The Mission Taught Us Not to Call the Police

I used to hear the words “We investigated” and feel reassured.

Now those words scare me.

For a long time, I did not understand why it was wrong for the mission to investigate reports of child abuse.

Now I understand.

I was trained not to see outside authorities as the people who should be called.

I grew up in and around the mission and churches. When children were hurt, the police were not called. Child protection workers were not called. Problems were taken to pastors, missionaries, or mission leaders.

That teaches a child something.

It taught me that abuse was a church or mission matter, not a police matter.

It taught me that the mission or church was the highest authority.

It taught me that calling someone outside the mission was not even an option.

Then I entered mission training, and those lessons became even more direct.

We were taught that the outside culture was against biblical parenting. We were told that government authorities did not understand God’s commands. We were taught that obeying what the mission said was right was more important than obeying the law.

We were not simply taught to spank children a lot.

We were taught how to hide it.

Even after being told that spanking was illegal in Oregon (where NTM had a boot camp), we were still told to do it.

We were told not to stop spanking until the child showed no resistance—even if that took 40 swats. We were supposed to break the child's will.

Young parents were told to use glue sticks and paint stirrers because they were less likely to leave marks.

You could beat the child more and leave no marks.

We were told not to use the word “spanking.” We were encouraged to call it something else, such as “charity” or “correction,” so that if the police or someone from CPS took a child aside and asked whether they were being spanked, the child might not understand the question.

They knew the authorities were not okay with this brutal form of physical punishment.

They did not tell us to stop.

They told us it was the most important part of parenting.

They told us how to keep the authorities from finding out.

The message was clear:

The authorities could not be trusted.

The mission knew better.

Hiding the truth was the good Christian thing to do.

By the time reports of abuse were being “handled internally,” many of us had already been trained to believe that was normal.

So when the mission said, “We investigated,” we did not always hear the danger in those words.

We should have.

Ethnos360 should never investigate allegations of child abuse.

Not through local leadership.

Not through its Child Safety Team.

Not through an IHART investigation.

Not through any team chosen, directed, funded, or approved by the mission.

An internal team is still internal.

A professional-sounding name does not make an investigation independent.

The organization still has its reputation, workers, leaders, churches, donors, and future to protect.

It cannot be connected to the allegation and also be the neutral investigator deciding what happened.

The mission has one responsibility:

Listen. Report. Step back.

Listen to the disclosure.

Write down what was said.

Report it to the proper authorities.

Then step back and let trained Law Enforcement Officers or child protection workers do what they have been trained to do

Do not repeatedly question the child.

Do not gather witness statements.

Do not confront the accused.

Do not decide whether the child is believable.

Do not try to determine what “really happened.”

That is investigating.

The investigation does not belong to the mission.

I understand now why this was so hard for many of us to see. We learned that the mission was safe and outside authorities were dangerous. Then the mission taught us how to hide the treatment of children from those same authorities.

So when the mission suspects abuse and conducts its own investigation, it is not following best practice. It is not doing what protects children.

It is repeating the same pattern we were taught from the beginning:

Keep it inside.

Keep the authorities out.

Handle it ourselves.

That is not child safety.

It is the very system child safety is supposed to protect children from.