A Modest Proposal for a Christian NGO

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.

—Desalegn Abebe, President, Meserete Kristos Church, from a white paper published on February 14, 2025, “From Inertia to Momentum: Restoring Institutional Integrity in Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)”

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.

Wake Up. It’s Systemic.

One institutional approach to abuse allegations that is guaranteed to amplify human suffering is to publicly deny that any such abuse could possibly be taking place. It advertises to an attentive public that your organization’s identity is wrapped up in fantasies of perfection. And it communicates to abuse survivors that they won’t be heard if they try to report.

That’s what Mennonite Central Committee is doing. I’ve mentioned in an earlier piece that I was raised Mennonite (not the plain-dressing kind). The denomination I identified with as a kid, General Conference Mennonite Church, was absorbed into the two largest North American Mennonite denominations, Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada. If there’s one organization that has been a continual touchstone of Mennonite identity for my entire extended Mennonite family, it has been Mennonite Central Committee, a now-global NGO formed shortly after World War I to address the acute humanitarian needs of Mennonites in Ukraine. (My own ancestors on both sides of my family emigrated from Ukraine, then imperial Russia, in the 1870s. History repeats itself.)

Now it’s a global NGO, supported by Mennonite denominations around the world, including Mennonite Church USA, Mennonite Church Canada, and Meserete Kristos Church, an Ethiopian/Eritrean Mennonite denomination that is, by the most recent statistics I could locate, three times larger than the two largest North American Mennonite denominations combined.

It’s fitting, then, that Pastor Abebe is the one whose words reminded me why this particular ongoing abuse crisis is so excruciating for me. I grew into the profession of survivor advocacy during a big institutional reckoning about the horrific legacy of John Howard Yoder, the most illustrious Mennonite theologian of the twentieth century. I wrote about Yoder’s insidious effect on the Mennonite culture of my youth in my dissertation. I endured harassment, dismissal, and hate from Yoder’s defenders, alongside many other Mennonite women of multiple generations.

Also, my dad, and every single one of my uncles save the youngest one, were of draft age during the Vietnam War, and because they were all devout Mennonites, they were all conscientious objectors. My mom, my dad, and most of my aunts and uncles served MCC terms, mainly as teachers, in recently-decolonized African countries, the men serving as an alternative to military conscription. My parents were in Democratic Republic of Congo, which now competes with Ethiopia and the United States for the largest population of Mennonites in the world. (I’m not sure what the most reliable sources for these statistics really are, but I generally turn to the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.)

It’s not that I ever felt uncomplicated about MCC’s global legacy, or that I never recognized how much the organization defaulted to the demands of conservative, patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ+, and racist donors. I certainly did, and in my capacity as the Executive Director of Into Account, I sometimes received reports from a seemingly terrified MCC employee who would not tell me their name, as well as several who did.

But until 2023, when I received outreach from a growing group of abused former MCC workers, I didn’t realize how bad, how systemic, the abuse situation really was. I had to wake up.

Colonial Roots

Humanitarian NGOs, while many do necessary, life-saving work, are by-products of colonialism, and their very existence belies the assertion that they could possibly be abuse-free. The world order that created the need for these organizations is one of systemic inequity through violence and domination.

So even when the intent is to do good, stay humble, and share power, the wise humanitarian from the Global North maintains awareness of how easily their privilege can be weaponized. And while being a recipient of humanitarian aid in the Global South isn’t a subject position I’ve ever been close to, I’m certain that many people in that position have a far more informed understanding of the relationship between systemic abuse and professionalized benevolence than do their benefactors.

It’s for these reasons that humanitarian NGOs, when they’re run by people who care about these dynamics, operate under the assumption that some abuse is inevitable, and that their response to it is going to say a lot about who they are as an organization. It’s grandiose to imagine that yours will be the organization to eliminate it.

No policy has that kind of power. And no theology has that kind of power. No, not even Mennonite pacifism.

No organization built on the structures given to us by colonialism, patriarchy and global capitalism is free of abuse. Because when human beings decide to invade, colonize, spread supremacist ideologies, and claim ownership over each other, it’s not just mass killing that does the job. It’s rape. It’s child sexual abuse. It’s coerced labor and trafficking of all kinds. It’s gaslighting and psychological manipulation and coercive control. It’s bureaucratic tyranny and bullying. And where you have one of these things, you almost always have some of the others. That’s how systems of dominance and oppression work. They gain strength through layering different kinds of violence, and not all of that violence is splashy, or bloody, or visible, or even named.

Variations on a Theme of Zero Tolerance

This reality underscores why I’m not a fan of the “zero tolerance for abuse” model of addressing systemic harm.

I’m wary of “zero tolerance for abuse” approaches because they incentivize an institutional image of moral perfection, and disincentivize genuinely listening to people whose stories threaten that image. If you’re the one who loudly proclaims that there will be zero tolerance for abuse on your watch, you, or your staff and subordinates, will soon be confronted with the reality that abuse does indeed happen on your watch, because abuse happens everywhere, and your policies have not categorically eliminated it. What then?

Too often, the answer is one or more of the following:

• Try to convince the victims that they weren’t actually abused, and that what happened was normal and expected. (“differing opinions,” “workplace conflict”)

• Present the victims with options that so completely eviscerate their agency that they would have been better off not reporting in the first place, then blame them for not using your options, claiming they are impossible to please.

• Blame them for the abuse and do your best to convince them that they caused it. (This is the trademark Southern Baptist approach, but it works everywhere, including in MCC.)

• Coerce them into a non-disparagement agreement, preferably after disparaging them in a targeted fashion to ensure that a shady narrative about them will be floating around out there, with them now defenseless unless they risk your organization’s legal retaliation against them. Bonus points if you’ve paid them poverty wages and/or their therapy bills are so high that they can’t afford a lawyer.

These are not grim imaginings or rare occurrences. In many organizations, these scenarios are business as usual.

(The most persuasive, and depressing, defense of MCC that I’ve heard is “all organizations are like this.” Maybe I’d be more persuaded if there wasn’t such significant overlap between those who hide behind this defense and those who are clearly invested in MCC’s exculpatory narratives of self-congratulation. Isn’t there some relevant truism here about cake?)

It probably remains to be seen how effective these “zero tolerance” policies actually are in terms of abuse prevention. I don’t believe they’re put in place by ill-intentioned people, at least not usually. But as an advocate who knows how under-reported abuse is in general, and as someone who pays close attention to how discourse shapes our perceptions of reality, I worry that “zero tolerance” policies will effectively disappear the data.

If the subtext of “we have zero tolerance for abuse,” is “we have zero tolerance for your story of abuse,” “the claims of systemic abuse are unequivocally false” just throws out the subtext completely and grabs for a loaded weapon, aiming, practically daring abuse victims to walk into range and find out how fiercely the institution in question is going to defend that image.

MCC has a systemic abuse problem. No rational person can look at the assembled evidence and deny it. There are too many accounts. There’s too much corroboration. There are too many patterns, and many of these allegations go all the way to the top of the organization, to the very people who are vocally, sometimes viciously, denying that the abuse exists. Unfortunately, MCC is fighting hard to keep donors from looking, and churches from caring.

The Weapons of Mennonite Public Relations

Here’s a smattering of the ways that MCC leadership is fighting back. Not against abuse, but against people who speak out about it.

• MCC leaders use phrases like “differing opinions” and “workplace conflict” to characterize a growing body of public abuse allegations, spanning everything from sexual abuse coverups to financial fraud.

• In public statements, MCC leaders consistently graft the entire problem onto one family who had the good fortune to be residents of Quebec, a province with relatively strong labor protections, the likes of which are nonexistent in the United States for employees of religious organizations. After a little bit of publicly visible legal accountability that MCC leaders did their best to twist to their advantage, the leadership escalated a smear campaign against the family, causing relentless psychological damage to the couple and their children, and stealing attention from many dozens of additional allegations, some of them with even more potential to shock donors. The smear campaign also operates as a warning to other victims who are considering sharing publicly, because no one wants to be treated like that.

• MCC leaders insinuate repeatedly, with unguarded sanctimony, that all of the reported abuse is coming from excessively entitled white North Americans who are ignorantly mistaking the challenges of living abroad for abusive conditions. For instance, a February 13, 2025 Canadian Mennonite article reported the following quote from the recently-retired Executive Director of MCC Canada, Rick Coburn Bauman (who reportedly brushed off persistent allegations of financial misconduct and misuse of donor funds over the course of years):

  Cober Bauman emphasized the extent to which MCC has changed over the years to include more staff from outside North America. He said some of these people from “non-dominant cultures” have been “highly critical” of the attention MCC and Canadian Mennonite have given Clarke and Fast, saying that they would receive much less attention or accommodation.

  “We have to be careful when privilege drives the process,” Cober Bauman said.

  This, in the everyday parlance of my profane household, is called “showing your entire ass.” A former MCC regional director, Kim Thiessen, puts it more kindly and succinctly: “Many MCC national and international staff and volunteers do not have the option to voice their concerns for fear of reprisal from MCC. They need their jobs to live, to support their families. Others are not ready to go through what MCC has put people like Anicka [Fast] and John [Clarke] through over several years.”

The Teal Ribbon Campaign

"I am wearing a teal ribbon as…
• a small but meaningful gesture to express my deep longing for MCC—Mennonites’ largest humanitarian organization—to cease practices that harm or silence people
• a choice to not remain silent
• an affirmation of the need for transparency and accountability
• a statement of solidarity with those who have been harmed
• an expression of hope: I want the good and faithful work of MCC – built on a foundation of care for its workers and partners – to continue for years to come
• a way to express my privilege and responsibility as a leader to act in a way that reflects the gospel of peace and justice"

—Desalegn Abebe, explaining his decision to wear a teal ribbon at the May 2025 Mennonite World Conference in Schönblick, Germany, a conference commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement and beginning now

Abebe leads the largest Mennonite denomination in the world. (At least, by the best online evidence I can find. Feel free to correct me if you know of better info.) It’s not without irony that the only Mennonite denominational executive speaking out in support of the MCC survivors is located in the Global South. No such statement has been forthcoming from North American denominational leaders, though it’s safe to assume that they have far more power to pressure MCC towards accountability.

In fact, in Mennonite Church USA, every attempt by congregants to bring attention to the plight of the MCC survivors has been emphatically crushed by denominational leadership. The latest rationale is that MCC needs all the support it can get to deal with the refugee crisis in the United States, precipitated by the xenophobic, white supremacist policies of the Trump administration, and that the abuse allegations are a distraction from this.

I’m proud of Mennonite Church USA for being part of Mennonite Church USA et al. v. United States Department of Homeland Security et al., a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration on its removal of the sensitive locations policy that protects houses of worship as sanctuary locations for undocumented people and refugees. But I do not accept the notion that MCC abuse allegations are a distraction from this cause. That argument is based in a capitalist scarcity mentality, and depends heavily on the illusion that abuse can be treated as a series of isolated, unconnected, individual events.

That may be how institutions train us to think about abuse, but it isn’t how abuse actually works. There are few factors that put human beings at greater risk for abuse than being displaced by war and disaster. If privileged white employees are being abused in a humanitarian organization, you can bet that other people are being abused as well.

Systemic abuse isn’t a white issue. It isn’t a North American issue. And it isn’t a trivial issue. It’s a hellish, human issue, inseparable from the very forces of oppression that this “no time for whiny victims” discourse purports to be challenging.

Are we supposed to pretend that North American Mennonites never sexually assault undocumented people? Are we buying the aggressive implication that MCC never abuses the people dependent on them for aid?

Or do we believe, in some bleak part of ourselves, that enduring abuse is a fair price for oppressed people to pay for the benevolence of privileged white Mennonites?

MCC, I have a modest proposal for peace: If you want to help people suffering under the Trump Administration–a group that is depressingly likely to expand, globally, for the foreseeable future–it might be a good idea to stop behaving like the Trump Administration.