|
If there is anyone reading this who is a member or a supporter of Ethnos360 (New Tribes Mission), I hope you will consider something that has been heavy in my thoughts and on my heart. I hope I can find the words to express my heaviness.
This has to do with the poem so eloquently expressed by threewillows.
"Broken children left in your wake
Rumors of change conceal their carnage
Where is your consequence? ...."
It is not an exaggeration to speak of broken children, and carnage. Around the world there are broken children. Hundreds of them, if not thousands. Children of the missionaries who served in New Tribes Mission in decades past. Children who are now adults.
There are families torn asunder because this brokenness. There are estranged children. There are grieving parents who feel they have lost connection with their children. There are siblings who have ended up on opposite ends of the spectrum in their faith, their political leanings, or their opinions of NTM/Ethnos360.
Ethnos360 wants to believe they have taken care of the problems of the past. They want their members and supporters to believe this. They have spent enormous amounts of money (money donated by the faithful, intended for world evangelism) to conduct purported investigations into child abuse in several MK schools. Currently they are still paying an attorney to keep up the pretense of continuing investigations ... investigations which will carry no weight, and not lead to any validation or satisfaction for survivors of child abuse.
Current leaders of the mission, and current members, are willing to acknowledge that there have been some missionaries in the past who did hurt children. They refuse to name them publicly, but they do acknowledge that there were some people, particularly some staff members at MK boarding schools, who hurt children physically and even sexually.
It seems to be the opinion of mission members and leaders that since there has been an acknowledgement of abuse, and in some cases even a slap on the wrist for some perpetrators (these consequences have not been particularly verifiable, because things have all been so vague), that the mission has done its duty, and it is time for these matters to be considered resolved.
As a mother who has experienced tension, alienation and estrangement in my own family, I ask you to understand that NO, things are not resolved.
It is not helpful for you to point to MKs who you you consider to be well-adjusted, many of whom have actually joined your mission as adults, and even become a part of your leadership structure, as evidence that MK schools really weren't all that abusive or harmful.
Ethnos360 will never be willing to accept and acknowledge the fatal flaw in their MK education plan, devised in the 1940s or 50s.
They will never be willing to admit that separating small children as young as 5 or 6 years old from their parents for months at a time was WRONG.
It is a distraction to focus on individual perpetrators of abuse while refusing to acknowledge the error of separating small children from their parents for the sake of "The Work". The carnage this has caused will continue to cripple our families and kill our children.
The refusal to acknowledge this part of the child abuse picture in any significant way keeps most missionary or former-missionary parents from being able to accept how wrong the education set-up was. The set-up that we as parents felt pressured to participate in as a way to show our total devotion to the cause. As long as parents keep making excuses for abandoning their children, their children's pain will not be able to be healed.
Until this part of the issue is acknowledged and confessed, adult MKs who are your "broken children" will continue to be distant from you. They will continue to feel that the mission just doesn't get it. Their parents just don't get it. The pain that MKs have expressed to me stems more from the basic abandonment they experienced than it does from specific teachers or dorm parents who beat them or molested them.
The greatest pain is that as a 5 or 6 or 7 year old, they did not matter. They did not matter as much as the Mission did. They did not matter as much as pleasing the field leaders and the Executive Committee did.
Think about what this does to the psyche of a small child.
Think about this and weep.
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
