Why Some Assemblies of God Survivors Do Not Recognize What Happened to Them as Abuse Until Years Later

There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives the moment a memory rearranges itself. You might be folding laundry, or driving a familiar road, or watching your own child laugh at something silly. A thought surfaces that you have carried for years without ever letting yourself finish it. That was not normal. That was not affection. That was not what he told me it was. If you have lived that moment, I want you to know it is one of the most common experiences I come across, and there is nothing wrong with you for arriving here on your own timeline.

For a lot of survivors who grew up inside an Assemblies of God church, the recognition does not come as a flood. It comes as a slow leak. A detail you once laughed off starts to feel heavier. A man you used to call a mentor starts to look different in your memory. You are not required to know what to do about any of it yet, and you are not required to call anything by its legal name. There is a time to learn about the legal rights survivors hold in Arkansas, and that time comes when you are ready, not a moment before. For now, the only thing that matters is letting yourself ask the question you have been avoiding.

Grooming Is Built to Confuse You

Here is something most people never learn until they need it. Grooming is not a single act. It is a process, and confusion is not a side effect of that process. Confusion is the point.

A predator who targets children inside a church does not begin with anything a child would recognize as wrong. He begins with attention. He remembers your birthday. He notices when you are sad. He treats you like you matter at an age when very few adults bother to. For a child who feels unseen at home or at school, that attention can feel like rescue. By the time anything crosses a line, the line itself has been blurred so gradually that you cannot point to the moment it moved.

That is the cruelty of it. The same warmth that drew you in becomes the thing that keeps you quiet. You think, he was so kind to me, so maybe I am remembering it wrong. You think, everyone loved him, so maybe the problem is me. A child struggles to hold two ideas at once, that a person can be generous and dangerous in the same breath, so the child keeps the version that hurts less. The mind protects itself by choosing the story it can survive.

This is why so many survivors describe the abuse and the friendship as tangled together in memory. They were tangled together on purpose.

Spiritual Authority Changes What a Child Can Question

Now add the weight of the church.

In an Assemblies of God setting, a children’s pastor or youth minister is not just an adult with a job. He is described as called by God. He is trusted by the senior pastor, welcomed into family homes, and held up to children as someone to respect and obey. Parents are encouraged to extend that trust without reservation. The entire room operates on a quiet assumption: God’s church would never place an unsafe person over its children.

Think about what that assumption does to a child’s instincts. When something feels wrong, a child in that environment does not only have to overcome fear. She has to overcome God. To question the man is to question the church that vouched for him, and to question the church is to risk a kind of spiritual exile that, to a child raised inside it, can feel worse than the harm itself.

Some survivors were told, in one form or another, that the relationship was special, chosen, even part of a plan larger than themselves. When an adult wraps abuse in the language of faith, he is not only assaulting a child’s body. He is rewriting the child’s ability to name what is happening. How do you call something abuse when the person doing it claims to speak for God?

A recent NBC News investigation reported that the Assemblies of God has, for decades, responded to ministers accused of abusing children by quietly moving them through a restoration process aimed at returning them to ministry rather than removing them from it. The denomination’s own governing documents, as described in recent Arkansas court filings, are alleged to have prioritized the forgiveness and rehabilitation of accused pastors over the protection of children, and to have kept those disciplinary matters off public rosters. I share that not to frighten you, but because it reframes something you may have blamed yourself for. The silence around you was not your imagination. In many of these communities, silence was the practice.

There is a reason the law treats an institution that knew and did nothing as more blameworthy than one that was merely careless, and survivors who eventually look into it sometimes learn how punitive damages work in church abuse cases. You do not need that information today. I mention it only so you understand that what was done to you, and what was allowed to continue around you, is taken seriously by people far outside the walls of any single church.

Why It Can Feel Like You Chose It

Of all the things survivors carry, this one may be the heaviest: the feeling that you went along with it. That you kept showing up. That some part of you wanted the attention, or felt special, or never said no out loud.

I want to be careful and clear here. A child cannot consent. Not legally, not morally, not in any way that counts. When you were eight, or ten, or twelve, you did not have the power to agree to what an adult did, no matter how it felt at the time, and no matter what you did or did not say. The warmth you felt was real. The confusion was real. Neither one makes what happened your fault.

Predators rely on this exact feeling. They engineer situations where the child appears to participate, because they know that appearance will become the child’s prison later. The man understood the difference between affection and abuse. You did not, because you were a child and he made sure of it. The guilt you feel is not proof that you were complicit. It is proof that he was good at what he did.

If you take one thing from these paragraphs, let it be this. The shame you have been carrying was never yours. It belonged to him, and somewhere along the way he handed it to you and let you believe it was your own.

Recognition Often Arrives Late, and That Is Normal

People who have never lived it ask the same question, sometimes gently and sometimes not. Why did it take you so long to understand?

The answer is woven into how trauma works. The mind has ways of setting unbearable things to the side so a person can keep functioning. A child grows up, builds a life, raises kids, holds a job, and the memory sits in a sealed room she rarely opens. Years can pass before something forces the door open. It might be your own daughter reaching the age you were. It might be a news story. It might be a single offhand comment from someone who was there.

I think of the people who have told me their version of that moment. One woman recognized it while helping her daughter pack for a church trip, when the simple act of handing her child to another adult set off an alarm she could not explain. Another felt it watching an old home video, when a man she had not thought about in decades appeared in the frame standing a little too close. The trigger is rarely dramatic. It is usually small, it is usually about safety, and it usually arrives when you least expect to be ambushed by your own past.

For survivors raised in the Assemblies of God, the delay often runs even longer, and for reasons the church itself helped create. Many were taught that prayer and scripture were enough, and that needing a counselor signaled a weakness of faith. A child raised to distrust therapy becomes an adult who never sits in the one room designed to help her connect the dots. The recognition gets postponed not by accident, but by a culture that discouraged the very reflection that leads to it.

So if you are only now, in your thirties or forties or fifties, beginning to understand what happened, you are not slow and you are not broken. You are right on time for someone who was given every reason to look away. There are layered, human explanations for why survivors so often wait years to come forward, and not a single one of them is a failing on your part.

What It Means When You Finally See It

Recognition is not a verdict. It does not mean you have to do anything, tell anyone, or change your life by Friday. It simply means you have stopped lying to yourself about something you were never responsible for in the first place. That alone can feel like grief, because in a way it is. You are mourning the childhood you should have had, and the trust that was spent on someone who did not deserve it.

It can also feel like vertigo. If that was abuse, then what else was true? Memories you had filed away as embarrassing or confusing start to make a different kind of sense. That disorientation is not a sign that you are losing your grip. It is a sign that you are finally seeing the picture at full size.

Be patient with the version of you who could not see it sooner. She was not weak. She was surviving, using the only tools a child is handed, in a place built to keep her quiet.

You Are Not Behind, and You Are Not Alone

If you are reading this with your stomach in a knot, I want to leave you with something steadier than fear.

You are not the only one. The recognition you are sitting with has been sat with by many others who grew up in the same kind of church, under the same kind of man, carrying the same misplaced shame. They thought they were alone too. They were not, and neither are you.

There is no clock you have failed to beat tonight. You do not owe anyone a decision. When and if you want to understand more about what has come to light in these cases, you can read what investigations have alleged at your own pace, on your own terms. Until then, the bravest thing you can do is exactly what you are already doing. You are letting yourself believe what part of you has always known.