Thread by @ladyjessicahaze

So Christ Our Light, now defunct, housed a catechist who sexually abused numerous victims, and @cherinmarie2’s lawsuit discovery shows that the church had no insurance.

@greenhousemove planted Christ Our Light within @MidwestAnglican.

What’s up with the insurance, Greenhouse?

https://twitter.com/nymag/status/1699032618895905013

If I remember correctly, more than half the churches within @MidwestAnglican were planted by @greenhousemove. Do these churches have insurance to cover them in the event that they are sued for institutional negligence? Is it legal for churches not to have this insurance?

I assume we’ll discover that @greenhousemove as an umbrella organization does, in fact, have insurance that covers all their churches (as well as former churches that had to be shut down because 2/3 of the main leadership turned out to be sexual predators).

Meanwhile, @greenhousemove remains both institutionally opaque and also shows up like one giant pile of red flags, just from its own online presence, not even considering reports we’re fielding behind the scenes.

Their website alone should give you pause.

The homepage of @greenhousemove’s website highlights their institutional ethos: “Following the Holy Spirit TOGETHER for the spontaneous expansion of the Church.”

It feels clear by now that this expansion needs a little less spontaneity and a little more attention to the basics.

The “Our Story” page on @greenhousemove’s website speaks of founder William Beasley’s vision of lanterns going out two by two from the then-small, now mega-church-sized @ChurchRez.

“…then, these lanterns were taken into airplanes to the nations, reaching the ends of the earth.”

I’ve long found this vision story alarming in its grandiosity. But it also just feels sad, and dripping with dramatic irony. When I think of a pair of lanterns, all I can think of is the pair of sexual predators who helped found Christ Our Light: Mark Rivera and Chris Lapeyre.

I didn’t really understand what @greenhousemove was at the time, but while I was Mark Rivera’s next door neighbor and his abuse victim he told me Greenhouse was a bureaucratic mess of an organization.

Mark lied about a lot of things, but apparently not this one.

When I came forward in 2020, I got the message that @greenhousemove was sort of separate from @MidwestAnglican, that Bp. Stewart Ruch was not really in authority over Mark Rivera’s superior, Fr. Rand York.

To this day, the structure of Greenhouse remains monumentally confusing.

And this is not due to a lack of research and inquiry. I don’t do this research, but numerous friends and fellow advocates have tried to sort this out, not to mention @cherinmarie2’s lawyers, whose attempt to hold some entity within this mess accountable is ongoing.

Bp. Stewart oversees @MidwestAnglican, and @greenhousemove plants churches within the diocese, but it is a separate legal entity that also plants churches elsewhere, and nobody seems to agree on who has authority over whom, and thus who is responsible for what.

And yet @greenhousemove founder William Beasley explains the evident structure in a YouTube video, posted 11 years ago, in which he is answering questions about how his movement in the western Chicago suburbs is apparently modeled after the African [Anglican] Church.

In this video William tells a story of a Bishop John, who started as a lay catechist — the same role Mark Rivera recently occupied, a role that has been repeatedly downplayed as an unpaid volunteer position in order to distance the diocese from Mark.

”Bishop John started as a lay catechist,” Beasley recounts telling people. “They tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘would you be a priest.’ They tapped him on the shoulder and he’s a bishop.”

This is William’s illustration of “spontaneous expansion.” But there’s a punch line.

Apparently Bp. John interrupts William to say, “No no William, I have to correct you. I didn’t start as a lay catechist. I first started two congregations, THEN they made me a lay catechist.”

If this isn’t an alarming escalation of spontaneous expansion, I don’t know what is.

(Contextually from the video it appears that Bp. John is an African bishop, and I have no insight into how this is working out in that context. I can only speak to the fruits of Fr. William plunking this model down in the U.S. and assuming all would be well.)

Fr. William then launches into a somewhat confusing explanation of how there is both spontaneous expansion AND hierarchy within the system, and goes on to elucidate how this unusual arrangement that “we don’t have a category for in our [U.S.] thinking” actually “holds together.”

“Once you get a lay catechist, your lay catechist is working for the bishop. Because the whole region is one church of which the bishop is the chief pastor, the chief apostle, the chief leader…”

So…Bp. Stewart Ruch WAS in authority over lay catechist Mark Rivera?

“The way it holds together,” says Fr. William in the video, “is that it’s very clear who reports to who. That’s very clear in this whole chain.”

Is it? Because numerous people I know have been trying to sort out the @greenhousemove / @MidwestAnglican relationship since 2021.

And the only thing that’s really clear is that, in the U.S. iteration, this hybrid of “spontaneous expansion” and Anglican hierarchy is a non-transparent institutional disaster where no one is exactly responsible for anything that may go terribly wrong.

Again, I have to assume that future legal discovery will show that @greenhousemove itself does, indeed, have liability insurance, and that Greenhouse will be forced by the civil court to make restitution to @cherinmarie2’s family for the excruciating harm inflicted on them.

But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And we haven’t remotely gotten to the bottom of the particular dumpster fire that is @greenhousemove and its lanterns going out two by two to the ends of the earth, but the fire alarms are certainly going off behind the scenes.

And despite @keepalanwalking’s apparent obsession with informing people of the fact that I am not a Christian (which has never been the least bit of a secret), I am not opposed to organized religion.

I’ve just seen firsthand what can happen when it’s not actually…organized.

I’ll leave detailed discussion of church polity to people who actually understand it, like @AaronMHarrison and @ArlieColes. What I know is that something is very off with the “spontaneous expansion” of this corner of @The_ACNA, and that what is public only scratches the surface.

Meanwhile, thank you to @NYMag and @onesarahjones for taking an interest in the story of @ACNAtoo and helping bring all of this more squarely into the public eye.

https://twitter.com/nymag/status/1699032618895905013