To Allen Hood, a Man After God's Own Heart

A call for repentance on Ash Wednesday

Latest in a long and vibrant evangelical tradition of institutional sexual scandals, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City has had its inevitable reckoning. Its leader Mike Bickle was rightfully disgraced, and the house divided against itself has finally fallen, torn apart by its own.

Now its former generals feel safe enough to rise out of the rubble, surrounded by rotting bodies, and shout in unison: “Look what he made us do!”

It’s been a long year of watching silently as spiritual narcissists proclaim themselves to be on the righteous side of a holy war against a monster they created. Allen Hood’s self-exonerating, PR-shaped “apology”, cushioned by his signature self-deprecation and endearing compunction, broke my brain at last.

I was a teenager when Hood came to my country to recruit me to his unaccredited school. From the platform of my parents’ church, in the middle of the service, he called me by name and said that if he had 10 young people like me, just 10 as special and gifted as I was, he could change the world. This affirmation from a man who knew the world was ending, who knew I was chosen as part of a select few, was dizzying, intoxicating. I doubt he remembers it. I moved from London to Missouri to join his school.

Your school, Allen. The school over which you were president, at the church where you were second in command, whose theology you shaped, whose message you promoted.

Once there, you mostly forgot that I existed. Apart from being assigned an inexperienced and half-hearted “small group leader” — another student roughly my age — I was left alone, with no pastoral care or support. Then again, the organisational culture was so resolutely elitist that I gathered I just wasn’t important enough to be cared for.

Naive and culture-shocked, I fell in with one of your musicians, trustworthy in my eyes because of proximity to the institution’s inner circles. Things escalated quickly, abusively and secretly. What followed were years of sexual and emotional pain that I will never get back.

I want to be as clear and unsentimental as possible: I was a sexually inexperienced young woman who moved to a small town in a different country at your personal invitation, Allen. Once there, I entered an environment that uniquely positioned women like me to be taken advantage of by your subordinates because of (a) the puritanical theology you taught and still do, (b) the isolating nature of your school and (c) the lack of any safe pastoral care.

Narratively, this is what happened.

I started having sex with a prominent figure in your ministry within a year of being at your school. The sex was penetrative, but of the kind that doesn’t risk pregnancy. You know what I mean. These physically painful experiences were my only sexual experiences until I left your school. I was not allowed to talk about them, because to talk about them would be to risk the man’s career as a musician in your ministry, which was of course the most important thing at stake in the situation. He did, in his defence, always repent, even when it happened in between Onething Conference sessions. Press delete. King David fucked a lot too. I’m sorry. Now get face down on the floor so my roommates don’t hear us.

Then, one day, one of your lieutenants found explicit photos of me in my student email account, addressed to my secret friend. I received an anonymous message ordering me to confess my sexual activities to university leadership within three days, or they would do it for me. (I believe I know who this blackmailer was, but now is not the time). So: a leader from your school went through my emails, saw me naked, and threatened me with expulsion and subsequent deportation if I didn’t humiliate myself willingly.

The man I was seeing did away with the blackmailer’s threats through his institutional connections and all was forgiven without my being exposed. But it wasn’t, though, was it? Because for the next year, I was subjected to unexplained and traumatising disciplinary measures at your school.

Your lieutenants assigned me to various one-on-ones with prophets and counsellors, for vague reasons. Without my knowledge, my parents were told I was “struggling.” Well-known leaders would bafflingly pray for God to help me confess. Confess what, I wonder? I knew, they knew, but they would never let me know that they knew. In the end, I was told I was being expelled, and therefore had to leave the country, because I had skipped a few classes. Why had I done that? Because I was an unpaid musician at your ministry for 20+ hours a week as well as a full-time student, and I babysat for cash. We all knew that’s not why I was being expelled. I sobbed. I begged. They let me stay.

Not a single person ever asked me plainly about my sex life.

The relationship went on, twisted by the fear and subordination ingrained in me by your theology of exacting purity for godly women and endless moral flexibility for Men After God’s Own Heart. I bore his shame and mine, without being able to say anything to anyone, ever, or I’d be sent away. I started drinking — vodka in my energy drink as I walked into Excellencies of Christ III. This would never have happened without the International House of Prayer University. The International House of Prayer University would never have happened without you, Allen.

You have no idea the scars I still carry because I went to your school.

Luckily, I left. Luckily, I left the man too. Luckily I’ve built a life entirely divested from the evangelical world — my purpose and happiness no longer dependant on the comings and goings of hysterical men behind pulpits, saying things they don’t intend to be held accountable for.

But if there was ever a time to open my mouth, it’s when people like you, like Dwayne Roberts, try to behave as if scapegoating Mike Bickle is enough to acquit you all of your hand in creating, sculpting, and overseeing the monster that ravaged my life and that of so many others. You don’t get to build the gas chambers and expect a pass, much less a pat on the back, for pointing out where they are. A little yeast leavens the whole bread, and you all come from the same batch.

You, Bickle, Roberts, Hundley and everyone else — you did this to us together.