that’s the hand you’ve been dealt. That can’t be easy.

And I have empathy for you. You’re just the mouthpiece for the mouthpiece. You don’t get to set the policy. I work in communications at a faith institution, too. I can say to the powers that be, “This isn’t going to go well, I suggest another course of action,” but at the end of the day they make the decision and my job is to say what they’ve decided. You’re in a similar situation, I get that.

But professional to professional, person to person, believer to believer: this was not the way.

You’re sitting down with a person who is telling you that a particular policy has caused tremendous harm to many–including the person in front of you. And your response is, “You have found a selection of individuals who have perhaps had that experience…”

Let’s put it in another frame. Imagine you were the communications person for the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine you had a victim of clergy sexual abuse sitting in front of you (PS you did have a victim of clergy sexual abuse sitting in front of you). She points out a system-wide policy that’s made it easier for a significant number of children to be traumatized. Is “But think of the kids who weren’t molested!” a reasonable response? Of course it isn’t. It’s a cavalier, even horrific, thing to say. What you said is along these lines.

But then you went further. You defended the practice with a hypothetical example of an 11-, 12-, or 13-year-old girl who is “very, very mature in her thinking, and the ways of the world, and so forth” who might require “a very different” conversation from a more “innocent” child of the same age.

Because apparently this isn’t obvious to you, allow me to clarify: an 11-, 12-, or 13-year-old girl cannot be “mature in the ways of the world”–because (read this carefully, it’s important)–SHE IS 11-, 12-, OR 13-YEARS-OLD.

A child in this situation is either exploring her sexuality in age-appropriate ways or she is being abused. Either way, the answer is to allow parents, sex educators, and/or professionals to handle it, not for random neighbor men with no pastoral training to put her through a graphic inquisition.

But of all the harmful things you said (and everything was pretty harmful), your unwillingness to acknowledge that this practice is wrong was the most devastating.

Look, people do bad things. Not infrequently, people do bad things thinking they’re doing good things. This is human nature, you’re not alone. But the difference between those who show accountability and trustworthiness when confronted with the fact they’ve caused harm and those who do not boils down to one thing: a willingness to admit wrongdoing and course-correct. In Christian terms, we call this repentance.

I know it’s not your job to repent on behalf of the whole church. At the same time, your silence demonstrated complicity in structures and policies that harm children. Make no mistake: the church’s practice of sexually explicit worthiness interviews with children is an extremely serious sin. Far more serious than youthful sexual indiscretions, it is a sin about which Jesus taught it would be better to have a large millstone hung around one’s neck and drowned in the depths of the sea. This millstone hangs around the church’s neck with the weight of thousands of children’s tears, and while the top leadership is by far the most culpable for the suffering it has caused, you had a chance to bring healing and you chose to look away.

I can’t tell you what to do from here, but I hope that if I were in a similar situation to you, I’d resign. I hope I’d have the moral courage and clarity to refuse complicity in the systemic abuse of children in any way–let alone such a public one. As long as this practice persists, without clear guidelines to avoid traumatizing encounters rooted in best practices in pastoral care, everyone who participates in defending or enabling it causes little ones to stumble. I don’t envy your position, but I sure hope it’d be a deal breaker for me.

As always, there is grace. Even this can be forgiven. There is no sin so terrible, no darkness so profound, that the love of God in Christ can’t overcome it. But what I’ve experienced is that healing requires acknowledgement of what is. Not because the rules say it’s the way to regain “worthiness,” but because when we harm others, we not only damage them, we fracture our own souls. The church will remain broken and fractured, an agent of the kind of harm Elna described, until church leaders face this truth and allow it to drive them to the feet of Jesus. For it is his love alone that restores us to wholeness, not because we’ve earned it by righteousness, but because we can’t. Paradoxically, for all the emphasis on worthiness in the church, it is the acknowledgment that the pursuit of “worthiness” is a fool’s errand that opens us to grace. And it is why the practice of worthiness interviews will never accomplish what they are intended to accomplish, and will continue to leave a trail of devastation in their wake: they make a false promise they can never fulfill, for it is God who heals, not our systems, not our policies, not our church leaders.

This is difficult–change always is. I pray daily for the church’s leaders to find the strength to apologize, repent, and rest in the mercy of Jesus. I will pray for you to be part of the change. May you find the courage you need to do what is right: the world is watching.

Peace and grace to you,

Katie Langston