GRAND RAPIDS (MI)
WOOD-TV [Grand Rapids MI]
December 10, 2024
By Ken Kolker
A church with deep roots in West Michigan and congregations around the world turned 100 this year. Instead of celebrating its centennial, the Protestant Reformed Churches in America is struggling with what it has called the “private sin” of child sexual abuse and decades of covering up for abusers, including church leaders and school teachers.
A recently released report obtained by Target 8 found dozens of cases of child sexual abuse within the Protestant Reformed Church, or PRC, and accused the church of violating state laws that require clergy and educators to report child abuse.
A police report obtained by Target 8 shows that even recently, leaders in a PRC church in Ottawa County encouraged members not to notify authorities to report physical or sexual abuse within the church or among families of the church. That church’s pastor was convicted in 2022 of assault after teenage girls accused him of inappropriate behavior.Former pastor jailed for abusing teen girl
Survivors of PRC child sexual abuse say the church’s response has made it even more difficult to shake the memories and the pain.
Jean Bylsma was 14 in 1990 when her basketball coach at a PRC school in Ottawa County started molesting her.
“I was very angry at God, very angry at God,” she said. “I didn’t understand how, if what I was taught and what the Bible says, he’s a kind, loving, trustworthy, all-powerful, everywhere-powerful God, then he was in that room, in that car, every time she put her hands on me.”
A man who was identified as Case No. 1 said he was raped over the course of half a dozen years by his sixth grade teacher at Hope Protestant Reformed School in Walker, starting in the mid-1970s.
“She raped me at 13,” said the man, who is now 62 and disillusioned by the church’s response.
“I was willing to end my life, like I looked forward to it,” said Heidi Woldhuis, who said she was sexually assaulted by the same sixth grade teacher in 1979 and kept the secret for decades. “I was that lonely and that lost and that alone. My date was picked: Sept. 27, 2021, was going to be my last day on Earth.”
Jessica Kamps, 30, of the Byron Center area, recently held up a photograph showing herself as a child with her grandfather, a PRC church elder who she said raped her repeatedly when she was little.
“So this is me and Jack is holding me,” she said, referring to her grandfather by his first name.
THIRD-PARTY INVESTIGATION HALTED
The Protestant Reformed Church, known as the PRC, was founded in Grand Rapids, splintering from the Christian Reformed Church in 1924. Its 8,000 or so members are spread across 32 churches in the United States, about a third of those in West Michigan.
Last year, faced with a church divided over decades of sexual abuse and cover-ups, its 20-member governing body agreed during Synod 2023, its annual meeting, to hire a third party, Guidepost Solutions, to investigate. The nearly year-long investigation cost the church $358,000.
“I literally thought because they hired them, that in and of itself for this denomination to do was mind-boggling,” said Woldhuis, one of the survivors. “Like we celebrated the day it passed and that they said, ‘Yes, we’re going to do it.’ Like, we celebrated.”
Guidepost conducted a churchwide survey, set up a hotline and interviewed survivors and others.PDF: Guidepost’s independent assessment report
But at this year’s annual meeting, Synod 2024 (PDF), church leaders did a complete turnaround, deciding in a close vote to denounce the report and that they never should have hired Guidepost in the first place.
Some church leaders feared Satan was working through Guidepost to harm the PRC. One church leader demanded that Guidepost repent for being a supporter and promoter of the LGBTQ+ community.
As a result, Guidepost won’t investigate specific cases in the churches and its schools as expected. Instead, the consistories — the elders and pastors at each church — will investigate allegations within their own houses of worship.
Some survivors question whether that will happen.Survivors: Catholic Church helping abusers more than abused
The Rev. Ronald Cammenga, an advisor to synod, said leaders decided that the “investigation of sin is a matter for the elders of the church.”
“They have the responsibility and they have the calling, so the elders in the local churches have to handle this,” Cammenga said.
Guidepost officials declined to comment.
The Rev. Clayton Spronk, pastor at Faith PRC in Hudsonville, who supported the third-party investigation, said the reversal makes it appear the church is more interested in protecting itself than children.
“That’s what it comes across as, yes,” he said.
He said there’s no guarantee church leaders will do what’s required and call police with any new allegations.
“No guarantee,” he said. “(But) that’s what they’re required by law and by the scriptures to do.
“When it comes to objectivity, I was convinced, I think many of us are convinced, this is something that has to be looked into by someone else. It’s just the nature of an institution that you’re going to want to protect yourself,” he continued.
“If you look at the decision carefully, we’re affirming the evil of the sin of child sexual abuse, we’re affirming the importance of investigating this sin, but then not proposing any way to actually investigate the sin,” he said. “We’re only shutting down the one investigation we have going.”
“The idea that they would rather protect the name of the denomination than to help living, breathing human beings is just gutting to me,” said Woldhuis, a survivor.
There’s plenty to investigate.
A HISTORY OF ABUSE
Guidepost’s report, obtained by Target 8, described a history of sexual abuse allegations in 29 of the church’s 32 U.S. congregations.
In those churches, it uncovered a total of 43 abusers and people who mishandled allegations of child sexual abuse. The report didn’t break down that number.
During interviews, Guidepost also found 45 cases of sexual abuse involving the church’s schools, including some in West Michigan.
“I’ve known since I was in seminary that the Protestant Reformed Churches had a bit of a problem with sexual abuse and handling it,” Spronk said. “So to find out that this report is confirming that is not a surprise. Sadly, the church — and this is true in every church — all of the sins that you find in the world are found in the church.”Priest dies before extradition to Michigan to face rape case
Target 8’s investigation found only one alleged abuser who was ever criminally charged: Ronald VanOverloop, a former Ottawa County pastor.
One reason for that, according to the Guidepost report: Churches and schools failed to report child sexual abuse allegations as required by law. Educators and clergy are mandatory reporters.
“I think there’s this need to protect the name: ‘We need to protect the PRC,’” said the survivor known as Case No. 1. “(Leaders think) ‘We cannot let something like this get out. It’s going to soil the PRC.’”
Instead, according to Guidepost, when faced with allegations, the church has relied on the Bible. Matthew 18:15 reads, “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.”
Some interviewed by Guidepost “were taught that ministers and elders were appointed by God to be leaders. ‘So how could a person say anything bad about them?’” according to the report.
It’s a church run only by men, where women aren’t allowed in any positions of authority and aren’t allowed to vote on church matters.
That’s at least part of why some victims kept quiet, including Heidi Woldhuis, who said she was molested in 1979 by her sixth grade teacher, Hulda Kuiper, at Hope Protestant Reformed School in Walker.
“Where was I going to go and who was I going to talk to?” she said. “I learned how to disappear, just disappear.”
According to church reports, her abuser molested at least five young students dating back 50 years. Hulda Kuiper was 90 when she died in 2022, never charged with a crime.
Spronk, the Faith PRC pastor who supported the investigation, said he has spoken to about 10 child sexual assault survivors across the denomination.
“In my mind, the sexual abuse they suffered is horrific and I can’t think of anything worse,” he said. “But almost all of them, and I believe all of them I have asked about this, will tell me and say that the mishandling of their case by the church hurts more. That’s astounding.”
Spronk said he has also had connections with several of those identified by the church as abusers: one was a member of his church; he interned for one; and his own children, he said, were groomed by another.
“What hurts the most is the church not having your back,” said Bylsma, one of the survivors, who felt the message she got from the church was: “‘We’re done helping you and you need to heal, you need to move on and you need to go on and be a mom and a wife.’”
THE ONLY CONVICTION
The Guidepost investigation was prompted in part by the assault conviction of long-time pastor Ronald VanOverloop.
“I remember it feeling weird and it feeling wrong,” said Eliese Moelker, one of his victims.
VanOverloop got 45 days in the Ottawa County Jail in 2022 for inappropriately touching a teenage girl while counseling her at his parsonage at Grace Protestant Reformed Church in Ottawa County.
One girl told Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office detectives that he asked her to sit on his lap, touched her inappropriately and kissed her on the lips on at least 10 occasions, sometimes while talking about the love of God, most often at his parsonage and sometimes while his wife was home.
Police reports (PDF) say the assaults against that girl went on for four years, starting in 2009, but wasn’t reported until 2021. By then, it was too late for criminal charges.
But other girls came forward with similar stories. One told police VanOverloop fondled himself while counseling her, according to a police report.
Eliese Moelker, now 25, said VanOverloop inappropriately touched her legs during a counseling session in the pastor’s study when she was 16 or 17. He stroked her leg, she said in court, and held her in a long, uncomfortable hug. It was her case that led to his assault conviction.Scouts Dishonor: The legacy of one Boy Scouts volunteer
Former PRC Pastor Ronald Cammenga told Target 8 VanOverloop had a dozen or more victims.
Witnesses reported regularly seeing parents dropping off teenaged girls at VanOverloop’s parsonage. Pastors at other churches sent girls to him for counseling. There were reports he counseled girls from Covenant Christian High School.
“I remember adults saying, ‘Oh, he just has such a passion for working with the young people. Oh, he just really loves kids,’” Moelker said. “He’d go around after church giving us all hugs.”
According to the police report, victims were reluctant to come forward because church leaders “have been very intentional about encouraging their constituents not to go to the authorities when physical or sexual abuse occurs within families or the church,” that the church would deal with it privately.
VanOverloop, according to the police report, had told church leaders “they are not to go to authorities about reported abuse.”
“The environment they created made me feel like I would not feel safe coming to them with that information, so I just went to the detective,” Moelker said.
Moelker said church leaders asked her to meet with them.
“Having an older man like violate you in some way and then having a bunch of other old men like, ‘Oh, yeah, come tell us about this, and oh, yeah, he (VanOverloop) might be in the room when we have this conversation,’” Moelker said. “I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’”
Moelker said she quit the PRC, but said some family members still attend.
“It made church become like a very stressful environment that I didn’t want to be in anymore,” she said.
VanOverloop, fired by the church in 2021 after victims came forward, is now 75, living in Georgetown Township. He slammed the door when a Target 8 investigator stopped at his home to ask for comment.
UP TO 10 VICTIMS, NO CHARGES
Then, there’s the case of long-time church member and former elder Don Faber, detailed in a Grand Rapids police report obtained by Target 8.
According to the report (PDF), a male member of First Protestant Reformed Church in Grand Rapids confronted Faber in 1998, leading him to confess to sexually molesting children a decade earlier.
The church says five to 10 other male victims were identified.
But there’s no record the church called police.
Instead, a decade later, in 2008, a woman — not a church leader since women aren’t allowed to lead — called Grand Rapids police to report the assaults. By that time, Faber was 72 years old. The woman’s name was redacted from the report.
The woman who originally tipped off police called them again in 2013, questioning why Faber was still “ministering” at the church.
The pastor at the time, James Slopsema, refused Target 8’s request for an interview, but in an email said that in 1999, the year after church leaders learned of the allegations, a “public announcement was made to the church explaining Don’s sin of sexual abuse and his repentance.”
“Don took ownership of his sinful, criminal activity and was deeply sorrowful,” the pastor wrote in the email.
He said Faber “apologized to his victims and as much as possible to their parents.”
Slopsema said he didn’t call police back then because the statute of limitations had already expired. He wouldn’t describe details of the sexual assaults or how he knew the statute of limitations had run out.
Grand Rapids police said they didn’t pursue the investigation because the alleged abuse happened outside their jurisdiction — at Faber’s cottage in Spring Lake — and over questions of the statute of limitations since it wasn’t reported until 2008.Former Boy Scout: Michigan law is keeping abuse victims from full payouts
Faber is 88, still a member in good standing in the PRC, living in Walker with his wife.
When Target 8 knocked on his door and asked him about the allegations, he responded: “That was taken care of 25 years ago,” and then shut the door.
IT STARTED ‘ON MY FIFTH BIRTHDAY’
(Please see original article for video)
Jessica Kamp’s grandfather, Jacob Lenting, of Beecher, Ilinois, is among those identified by the church as child molesters.
“I loved my grandpa,” she said. “If I ever had an issue in life, who did I call?”
Grandpa.
Leaders at Crete Protestant Reformed south of Chicago said in a church report that they only recently learned that Lenting, a longtime member and former elder, had molested children, including his own granddaughter.
“He wore a mask where I thought he was one of the most Godly men,” his granddaughter said. “He knew how to talk the Bible.”
His granddaughter said he sometimes abused her during naps at his home between Sunday services.
The worst of the abuse, she said, started on her birthday.
“It was a Sunday. It was my fifth birthday,” she said.
She was 26 in 2019 when she first told church leaders and police. The church said it reported it immediately to child protective services in Illinois. It eventually ex-communicated Lenting.
“I was believed and supported by the church, whereas some of these other victims weren’t,” Kamps said.
In an open letter (PDF), Lenting’s church described the allegations in detail: that he raped children, including his own grandchildren, that he pulled kids into the church bathroom and exposed himself. Church leaders said they first knew of a dozen victims, but later learned there are many more and that “his victims span many decades,” according to the letter.
One woman came forward in 2020, after suffering a nervous breakdown, to report Lenting had raped her in his basement when she was a girl, according to a police report obtained by Target 8. She spoke of nightmares and remembers cuckoo clocks chirping and chiming in the room while it happened.
That report suggested as many as 30 victims.
Lenting’s church apologized in writing in March 2024, acknowledging mistakes. Among them: The church pastor didn’t act on the allegations for a month after learning about them in 2019. Leaders waited nearly a year to warn church members and even longer to inform other PRC churches.
“We grieve over the harm our failure has caused,” the church wrote. “We grieve with all who were so wickedly groomed and victimized by this man who was often an elder in our church and was called to guard the flock, especially the little lambs.”
In late 2021, Lenting spent two days in jail for violating a protection order filed by his daughter, Jessica Kamp’s mother, Illinois court records show.
In a polygraph he paid for and passed, obtained by Target 8, he said he didn’t remember raping his granddaughter but admitted touching his own daughter inappropriately when she was a teenager and getting aroused by touching his grandchildren’s thighs.AG releases report on abuse within Catholic Diocese of Kalamazoo
The Rev. Spronk, of Faith PRC in Hudsonville, said his own daughters “were targeted” by Lenting. At the time, Spronk was a pastor in nearby Lansing, Illinois, and knew Lenting well.
“Jack Lenting would come to our house almost every time that he knew I’d be out of town,” Spronk said. “Usually, he’d say, ‘I have my granddaughters with me. Can your daughters come with me to McDonald’s?’ And we’ve come to find out that if your children were in the car with him, he was doing different things, already to try to touch them and break through boundaries. Things like that. Grooming. It’s grooming.”
In March 2024, the Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney’s Office decided not to file charges against Lenting. A spokeswoman told Target 8 in an email they agency didn’t have enough evidence. She refused to elaborate.
“I can’t think of anything more that you need when you have four victims who are willing to testify to sexual assault,” said Kamps, his granddaughter. “I can’t imagine there’s more.”
Even the church, in a report, criticized the state for not pursuing the case: “We believe the justice system has failed at many points in this case, and do desire that one day he would be convicted for his crimes.”
Lenting is 79 now, living south of Chicago in Beecher, Illinois.
Target 8 caught up with him as he was leaving his home. When asked to deny the allegations, he said: “No, I’m not going to talk about it.”
He referred Target 8 to his attorney, who declined to comment.
“His side of the story is either a matter of public record or confidential, attorney/client privilege,” attorney Jason F. Danielian wrote in an email. “Feel free to peruse the former, but I cannot delve into the latter with you.”
Still, to this day, his granddaughter won’t celebrate her own birthday and struggles on her kids’ birthdays.
“I’ve always hated my birthday, absolutely always hated it,” she said.
CASE NO. 1
(Please see original article for video)
Hulda Kuiper was a sixth grade teacher at Hope Protestant Reformed School in Walker for 16 years, well-known across the PRC. She wrote religious poetry.
“Everyone knew Hulda,” said the man who later became known in a church report as her Case No. 1. “She was a strict disciplinarian, known for spanking boys.”
He remembers the paddle hanging on a hook in the library.PDF: Letter from Hope Protestant Reformed Christian School regarding Kuiper
But Kuiper, according to church records obtained by Target 8, was also a predator with at least five victims, likely more.
She was among those never charged with a crime, protected by her church.
“She should have gone to jail,” Case No. 1 said.
He said he was 12 when the abuse started in the 1970s. He’s 62 now, married with two children. He doesn’t want to be identified because his co-workers don’t know what happened. However, he allowed Target 8 to use his school photographs.
He was teacher’s pet in sixth grade at Hope.
“She would do a lot of talking about how, ‘You’re special, you’re more special than the other students. You’re good-looking. You’re obviously going to have all the girls chasing you,’” he recalled. “She made friends with my parents, which is a standard pedophile technique, to pull the family in and groom them also.”
She attended the same church as his family, Southwest PRC in Wyoming.
Soon, she was touching him, kissing him, making him touch her — alone in the library, or in a utility room at the school, he said.
“This was going on through the entire sixth grade,” he said. “I’m a terrified 12-year-old. I don’t know what to say to this strict disciplinarian. No? What’s she going to do if I say no? She going to spank me? Am I going to be in huge trouble if I say no? So, I’m just trapped. I mean by the age of 12, I was trapped already.”
Then, the seventh grade.
“Raped at 13, continued to be raped until the age of 17,” he said.
Sometimes it happened at Kuiper’s home in Jenison; sometimes in her classroom during recess, he said.
“While we could hear the kids playing outside the window,” he recalled.
When he was attending nearby Covenant Christian High School, she would summon him by asking the school’s secretary to leave a note on his locker.
“And I would go see her. I was so under her control. I thought I had to,” he said.
Finally, after another sexual assault, he drove north on Wilson Avenue, away from the school. He was 17.
“And almost committed suicide, almost,” he said. “I kept looking at the trees flying by, just said, ‘Just pull it into the trees, just be done. Look at that tree go by. How fast it would be. All’s you got to do is yank the wheel and drive straight on into a tree, and it will be over with.’
“I’ve only told that to a few people, but I swear I had a demon in the car with me, tempting me, trying to get me to commit suicide,” he continued. “But the Lord kept it from happening.”
He confronted his old teacher.
“I told her that’s it,” he said. “I’m never going to see you again, you’re never going to see me, otherwise I’m going to tell.”
She responded with letters: “Please remember, my darling, I still love you very much,” she wrote in one, and a Valentine’s card, signed, “You know who.”
Several years later, in 1981, he was drunk — at the beginning of a decade of alcohol and drug abuse — when he told his parents, but only about the kissing and hugging, he said.
His father, an elder, told the church. A recent report (PDF) released by the church revealed leaders failed to investigate and failed to report it to authorities. The statute of limitations had not yet expired, so she could have been prosecuted. Instead, back in 1981, the church placed the teacher on supervision, didn’t notify the school and allowed her to keep teaching for four more years.
“She gets to keep her job and even worse than that they don’t even tell the school what happened,” Case No. 1 said.Why survivors of sexual assault may take time to report
The school fired her in 1985 for insubordination, still unaware of the allegations.
More than a decade later in 2001, Case No. 1 said he met with Rev. Ronald Cammenga, then the pastor at his church, Southwest PRC.
“I’m just crying and just going on and on,” he said. “Told him everything. Everything.”
He said he described first-degree criminal sexual conduct, punishable by up to life in prison. Still, he said, nobody called police.
Case No. 1 said the pastor told him: “Well, I don’t really think we should do anything. You’re going to hurt your children. If this gets out, your children are going to suffer.”
Cammenga told Target 8 he recalls that conversation.
“I think I was concerned about his family and about his kids and about everything that would happen if this was made public,” he said in a recent interview.
Cammenga said he recalls calling police to ask about the statute of limitations without giving names. By then, it had expired. The law couldn’t touch Hulda Kuiper.
Five years later, on Thanksgiving Day in 2006, Case No. 1 filed a report with the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department (PDF). He said he met again with Cammenga.
“‘You went and called the police?’” he quoted the pastor as saying. “Well, I ain’t going to help you then. This whole thing’s going to blow up. You’re going to have WOOD TV at your door.”
He said the reverend calmed down once he learned prosecutors couldn’t file charges.
Cammenga also recalled that conversation.
“The reason I was upset is because we had kind of an agreement about how we were going to handle or not handle the whole thing and completely without my knowledge he went to the police and that upset me a bit because I was his counselor,” Cammenga told Target 8. “We were working together on the issue.”Under God, Divisible: Political conflict deepens rift among Christians
Heidi Woldhuis said she was also a victim of Kuiper, her sixth-grade teacher in 1979, who often kept her in for recess.
“She used to call me the little Nazi all the time, that was her special name, because I was a German kid in a school of Dutch people,” Woldhuis said.
“Any time we were in the room, any touching was usually over my shirt, a few times she would start going under, and then began the, ‘I need to take you to the bathroom because we need to teach you about what happens when women get their periods, and I’m going to teach you some things,’ and she began assaulting me and she would use tampon applicators to penetrate me in the girl’s bathroom at Hope school,” Woldhuis recalled.
“By the time I left junior high, I was a shell of a mess with a serious drinking problem,” she continued. “I was blackout drinking at least twice a week, just desperate to stop this up here (in my mind), a desperate wish to not exist anymore, eating disorder.”
She said she was eventually shunned by the church and her family after ending what she called a violent marriage with divorce. She recalled how two elders showed up at her house with her church membership papers.
“Letting me know that because of my wicked and willful ways, I left them with no choice but to excommunicate me and that they were sad to see that I was going to hell and joyfully bringing my children with me, and they left,” she said.
She didn’t tell anyone about Kuiper until a year and a half ago. By then, Kuiper was dead. Woldhuis never got a chance to confront her.
“It was the one thing I held onto. I thought I was the only one, and it was a place, I just didn’t want to go back to it,” she said.
Woldhuis, now an ordained minister, said she knows more than 100 PRC abuse victims and holds support meetings at her home. She’s also among those posting on a forum for former PRC members that tracks abuse and has pushed for change.
“It’s not pretty inside my head sometimes, but it has been my healing. It’s just been my healing to be there and support and to counsel and assist because I know how bad and how hard it was for me,” she said. “I will do anything I have to do to make sure eyes are on this church and somebody answers for the damage they have caused because there are so many of us.”
Case No. 1 said he met twice with Kuiper years after the abuse ended.
“It started out with ‘Hulda, I hate you, and I don’t want to hate you anymore, let me tell you why,’” he said.
He listed everything she had done to him.
“She’s like, ‘Oh, do we have to hear all these details?’ I almost lost it. I’m like, ‘I’ve had to live with these memories in my brain for 20 years, you can sit here for 10 minutes and listen to what I’ve got to say,’” he recalled. “She must have seen the murder in my eyes, and she shut right up.”
She signed documents confessing to everything.
“This has changed my life right there because I took control back from Hulda,” he said.
Later, Kuiper became a member in good standing at Spronk’s Faith PRC in Hudsonville.
“It wasn’t until months before she died that one of the victims contacted me and I could have fallen over when he said to me, ‘You have a serial pedophile in your congregation,’ and then he told me Hulda’s name,” Spronk said.
He said Kuiper should have gone to prison.After the Fall: The legacies of Grand Rapids’ two most notorious priests
After her death at the age of 90, the PRC’s website listed Kuiper among the “Saints Who Died in the Lord in 2022.”
Spronk presided over her funeral.
“I didn’t try to eulogize her at all,” he said. “Just that it’s a moment of death and pain and call the people that are there to believe in Jesus.”
He said he hopes she’s in heaven:
“I can’t judge that. Her crimes were horrible and I do not believe that the church did everything it should have done to call her to repentance and to show that repentance. Does that mean the Lord couldn’t have? I don’t know. That’s how I view it. I don’t want to judge people eternally.”
OVERWHELMED BY THE MEMORIES
PRC survivors say they struggle to keep the memories of abuse from defining them, sometimes overwhelming them.
“I have my times. Sometimes I surprise myself and other times I completely lose it. And the problem is you never know when it’s going to hit,” survivor Jean Bylsma said.
Bylsma said she was 14, a ninth grader, in 1990 when her basketball coach, a teacher at the PRC’s Heritage Christian School in Hudsonville, started molesting her. The teacher was in her late 20s.
“It started with grooming, you know, get to know the family, get to know brothers, sisters,” she said. “Then she started giving me rides home from basketball practices, games, just me so it was a lot of alone time with her, and she would put her hand on my leg, and then it would proceed to more of that sort of touching.”
She said the abuse went on for a year. She came forward more than 20 years later, too late for criminal charges.
“It was just a depression, a suicidal depression,” she said. “I was not good. I didn’t want to live because I didn’t know how to live with this anymore, with the abuse.
“It was when my daughter had turned the same age as me that it all hit me, came crashing down on me. I didn’t know how to deal with it,” she continued. “I didn’t know how to be a mom. I didn’t know how to hug my daughter. I didn’t like it, right. It was icky, it was dirty, so I crashed.”
The police report, which described the crime as second-degree CSC, forcible contact, shows a church elder immediately called police after learning about the allegations and that church leaders confronted the teacher in Iowa, where she was teaching at a PRC school. The report shows the teacher acknowledged what happened but didn’t go into detail. She was allowed to resign.
But Bylsma said the church still hasn’t done enough to make things right. She wants the former teacher, who still attends a PRC in Iowa, to confess to her and apologize to her family and the school.
“I would love and I pray for complete and sincere repentance and confession and that’s what we’re working towards and so far I haven’t seen it,” Bylsma said. “But that’s what I hope happens, so she can worship in her church free of guilt and I can worship knowing that we’ve tried to settle this as best as we can.”
Bylsma is married with four children and is still a member of the church that she loves.
“I just want I want to fix it. I want to have the hard discussions. I want to, even if it’s raising voice and the tears flow and we get frustrated, at least let’s talk about it. Because if we don’t talk about it, we’re never going to change, and in 10 years, we’re going to have a whole new batch of victims,” she said.
For the man known in a church report as Case No. 1, molested for years by his elementary teacher at Hope Protestant Reformed Church in Walker, the recent church decision to denounce the third-party investigation has reopened the scars. He’s still a member of the church, was on a committee that worked with Guidepost to investigate abuse, and was there when church leaders decided that the investigation was a mistake.
“I went into a two-month depression,” he said.
“Will they ever change? Will they ever fix this? I don’t hold out much hope for them.”
The Protestant Reformed Church released a statement Tuesday before this story was published. Read the full statement here.