

Rumors of a Dark Universe: NASA

“Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.” ― Emma Donoghue, Room

I plan to write two more stories of abuse in the UPCI”s Calvary Gospel Church. The women who have come forward are the vanguards of a new movement to expose the abuses which are endemic to Calvary Gospel Church and the United Pentecostal Church International.They have started an anonymous support group, a couple of websites and are active in changing Wisconsin law to change the Statute of Limitations and to make clergy mandatory reporters.

Ww need to get behind these brave people who are willing to step into the public eye and discuss their pain in order to help others. It is also my opinion that we need about 30 more website to handle the number of stories that need to be told throughout the evangelical and broader Protestant community.

The following are Rachel’s words. If I insert a thought, I will label it as coming from me.

Calvary Gospel Church taught Rachel to fear lots of things and disobeying the pastor was considered the sin of witchcraft.

{Ed. note: Every woman who has spoken to me from this church emphasizes their overwhelming sense of fear that pervaded their lives as children and as adults. Not one of them ever used the word *grace * to describe their experience in Calvary Gospel Church.

Also, all of them mentioned their profound fear of the Rapture. They believed that Jesus would come again at any moment. If, in that instance, they had done something like being mad at their pastor, they feared would be left behind. So, each and every moment was filled with the fear that one small misstep could lead to their banishment from heaven for eternity. The pastor and leaders were the ones who could declare them in or out and promoted that fear.}

I was born into the UPCI, specifically Calvary Gospel Church in Madison, WI in 1980. I had a lot of fear growing up. Hell was constantly preached over the pulpit. I was told as early as I could remember if I didn’t obey my pastor or those in authority, my rebellion was as the sin of witchcraft. 1 Samuel 15:23.

For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry.( NIV)

It caused me early on to fear telling the truth about bad things I did or witnessed because then I’d be labeled rebellious. I saw kids labeled rebellious by the adults and those kids were treated horribly, so I learned to keep silent.

She lived in constant fear of the rapture since she worried she had been left behind.

{Ed. note: The church showed grossly descriptive movies about the end times. Some of them depicted people getting their heads chopped off. (Remember, these were children.) The church also supplied comic books which also illustrated frightening images of what might happen if they were left behind. Once again, I believe that this was a way to use fear to control people in the church. Showing these movies and comic books to little children is abusive, in my opinion.}

I was scared of the rapture as a child which started sometime before the age of 5. My nightmares started. I couldn’t find my mom one day when we lived on Stoughton Road. We moved off Stoughton around 1985. I thought she had gone up in the rapture with my whole family, so I went and hid in a neighbor’s closet to hide from getting my head chopped off. We were taught the only way to go to heaven after the rapture is to get your head cut off for Jesus. Needless to say, I fell asleep in my neighbor’s closet and my mom ended up calling the police to try to find me.

It was the fault of girls and women if men in the church had trouble with lust.

{Ed. Note: Sadly this sort of teaching is not limited to this church. My former SBC church had mother/daughter programs in which the central theme was “Teen girls cause teen boys to sin.” I remember an occasion in which the teen boys in the church were asked to respond to the problems they had when girls wore short skirts, etc. I started laughing because I had recently viewed a newscast which depicted women who wore outfits that kept their faces and bodies covered with loose fitting outfits. it showed men screaming and throwing things at women who accidentally showed their ankles since it was their fault if the men lusted after their ankles.}

I learned very early on that the lust of others was my fault. We weren’t allowed to wear slits in our skirts because if a man looked at the slit, his immediate thought would be what’s above the slit. This was taught over the pulpit. We were told to not dress in a way that would cause our brothers (men) to lust and sin. Again, I didn’t want myself or the kids around me to be labeled rebellious and shunned, so I kept silent about the lust and abuse out of fear that it was our fault.

Rachel was confused by a church friend who was her age. She felt her friend touched her inappropriately when they were 7 years old and she had no one to talk to about this.

{Ed. note: Rachel is aware that this may have been a simple case of typical childhood curiosity. However, it also could have been an outward manifestation of abuse that was going on in her home. Fear and silence was the name of the game.}

In 1987 when I was about seven, I was touched inappropriately by a church friend around my age. She asked to touch my privates and at the time I didn’t even know what she was doing because sex was not talked about other than to tell us it was bad outside of marriage. I knew what she did was considered bad, but not why or how bad. Bad equaled sin and all sin sent you to hell.



The girl who touched me touched others. I won’t name them because it’s their story to tell. Again I remained silent and didn’t tell out of fear. I often wonder if she was just being curious like kids are or if something horrible happened to her.

Rachel was accused of being a lesbian by a teacher for simply walking with another girl, linking arms. This led to severe depression and anxiety.

{Ed. Note:The children had no sex education. So they were left to try to figure out the confusing details. Was this naiveté on the part of the church or was it a way to help those who were sexually abusing the kids since the kids were given no clear guidelines on acceptable behavior? This approach leads me to wonder if the church was covering up sexual abuse by adults.}

I didn’t know what a lesbian was back then, but I was linking arms with a different friend at the church school and was asked by a teacher if we were lesbians. I said yes and the teacher became irate. She told us we needed to immediately go down the altar and repent. When I later found out what a lesbian was, I realized that my staying silent was the only way to deal with the confusion I was going through. If linking arms with a friend was bad, what would church people and my Christian school teachers think about a friend touching my vagina? I suffered severe depression and anxiety about people finding out because I knew I’d be punished and kicked out of school.



After I was touched, I became curious. Due to the church culture, there wasn’t a safe adult to ask questions of or have an appropriate discussion with about sex. Sex education was frowned upon and not taught in the Christian school. During an abstinence class where we signed a paper saying we wouldn’t have sex before marriage, I remember asking a youth teacher how far was it appropriate to go- was kissing ok, was hugging ok? He acted like I should already know the answers and frowned at me like I did something wrong. Church and school controlled everything we did, but he wanted me to guess what was ok before marriage.



When everything else is looked at as a clear line between what is sin and what isn’t, I needed that clear line back then but was baffled when it wasn’t given. They told us exactly how to dress, even what color underwear to wear in the Christian school, but no answers about appropriateness during sexual encounters. In school they’d make us unbutton our shirts to check the color of our bra and if it wasn’t white or skin colored you got a detention. If being forced to show our undergarments wasn’t enough, and detention wasn’t enough, the teacher would talk about the girls who did wear colored bras as if they were sluts trying to get the boys attention. In a normal environment, girls just want to wear pretty things, but in ours we were sluts.

Rachel cannot remember some details of her childhood and wonders if something happened that she could not process.

{Ed. Note: This is a profound insight.}



I’m 39 years old and I still don’t understand everything I went through. I have chunks of time missing from my childhood memories and I sometimes wonder if something horrible enough happened to warrant my brain not wanting to process it.

Young girls were encouraged to hang out alone with adult men.

{ Ed. Note: This trend leads me to wonder if the church leadership knowingly encouraged this sort of behavior which causes me to be deeply concerned about the motives behind the promotion of such behavior. Were adult men covering up for one another? It’s happened in lots of churches. It’s what happened in the Roman Catholic Church as well as the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Churches. I highly recommend that current and former members of Calvary Gospel Church and other UPCI churches obtain a copy of Jeri Massi’s book

Schizophrenic Christianity:: How Christian Fundamentalism Attracts and Protects Sociopaths, Abusive Pastors, and Child Molesters

The parallels between the IFB and the UPCI are uncanny.}

Young girls, much older men and bizarre behavior at Calvary Gospel Church.

{ Ed. Note: This is very concerning. Church members apparently encouraged these *dating* relationships. I’m curious if members of the community outside of the church were aware of this behavior? Where was DSS and law enforcement? }

A lot of the young girls around me in church were allowed to hang out alone with adult men. It was treated as if we were all one big family and they were our uncles or mentors.



My older sister started dating a man ten plus years her senior when she was around 13/14 in 1988/1989. They went out on dates to Pizza Hut with other church folks. I was nine and sent as a chaperone. Our family was poor, so going out for pizza was a treat.

We’d also go alone to his apartment or one of his family member’s apartments alone. This man had my 13/14 year-old sister try on lingerie in front of us. Then they went off alone to the bedroom to do whatever a 24 year-old man does to a 13 year-old girl that tries on lingerie for him.

I recently asked my sister if she understood he raped her. She said she just wanted a way out of the abusive church and she saw him as a way to escape. It makes me so sad that we suffered in silence for so many years. She gave me permission to talk about what I witnessed, but has been through too much trauma herself to want to come forward.

Rachel’s relationship with a man 20 years older than her which started when she was ~8 years old.

Different but not so different, in 1987-1988 I was allowed to hang out with a church man 20 years my senior when I was around the age of seven to eight. It was a few years before my parents divorced so they were going through a lot. He’d take me out to the mall after church. I’d spend the night at his house. We hung out like best friends. He told me all about his life like we were best friends. He told me I looked like his daughter he lost custody of. I grew to love this man in the most innocent of ways. He’d tell me he loved me and I thought it was said like a dad would to his daughter. I looked to him like I’d look to a father.



When I look back, my relationship with this man really confuses me. He also acted like my uncle and would wrestle around with me on the floor, pin me down and blow air in my nose and mouth. To this day I rationalize it like he was an uncle/father figure, so it wasn’t strange, but then even my uncle stopped wrestling with me when I got too old for it. I didn’t have to tell my uncle, “Look, I’ve got breasts now. Maybe this isn’t appropriate.” With him, he still tried to wrestle with me during a visit when I was 16ish in 1996.

{Ed. Note: Rachel now understands that this man was grooming her.}

I now see what happened as grooming. If he hadn’t moved away, I’m fairly certain my story would have turned out like Debbie’s and other CGC survivors. There are way too many similarities in my story and the other sexual assault survivors for his behavior to not be brought into question. I believe he moved to California around 1991 and is now licensed as a pastor for the UPCI.

Rachel’s relationship with this man resumed when she was in her 20s when she realized that this friendship had a sexual component.

I believe it was around 2003/2004 when he returned for another visit. I was 23/24. I was in an abusive relationship and even though I was slightly uncomfortable around him, he still felt like a father to me. My family was away for the week, so he and I were alone in the house. I just needed someone to talk to, to process the abuse I was going through, so I poured my heart out to him. I cried. He hugged me and kissed my forehead like a dad would. We made a plan for me to get away from the abuse. He helped fix my life so I was grateful. He told me about his problems.



I didn’t even realize he was looking at our relationship as sexual until he was leaving to go back home. I said goodbye, and he went to drive away, then he turned back, got out of the truck, ran back down the street, and forcefully hugged me. He told me he loved me but he couldn’t leave his wife. He started crying and left.

I thought maybe I had read the situation wrong and rationalized away his behavior as him just being eccentric. I knew if I said anything to anyone in church about it, I’d be the one in trouble for being alone in a house with a married man. I didn’t tell anyone about it until he visited again with his family.

I told my dad I was uncomfortable with him visiting and why. I was just told to not be alone with him. Even with his wife and family around, he was constantly grabbing at me and trying to hug me. I was so uncomfortable that visit, I vowed never to see him when he’d be in town again. It just baffles me that a man 20 years my senior couldn’t, or refused to see, how hurtful his actions were to me and to his wife. My family stayed close with him for a while, but had nothing more to do with him. I later confronted him about how strange his behavior was, but he denied it.

Rachel became involved in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend who raped her.

That wasn’t even the worst of the hidden abuse I suffered. I was raped by my boyfriend the first time I had sex. He was also verbally and physically abusive. I met him at church. I turned him down the first time he asked me out, but the minister he was living with convinced me to give him a chance. We started dating in 1997. I was 17 but very inexperienced because he was my first boyfriend. With dating him came a lot of confusion. As I wrote above, the church and school gave us very clear lines on how to act and dress, but not about sexual experiences. I guess they just expected us to never do anything until marriage.



I wanted to be a missionary with all my heart, so I wanted to stay pure. I guessed that kissing was probably ok to do and so in the beginning I tried to keep it just to that, although I was still scared kissing would send me to hell, or I’d get kicked out of school, or be disqualified from missions work. I tried to set up boundaries, but with time he just kept crossing them. I’d get angry about it and we’d fight. He’d yell a lot, but as soon as I raised my voice, he’d throw me up against the wall while choking me or he’d pin me to the floor. If I fought back, he’d hurt me even worse and one time gave me a black eye, slamming my face into the floor.



After awhile, I just gave up. I knew we had gone too far sexually to tell anyone about the abuse because I’d be labeled a slut or worse. I was raised to think lust was my fault, so even if I didn’t want it, I was to blame. Never once did I question if it was his fault or maybe he should stop when I told him to. I thought that rape had to seem brutal for it to actually be considered rape. I blamed myself for what happened because I probably could have fought him off.



The night he raped me, I told him in the car on the way to his place that I didn’t want to have sex with him before marriage. When we got to his place, we made out like usual. When he started to take my clothes off, I cried. My tears didn’t persuade him to stop and I was shaking my head and crying the entire time. After he raped me, he left me naked and alone crying on the floor, and went to watch TV.

This relationship led to her developing a feeling of worthlessness since she was no longer a virgin. She ended up marrying her rapist who eventually went to jail for abusing her.

I felt worthless because I knew my life as I wanted it was over. I’d never be a missionary. If I told, I’d definitely get kicked out of the Christian school because I signed a character agreement that I’d follow the rules in and out of school. I’d be ostracized. I was worthless. My value as a woman was to be a virgin until marriage and then to have babies for my husband and follow his lead.

No one would want to marry me except him, which is exactly what happened. I got pregnant out of wedlock and the only way to absolve myself was to marry him. The abuse continued until one day he took his rage out on my niece instead of me. He left bruises on her head and neck. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to stop him. He went to jail for abusing her and I made the decision to leave him.

She now says that Calvary Gospel Church and the UPCI contributed to her lifetime of abuse but she is now beginning to heal.

I left the church for a while but was convinced I was still going to hell. I did tell a mother figure in my life, who was in church, about my abuse. She basically said she had been abused too, but decided not to leave God, as if leaving the UPCI organization was akin to leaving God. This mentality had me in and out of church. It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I really began to see the lifelong abuse I had suffered because of this organization. I realized that Jesus would never have put up with that type of fear and control in his church. He would have called the UPCI out for living like Pharisees. He’d have been appalled at the level of child abuse. Having that new realization opened the doors to new possibilities and freedom to critically think about things. I want people to know there is life after leaving and you don’t have to put up with the abuse in order to go to heaven.

{Ed. Note: Rachel has bravely told her story, in the hopes of helping others who are experiencing similar abuse. She is an incredible woman who is willing to share the hard stuff so that others might be willing to share their pain. For those who would like to find out more about their support group. I placed the link at the beginning of the post.}

Thank you, Rachel. I am humbled by your transparency.