by Reverend Teresa K. Pecinovsky
Kintsugi pottery by Miyo Heki. Image shared with permission from the artist.
[Updated on 1/5/2020: This version of Teresa Pecinovsky’s interview contains additional details about Dr. Love’s behavior in response to the question, “Can you describe what he did?”]
As I read Rev. Pecinovsky’s answers to my interview questions about her experience with clergy sexual abuse, I felt the sickening weight of a familiar pattern.
The pattern varies from case to case, but it looks something like this: A clergy member targets a young adult, someone for whom he is a religious authority or mentor. He offers them confidential support, comfort, spiritual guidance. He takes advantage of whatever circumstances are making their life difficult: family relationships, struggles rooted in past trauma, daily battles with racism or other forms of oppression, the anxiety produced by new and unfamiliar environments. The grooming begins through kindnesses they may desperately need at the time.
Gradually, he starts to confide in them. Perhaps he talks about his marital struggles, his crises of faith, the way he feels oppressed or hemmed in by his own circumstances. He’ll let them know that they’re one of the only people he can talk to. His demands on them begin to shape their entire life. Eventually, whether through physical abuse or verbal suggestions, his demands will become sexual.
Teresa’s description of her response to this stage of the pattern echoes that of many survivors of clerical abuse: “Whatever it was, I was convinced that it was my fault. I simultaneously felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility and helplessness.” How else could a “servant of God” do this?
And there is another pattern, too: the institutional response of minimizing and denial. You can read it in Teresa’s Title IX complaint findings from Abilene Christian University, which we’re sharing here: “This conduct, while unacceptable and regrettable, did not constitute sexual harassment under ACU’s Anti-Harassment Policy.” The perpetrator, they claimed, faced “reasonable consequences” for his behavior.
Dr. Mark Love, the Church of Christ clergy member named in Teresa’s story, taught at Abilene Christian University during the events she describes below. Far from experiencing “reasonable consequences” for what he did to her, his career in Church of Christ-affiliated academia continued at Rochester University, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, where he currently serves as the Graduate Director for the MRE (Master of Religious Education) in Missional Leadership. He also teaches as an adjunct in the DMin (Doctor of Ministry) program at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee.
If you have experienced harassment and/or abuse from Love or from any other religious leader, in Church of Christ or elsewhere, you aren’t alone. Sexual abuse of adults by members of the clergy is its own hidden epidemic. While it’s likely that such abuse is even more common than clerical sexual abuse of children, it receives far less media attention.
We stand with Teresa Pecinovsky. Abusers should not be in ministry.
–Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director, Into Account
Who was your abuser to you, before the grooming and abuse began?
Mark was an assistant professor of ministry and director of ministry events at Abilene Christian University (ACU) when I was an undergraduate student in the College of Biblical Studies from 2001-2005. During my time as a student I would have described Mark as a mentor and supportive professor in the small department. Like many other professors in the department Mark was also a minister in the Churches of Christ and provided pastoral care to students, including myself. In the small Church of Christ world of academia he came from a well-known family with multiple generations of ministers. We both attended Highland Church of Christ in Abilene.
Can you describe what he did, and what the initial impact was in your life?
Shortly after I graduated from ACU I took a position as an ESL teacher in Japan with local Church of Christ missionaries and understood this position to be a vocational mission. I would send regular group e-mails with updates to family and friends back in the States. Fairly soon after I started the e-mails Mark began replying to them with his personal e-mail address, not ACU work address. Looking back, this was a turning point that indicated abusive grooming on his part. He would e-mail me and I would reply with my cell phone, as I did not have a laptop at the time. The e-mail exchanges quickly increased, up to several dozen a day. Initially the exchanges revolved around shared interests like music or what was happening in our daily lives. I was lonely overseas, in a rural area in a foreign country where everyone was new to me. Mark offered me a connection with not just someone familiar, but someone who I trusted completely, a minister who taught students how to be ministers.
That Easter I clearly remember Mark e-mailing me that he had been at Highland Church of Christ that Sunday. He was clear in his messages that he wasn’t in a place spiritually to embrace resurrection. Something was wrong, so I asked him what it was. He confided that he and his wife had marital problems. I was surprised, but at the time believed in the narrative that I was an adult, that we were colleagues. After this revelation the content of messages intensified. Mark shared his inner struggles freely and at one point included me in a list of his three closest friends. One day I told him I had just fallen off of my bicycle and skinned my knee really badly. He wrote back: “Don’t die TKP. I love you.” (TKP is my initials/nickname.)
“Tell me a secret,” Mark e-mailed me one day as I was still under the covers of my futon. I can’t even remember what I replied except it was certainly a boring random fact and not what Mark wanted to hear. He already knew my biggest secrets anyway—childhood trauma and a crappy first boyfriend at ACU. When I returned the question I got quite a different answer. Mark told me that once when he was living in Oregon he was driving and saw a woman in her house gesture to him in a sexually suggestive manner. He turned his car around and parked his car near the house and the woman proceeded to strip tease for him. “I thoroughly enjoyed myself,” Mark summarized.
As I write this now several insights are clear to me. First, I was so naive about what Mark was communicating to me that it did not register to me that he was saying he masturbated in his car while watching this woman. Second, Mark was grooming me. I was 22 and he was 45 years old—old enough to be my father. He started out referencing his own sexual acts as a way to get closer to me and to normalize communicating about his sexual desires. He continued with this pattern, one day telling me that in his crumbling marriage he wished he could just yell, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck!”
Early one morning, after sharing that I was feeling lonely and wished I had someone to hold me, Mark replied, “Gotcha. You feel so warm.” His words had power; I wrote back, “Well, I’m wide awake now.” But it didn’t feel right to me. Whatever comfort or closeness I felt from Mark in that moment was also combined with uneasiness and discomfort. He was starting to get bolder about blurring the boundaries. (To this day when someone replies to a message I send with either “Gotcha,” or “I feel you,” I have a nauseating visceral reaction.)
On another morning Mark wrote to me, “Last night I had a dream that I was running away from angry people in the woods. You hid me from them. My hero. There was a dragon tattoo on your back and you let me touch it. ” This was more grooming—telling me a story about his supposed dream to show me I had entered his subconscious, represented safety and protection to him, and was a fantasy to him, a fantasy that let him touch me.
Mark continued to escalate his grooming up until that May, when he was at Pepperdine University for their annual Lectureship. In the midst of our regular e-mail/text message exchange I asked him if he’d send me a Pepperdine sweatshirt. He replied, “I’d rather see you without one on.” I wrote back, “You asked me to tell you if you ever crossed a line and you did.” He was apologetic. I was incredulous. “Where are you?” I wrote, knowing that he should have been in a lecture. He responded, “I’m in a dark corner of the room.” I realize now how incredibly symbolic that message was.
The number of messages declined a bit immediately after that conversation. Eventually, though, it seemed to go back to normal. Mark would e-mail me starting around 3 am Tokyo time. I eventually got used to waking up in the middle of the night or early in the morning to read and reply to his messages. One day he wrote me that he had had a dream about me the previous night, but he said he wasn’t sure if he should tell me about it. I wrote back that it was up to him to decide. He sent me a very sexually explicit e-mail in reply. I was shocked, disgusted, and ashamed. When I didn’t respond he wrote back, “Do you hate me?” I responded that he knew I didn’t hate him, but he needed to get help for himself and his wife, and I told him to not e-mail me ever again.
After that the shame was suffocating. I felt incredibly foolish for not being able to see the signs that he was broken and predatory. I would still wake up at 3 am and when there were no texts I would sob until the sun came up or I could fall asleep. I was depressed, ashamed, and entertained suicidal thoughts. Somehow I had done something so terrible that a servant of God, a minister, would act so inappropriately toward me. Or worse, there was something horribly wrong with me. Whatever it was, I was convinced that it was my fault. I simultaneously felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility and helplessness.
How did you come to understand that his behavior was abusive?
I initially contacted two separate professors at ACU who were colleagues with Mark. I swore them to secrecy and told them because I was concerned about Mark and wracked with shame about what had happened. (Later I came to understand how common this kind of reaction–to worry about the perpetrator– is with clergy abuse survivors.) Both of these male colleagues emphasized to me that what Mark had done was wrong, but I was unable to hear that reasoning. I decided to go to the Dean of the College of Biblical Studies, Jack Reese. Jack sprung into action immediately. He assigned Mark to see a psychologist on campus and a Biblical studies faculty member as a spiritual director. Jack also had a different faculty member agree to be my spiritual director, and through her added a therapist. When I asked him how my spiritual director and therapist would be able to afford to call me internationally, he stated, “We have a fund for things like this.”
We have a fund for things like this.
Jack also took responsibility for demanding a list of names of all the people I had told about Mark. He went to each of them, either in person or by phone, and made it clear they were not to speak a word of this to anyone. At the time I would have told you Jack was protecting me. Now I know he was containing the scandal and protecting the institution. Jack kept regular tabs on me. He sent me a book entitled Forgive and Forget. He even decided that Mark’s wife would not be told what was happening, arguing that she was too fragile to hear such news.
Several months later Jack called me and informed me that Mark and his wife were moving to Minnesota so Mark could pursue his PhD. He assured me that this had nothing to do with me. Months after that he called me to tell me that Mark and his wife were divorcing. Again, he assured me that it had nothing to do with me because Mark’s wife never knew about what had happened.
My spiritual director and therapist were lifelines to me during that time. They both identified what Mark had done as abuse, but I was unable to recognize it as such. The weight of shame suffocated any acknowledgement of abuse until several years later when a different therapist diagnosed with me Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I underwent EMDR therapy that was so draining I couldn’t drive myself home after a session.
It was also during the time with this therapist that I began to unravel what Jack had done with clarity. Like so many other clergy abuse responses, Jack chose to protect the institution and abuser first and foremost. He chose this above my own well-being and the moral imperative to hold Mark accountable through the established sexual misconduct policies of ACU. In this way, Jack became a secondary abuser. After ACU paid for Mark to get his PhD he was not invited back to be a faculty member. Instead, he found a faculty position in the Theology and Ministry department at Rochester College (now University) and worked his way up to being the Graduate Program Director in Missional Leadership, a position he holds to this day.
What outcome were you hoping for when you reported his behavior to ACU?
In 2013 I confronted Mark in person, in a conversation I can only describe as traumatic. While he admitted wrongdoing and even acknowledged what he had done was abusive, Mark also was eerily calm and manipulative during the entire conversation. He told me I was “dangerous” and used language to indicate that he was a victim in the whole situation. Mark told me that he had to live with shame for what he had done, as if I was responsible for that, for going to Jack in the first place. I told him he shouldn’t be in ministry after what he’d done. I very clearly remember him telling me, “So, you’re saying that people who make mistakes shouldn’t be in ministry?”
People who make mistakes.
As if grooming, manipulating, and sexually abusing a former student was just a “mistake.”
I was a wreck after that confrontation. I was also stunned that, after all that Mark had done, he could justify himself being in ministry leadership. So I went back to ACU and reported him to the Title IX office. I also reported Jack for failing to respond appropriately and through the proper protocol at ACU. The Title IX findings are included here.
What are your goals and hopes in coming forward now with your story and his name?
In the 13 years since this has happened I have heard so many stories of clergy abuse that I have lost count. In many cases the survivors lived with shame for years, because they believed the lies that victims were responsible for abuser’s behavior. Like them, I did not have the language to identify what had happened as clergy sexual abuse until years after the abuse happened. I hope my coming forward shines a light on clergy abuse for other survivors. A minister has inherent power over church members; a professor has power over a student, even a former student. Too often, sexual activity between a pastor and a parishioner is wrongly labeled as an “affair.” Whenever there is a power imbalance in the relationship, an affair between consenting adults is not possible.
In the same way that a therapist has power over a client, a minister holds just as much, if not more, power, over laity, because ministers are seen as conduits of God. It is no surprise to me that many, many people have entirely left religion because of the abusive hypocrisy of clergy abuse and coverups. I had to leave the Church of Christ denomination as a result of my own abuse; it was too traumatizing and painful to exist in the same small world as the men and institutions who had utterly failed me and broken my trust.
I have chosen to come forward with Mark’s name publicly because it is part of my story to tell, mine to speak truth to power. Mark is a public theologian–a teacher–and as such, can and should be held accountable for his abuse. I have also found that there is rarely just one instance of clergy abuse from a minister and hope that my coming forward will empower any other survivors and prevent future abuse.
Lastly, I tell my story because I have children of my own now. I want them to know that even if it takes years to speak their truth, they can do so, even when other avenues of accountability have failed them. They deserve to know that despite what those in power say or do, that their stories, their voices matter. You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.
If you wish to contact Rev. Pecinovsky about this story, she asks that you not do so directly, but rather through her Into Account advocate at skrehbiel@intoaccount.org.
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