BRIGHTON (MI)
The Roys Report [Chicago IL]
March 6, 2025
By Ann Marie Shambaugh
In March 2024, the 12-year-old son of popular podcasters Josh and Ginny Yurich wrote a letter to leaders at a Michigan megachurch, pleading with them to confront the behavior of the church’s youth pastor.
“He always comes up to me at youth group and yells my name and gives me hugs and says he loves me, which I feel weird about,” the boy’s letter stated. “It feels creepy considering I’ve barely known him a year.”
Now, that youth pastor, Matthew Swider, is facing multiple felony charges for allegedly soliciting sex online with someone he thought was a 15-year-old boy and then touching him inappropriately.
And the Yurichs are furious with their former church—Community Bible Church in Brighton—for allegedly failing to take their concerns seriously and instead kicking the Yurichs out of the church.
But, in an email to the congregation last December, Community Bible Church claimed it had engaged an “external investigator to review the situation” raised by the Yurichs, but the investigator had found “no evidence of misconduct.” The church also accused the Yurichs of creating a “false narrative” that the church had neglected to protect people and “tried to cover up information.”
Yurichs say concerns of grooming fell on deaf ears
Josh and Ginny Yurich, who produce a parenting podcast called “The 1000 Hours Outside,” told TRR they alerted Community Bible Church to issues with Swider in early 2024.
The Yurichs said initially they were troubled by how Swider and other church leaders failed to adequately address bullying of their older son within the youth group. Their concern grew after Swider discussed and misrepresented the matter with non-staff church members without their permission, the Yurichs said.
With tensions high, Ginny Yurich said Swider confronted her during an event at the church to ask her what she had said to her younger son about him.
“That’s when the red flags start to go off,” Ginny Yurich said. “He started to go off about how (our son) used to give him all these hugs and was enthusiastically greeting him, and now he’s not doing it anymore. Then he went off on this rant about how if our kids hate him, he can’t be their youth pastor.”
She also said within a few weeks Swider confronted her son about his change in showing affection when Swider found the boy alone at church. She said her son came home sobbing, shaken by the encounter.
“No child should be expected to give (or) return affection to a youth leader,” Josh Yurich told TRR. “This is a red flag for grooming behavior.”
Josh and Ginny Yurich and their five children each wrote letters to church leadership about their troubling experiences at Community Bible Church. She said her 12-year-old’s letter included information about how Swider’s behavior made him feel uncomfortable.
In addition to giving unwanted hugs and saying he loves the boy, Swider was “mean and rude to my family,” the letter states.
The letter also mentioned that once, when Swider yelled the boy’s name, the boy “said hi back.”
“(B)ut then it seemed like (Swider) got mad and was like, ‘Why don’t you yell my name when you see me anymore?’ which was really upsetting to me because it’s like, I don’t want to yell your name or give you hugs after what you have done to me and my family.”
After receiving the letters, Community Bible Church Associate Pastor Eric Schindler emailed the Yurichs. In the email, he asked them to bring their younger son with them to a meeting with him and a third-party attorney “to ensure we have a full understanding and context for his statements made about Pastor Matt.”
The Yurichs, who were not alleging anything criminal, declined the meeting.
“At this time, my wife and I have had poor experiences with multiple people in positions of leadership at (Community Bible Church) CBC,” Josh Yurich responded in an April 10, 2024, email to Schindler. “We currently have little basis for trusting that this meeting would be handled properly, unfortunately. Therefore we are politely declining your request to bring our barely 13-year-old son for a meeting with you and an attorney.”
Previously, the Yurichs had met with Swider and two elders to discuss the bullying of their older son. Josh Yurich said Swider and the elders did not address the couple’s concerns.
“They had no intention of actually hearing us out,” Josh Yurich said. “They just wanted to defend (Swider) and try to lecture us on why we were wrong.”
Schindler responded to the April 10 email the next day and said he or an elder would be in touch to arrange further discussion of the issues.
Membership revoked
The next time the Yurichs heard from the church was May 3, 2024, when the elders sent an email, the Yurichs told TRR. The email said the church had conducted a “comprehensive investigation,” which “meticulously upheld the integrity of our church leaders.”
The letter also stated that the Yurich’s allegations “significantly distressed the fabric of our community.” And the letter confronted the couple for not meeting with church leadership as outlined in Matthew 18 and for stating they would “‘tell others’, which we have taken as a blatant threat to the church.”
“While we care for you, we will not tolerate nor stand by as shepherds and allow false accusations or gossip to be used as a tool to divide our church family,” the letter stated. It added that the couple’s membership had been revoked.
The Yurichs told TRR they were stunned by the letter and disagreed with many of its conclusions but decided to accept the church’s decision and move on.
However, in December, the Yurich’s heard about Swider’s resignation from friends who still attended the church. Upset that the church had not more thoroughly investigated Swider when they raised their concerns, Ginny Yurich posted about their experience on Facebook.
“I started to go public, just on social media in our area, because I feel like every parent needs to know if you attend that church, and . . . if your child is uncomfortable because a man is saying, ‘I love you,’ and giving you these big hugs, and you go in and say there are some issues here, they might kick you out,” Ginny Yurich told TRR.
That same day, Josh Yurich sent Schindler a heated email, asking him if church leadership still stood by their support of Swider.
“I hope CBC crumbles and the earth around it is salted so no other church can grow there for a thousand years,” the email stated. “God’s work can and will continue in spite of people like you and the people of Livingston County will be better off without (lead pastor) Steve Baker and his henchmen in positions of Biblical authority. The public is going to know about how you were made aware of Matt’s inappropriate behavior (on MANY levels) and instead of doing something about it, you kicked us out.”
The Yurichs heard Swider’s resignation would be addressed during the church’s Dec. 15 service, so they tuned in online to see how it would be handled. When that part of the service wasn’t shown on the livestream, they decided to attend the later service in person.
“They were waiting for us,” Josh Yurich said. “They called the sheriff’s department and had us escorted out of the building. We were very clear. We said, ‘We are not here to make trouble. We just want to hear how the church is going to address Matt’s alleged criminal behavior.’”
Five days later, the church sent an email to the congregation, addressing Swider’s resignation and defending itself against the Yurichs’ claims, though the Yurich’s weren’t mentioned by name.
The email stated that a former couple from the church had raised concerns about Swider in late 2023 and early 2024. The church said it “acted immediately” and hired an outside law firm. “Despite multiple attempts to involve this family in the investigation, they declined to participate, which limited the scope of the process,” the letter said, noting that the investigation found no wrongdoing.
The email stated that the husband of the couple threatened a staff member Dec. 14, 2024, which is why the security team asked the couple to leave the service the following day. It stated the church asked law enforcement to intervene when the couple refused to leave.
Josh Yurich said his previous email was “harsh and direct” but not intended as a threat.
“(The elders) clearly spun up the ‘threat’ narrative to further attempt to discredit us and sully our names to the church body and community at large,” he said. “It’s a shiny toy and distraction from the real issue at hand.”
TRR reached out to Community Bible Church for more information about the church’s handling of the situation, but did not receive a response.
Josh Yurich said he and his wife have never sought to cause drama or trouble for CBC. Rather, they are speaking out because they fear a similar situation could occur again without changes to the church leadership structure or review process.
“There unfortunately seems to be this pattern where, unless someone has broken the law, which Matt now allegedly has, there is no accountability, ever,” Yurich said. “You can treat people however you want, and the church just basically covers up.”