GRAND RAPIDS -- For three years, beginning at age 14, David Wygmans says he was sexually abused by the pastor of a church in southern Michigan.
It would be enough to make anyone turn away from the church. But Wygmans, now a pastor at a church in Newaygo, stayed.
Wygmans says he never doubted that a God somewhere wanted to stop the ongoing abuse. But years later, he still wonders, Why God didn't.
Wygmans' story is one of several in "Set Us Free: What the Church Needs to Know from Survivors of Abuse," published by the University Press of America. The book describes connections between church, faith, and sexual, physical and emotional abuse.
The book is the result of a 1990 survey by authors Rodger Rice, Ann Annis and Michelle Loyd-Paige -- co-workers at Calvin College's Social Research Center. They examined abuse affecting Christian Reformed Church members.
Wygmans tells one of the stories.
When the abuse started, Wygmans said, his parents had long been divorced, and his father had died. He remembers feeling desperately in need of a father figure.
The pastor at his church arranged for Wygmans to participate in activities that required the two to spend time alone together. He says he knew the pastor's actions were wrong, but says the sense of the church's patriarchal system transcended the abuse.
"I never felt empowered to feel anger," he told The Grand Rapids Press. "It was disrespectful to be angry with adults, and certainly blasphemous to be angry at God."
About 28 percent of the denomination's membership had been abused either as children or adults, according to the 1990 survey. The finding astonished the authors, Rice said.
In 1993, the Social Research Center surveyed churchgoers of all denominations. Of 200 who responded, 98 percent said they believed that people in their congregations had been abused in some way.
The Calvin researchers interviewed 63 people of various denominations and found that churches are unprepared to deal with abuse, whether perpetrated inside or outside of church walls.
"There's still a lot of cronyism, so any organization that tries to monitor itself has varying degrees of success," said the Rev. Patricia L. Liberty, a United Church of Christ minister and executive director of Associates in Education and Prevention in Pastoral Practice.
"People still want to believe that religious people don't do that, and there's not a shred of evidence that suggests that people who identify themselves as religious have any less experience of violence than the general population."
When the victims' feelings of guilt, shame and abuse are not addressed by the church, they result in a sense of abandonment by God and mistrust and disinterest in the church, the authors say.