“Consent requires that a person have all the necessary information to make a decision and the power to choose and have that choice respected by others.

The possibility of authentic consent rests upon equality of power in a relationship. Consent should never be confused with submitting, going along, or acquiescing.”

~ Marie M. Fortune – SEXUAL VIOLENCE: THE SIN REVISITED

Art by Laurie-Lynn McGlynn, Soul in State: Pain

As a straight-A student in my high school years, I found affirmation for budding leadership gifts in Church of the Brethren youth activities in my local congregation and at the district level. I cherished relationships with the committed adults who gave their time to work with these youth groups.

I had friends my age of both sexes, but did little dating. I had boyfriends my first two years of high school, but these relationships did not end well, and after that no other boys seemed interested in more than casual friendship.

I first met David Eller when a group of Church of the Brethren youth and young adults travelled to the Chicago area for a church-related event. He was a student at Bethany Seminary in Oak Brook at the time and attended the church event we did. It was my first time in a city as large as Chicago, and I remember being impressed with the tall skyscrapers. I was favorably impressed with Eller, who struck me as a warm and friendly pastoral figure.

A few weeks after graduating from high school, I ran into Eller again, this time in Cincinnati, at the wedding of an acquaintance, which he attended with his wife, Martha. Again, I was impressed with his friendliness, and I warmed up to the attention he paid to me. I interpreted his friendliness toward me as a brother in Christ, one of the many church mentors I had known who reached out to and encouraged youth. Someone at the wedding took a photo of the two of us standing arm in arm and later sent it to me.

It happened that I would be spending a few days in Cincinnati and had some free time. Eller invited me to stop by his office in downtown Cincinnati if I was in the vicinity. I naively took him up on the invitation and dropped in on him at his workplace. Soon after I entered his office, he closed the door. After some conversation that I don’t recall, he began to hug and kiss me.

I was exceedingly confused by his advances since I knew he was married and I still trusted him as a church leader. I had encountered nothing like this before. I saw myself as someone no boys found attractive, so it was baffling to have the visit take such a seemingly sudden turn, but my fragile self-esteem was at some level grateful for the positive attention. I had a childlike need to please and was completely unable to recognize or assert my own needs, so I acquiesced. Yet it made no sense that he was taking a romantic interest in me. He was married. He was a former pastor and church leader. He was probably ten years older than me. These differences seemed like a vast chasm to a 17-year-old only days after completing high school.

That fall I headed off to college. Over the next two years I ran into Eller on occasion. Ever cordial, he never spoke of the incident in his office. He seems now to have been deliberately cultivating my trust, grooming me for his own purposes, biding his time until he saw another opening. I trusted him as a mentor and friend, someone I could confide in about my struggle to find a relationship with God and a direction for my life. It was a very one-sided relationship: I was the needy one, he was the helper.

Life as a young adult was rocky. I dropped out of college after only two years, due to a lack of clear direction and inability to excel in a highly competitive academic environment, but especially due to clinical depression, as I would only recognize years later. At about the time I left college, I found myself in Cincinnati again. Eller had me over for supper in his apartment, without incident. By this time he had separated from his wife. His earlier aggression appeared to be an unexplained fluke that showed no signs of repeating. I did not bring it up because I felt awed by his greater age and life experience.

I followed college with a year in voluntary service, which also ended early because my depression was intensifying and had begun to interfere with daily functioning. I could not make myself get up and go to work. I returned home to live with my parents, ashamed of my failures at college and service, not knowing what was next in my life. I deeply yearned to follow God’s will for my life, but had no idea how to figure out what that was.

Not long after I moved home, I learned that Eller had moved to my hometown, and was living in a large house with an assortment of people I knew from various church settings, including one of my former youth sponsors. My high school friends were all away at college. I was experiencing considerable friction living with my parents. Feeling alone and isolated, I was desperate for connection with someone who could help me through my feelings of failure and he stood out as one person who seemed to care for and understand me.

I visited Eller, yearning for friendship and guidance. I trusted him because of his association with church and his seminary training. I wanted affirmation for my struggling faith. I was longing to connect with someone who could mentor me from a Christian perspective through pressing decisions about what to do next with my life. My emotional vulnerability was apparent, and Eller saw another opportunity.

Eller took me to his bedroom. As I shared from my heart, he moved close, as if to comfort me. It wasn’t long before he had moved beyond comfort andbegan to press sexual advances on me. I did not want sex, but friendship. My ability to resist was paralyzed by my need of affirmation and my impaired mental health. My belief that he cared about me and trust that he would not hurt me blocked me from a more objective interpretation of what he was doing. I acquiesced, overpowered by the strength of his personality and my need to please.

My paralysis was shattered when he brought me to sexual climax. As confused as I was, that moment cut sharply through my denial and told me something here was terribly wrong. I felt used and horribly ashamed and left quickly. I did not see him again after that. I tried to obliterate all memory of the event, but it kept coming back to haunt me, year after year, gripping me with shame that I had allowed him to entrap me.

A few years later, pastoral care people at the church I was attending guided me to confess the events with Eller as my sin, but that did little for the sense of shame and betrayal I felt. No one recognized it as anything other than consensual sex. No one talked about his sin of sexual aggressionand abuse of power. For the next five years, when I might have been enjoying dating and learning how to build healthy relationships with the opposite sex I was frozen in limbo, unable to risk involvement in close relationships with men.

Many years later, nearing age 50, with the help of years of therapy, I came to recognize Eller’s approaches to me as abusive and the negative impact those encounters had on my life. I was a particularly vulnerable teenager and young adult. Eller obtained my trust due to his association with church and with people I trusted. The difference in our ages and life experience added to the power imbalance between us. Recognizing his behavior toward me as betrayal and abuse allowed me to access buried rage at how he had taken advantage of me, to let go of the shame, and over time, to experience healing.

As I learned more about sexual abuse, I learned that abusers typically have many victims. I hoped that others had not suffered as I had, but I feared the worst. I wanted to tell Eller how hurtful his betrayal of my trust had been by sending a letter to his home. I sent an email to his public email address at Elizabethtown College. He replied cordially as ever to my first email, but did not reply to a second email asking for a home address.

Then in 2006 I received word from a friend that Eller had been arrested for attempting to solicit sex from a minor over the Internet. The twelve-year-old girl he thought he had arranged to meet turned out to be an undercover agent of the Pennsylvania Attorney General. Caught in a sting, he was subsequently relieved of his position as director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. He was eventually convicted of criminal attempted unlawful contact with a minor and sent to prison.

In a public statement from the Church of the Brethren released in July 2006, the general secretary of the Church of the Brethren Board is quoted as saying “Members of the Church of the Brethren will certainly want to keep Elizabethtown College and the Eller family at the center of our prayers in the coming weeks.”  And what of his victims? No prayers for them?

I am left to wonder how many other vulnerable young people suffered Eller’s unwanted sexual advances over the years and why church leaders gave no apparent thought to praying for the victims whose lives and souls he had no doubt also devastated.