When I woke up without an alarm at five o’clock, I decided to stay in bed. The day before, I woke up at 4:30, and by 5:00 I had decided to get out of bed, go downstairs, and wash some dishes rather than stay lying in bed, excessively ruminating on work stress and the state of the world. This time, I just put in my earbuds, tuned in to a low-stress, conversational podcast, and closed my eyes again, figuring that at least, even if I didn’t sleep, I’d be able to stay horizontal while being distracted from the noise of my own mind.
I need to learn to not do this. It’s okay if the podcast in question is a fictional story, but the ones where people are engaging in banter always confuse my dream consciousness just enough to make her think that she can participate in the conversation. The substance of the podcast doesn’t matter to this dream pattern. I’m never listening to anything serious when I use a conversational podcast to go to sleep; the goal is to reduce the stress preventing me from sleeping, not fuel it with the aural equivalent of doom scrolling. I listen to analysis of fictional narratives, podcast extras for stuff I subscribe to, cooking podcasts—basically anything unrelated to the news that I can access without ads.
But the gentleness of the banter doesn’t matter, somehow. The point is that the people in the podcast are delivering a steady stream of immovably real speech, and my dream brain can’t force them to converse with me.
The John Howard Yoder case serves as a warning against institutional self-satisfaction. One of the leading Anabaptist theologians, Yoder, practiced serial sexual abuse, but was protected by institutional cover-up by his Mennonite institutions over decades. Decades of survivors’ mobilization and outside pressure were required before these same institutions themselves admitted to breakdown (Miller, 2014).
MCC leaders’ response to successive allegations of abuse risks reproducing this scenario. Without external scrutiny and institutional transformation, complacency will defeat justice.
Like any organization, MCC will face workplace conflict. Differing opinions will arise when staff serve in difficult and complex situations. However, the claims of systemic abuse are unequivocally false.
—Mennonite Central Committee press release, released on February 5, 2025
Welcome, dear readers, to a very unwieldy essay, written with messy urgency and very little editorial attention. Please bear with me as I prioritize timeliness over perfectionism, for the sake of some people wearing teal ribbons right now at the meetings of Mennonite World Conference in Schönblick, Germany.
In any setting in which teenage sexuality and gender expression are under moralistic scrutiny, you will find predators like this.
I’m working on several essays that I plan to share here over the next month. Rather than go silent while I’m working on them, I’m sharing a short piece, lightly edited, that I wrote and shared on social media in August 2020.
“I feel like a lure,” she said to me. “Like I’m putting myself out there giving survivors false hope that churches are willing to learn and change.” Then she, a devout Christian, said, “I have literally no hope left that churches are going to change.”
Last week I had a long conversation with a fellow advocate from a partner organization that, like Into Account, specializes in strategic support for survivors who have been abused in Christian environments. We’re almost exactly the same age, and our advocacy careers have had somewhat similar trajectories, but what matters the most to me about our collaboration is how deeply aligned our priorities are.
We’re not in the business of working with survivors of church-based abuse because we want to “restore the church” or “save the church from itself,” despite the frequency with which those intentions are projected onto us. We both got into the work out of a desire to build up survivors’ agency and autonomy in the face of bad institutional responses and bad theology that routinely strip them away.
For the past few years, my advocacy nonprofit Into Account has been a partner organization with the Religion and Sexual Abuse Project, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project based at the University of California-Riverside. On May 30-31, they’re hosting a hybrid conference called Surviving the Law: Legal Advocacy for Survivors and Scholars.
If you’re reading this newsletter because you’re a survivor and/or a fellow advocate, I hope you can join me in Riverside, or attend online. The registration is sliding scale. I’m excited to be part of the lineup of speakers, which includes a number of my friends and advocacy colleagues, and some of my advocacy role models (including Terry McKiernan, the founder and president of the massive online archive Bishop Accountability).
Some of the panel titles include: “Survivor Experiences in Litigation: First-Person Accounts,” “Barriers to Justice: Agency, Education, Disability, Isolation, and Trauma,” “Post-Publishing Hazards for Scholars and Survivors: Libel, Subpoenas, Publishers’ Liability, and Personal Risks in Writing about Abuse,” and “Reform v. Abolition: Confronting Mixed Feelings.”
I’ll be speaking on a panel entitled “Institutional Firewalls: Bankruptcy, Insurance, Legal Teams, Enablers, and NDAs.” The title of my talk is “In the Shadow of ‘Zero Tolerance’: When Liability Avoidance Leaves Survivors Behind.”
Welcome to So Sue Me! I’m Stephanie Krehbiel. I’m a writer, a former academic, a nonprofit co-founder and executive director, and a survivor advocate. I work primarily with sexual abuse survivors who have experienced betrayal from churches and other faith-based institutions.
You can read examples of my previous writings here, here, here, and, if you have a stomach for dissertations, here.
