Why Survivors of Clergy Sexual Abuse Often Wait Years to Come Forward and What That Means for Assemblies of God Cases

If you have ever asked yourself why you waited so long to say anything, you are not the only one carrying that question. Many people who grew up inside a church, sat under a pastor’s teaching, sang in a worship team, or spent every Wednesday night in youth group find themselves decades later trying to make sense of something that happened to them as a child or a teenager. The question that often comes first is not “What do I do about it?” The question is “Why did I stay quiet for so long?”

For many survivors, the silence makes sense in light of how clergy abuse operates inside tightly bonded faith communities. Researchers who study clergy and church abuse have been documenting this pattern for years, and what they have found is consistent across denominations, countries, and decades. People who are abused inside a faith community rarely come forward right away. Many wait years. Many wait until middle age. Some never tell anyone at all. If you grew up Assemblies of God, that pattern is worth understanding, because your hesitation fits a documented response to how this kind of harm operates inside a church. There is a growing body of work on how survivors from Pentecostal and Assemblies of God settings are pursuing their legal options in Arkansas, and the starting point for most of them was the long quiet that came first.

What the Research Actually Shows About Disclosure Timelines

When researchers studying institutional child sexual abuse look at how long survivors wait before telling anyone, the numbers are striking. Studies published over the past two decades, including work referenced by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia, found that the average time between the abuse and the first disclosure was over twenty years. Some survivors waited thirty or forty years. A significant number had still not disclosed at the time they were surveyed.

Studies focused specifically on clergy abuse have produced similar findings. Research published in academic journals on religious abuse has documented that survivors of clergy sexual abuse are among the slowest to come forward of any abuse population studied. The delay is not random. It correlates with specific factors: the age of the survivor at the time of the abuse, the perceived authority of the person who harmed them, the closeness of the surrounding religious community, and the theological framing the survivor was raised with.

In other words, the more spiritually significant the abuser was, and the tighter the community around them, the longer the silence tends to last.

That is a research finding, not a personal failure. Researchers do not view these delays as signs of weakness. They view them as predictable responses to institutional and spiritual power dynamics that have been documented over and over again across the field.

Why Spiritual Authority Makes Disclosure So Much Harder

To understand why clergy abuse often stays buried for so long, you have to understand what a pastor actually represents inside the life of a believing child or teenager. A pastor is not just an adult in a position of trust. A pastor is, in the child’s understanding, a man who speaks for God. The same voice that taught you who Jesus was, who prayed over you when you were sick, who laid hands on you at the altar, was also the voice that did what it did. Untangling those two things is difficult for a child. For many survivors, it remains difficult forty years later.

Researchers who study clergy abuse describe this as a form of spiritual betrayal that operates on a different level than other kinds of abuse. The harm reaches the part of the person where their sense of God, safety, family, identity, and right and wrong all live in the same place. When all of that gets tangled up with what happened to them, disclosure feels less like reporting an event and more like dismantling a person’s entire interior world.

Some of the specific dynamics researchers have identified include:

The fear that telling will make God angry. Children raised in high-commitment church settings often absorb the idea that pastors are anointed and that touching, criticizing, or accusing them carries spiritual consequences. The pastor may have reinforced this directly. The community usually reinforced it indirectly.

The fear that telling will hurt the church. Survivor accounts often describe being warned, sometimes explicitly and sometimes through the surrounding culture, that an accusation could destroy the ministry, split the congregation, or grieve the Holy Spirit. A child who loves their church will often choose to absorb harm before they will risk being the one who damages it.

The fear of being called a liar. In tightly bonded congregations, an accusation against a respected pastor is often met first with disbelief, then with anger directed at the accuser. Survivors learn this quickly, often by watching what happens to others who tried to speak.

The internalized teaching about forgiveness, submission, and authority. Children raised on verses about submitting to authority, honoring elders, and forgiving freely can struggle for decades to give themselves permission to name what happened as wrong.

These are not character flaws. Researchers describe them as predictable effects of growing up inside a closed religious authority structure.

How Community Belonging Silences Survivors

Beyond theology, there is the simple fact of belonging. For many Assemblies of God families, the church is not one part of life. The church is life. It is where your parents serve, where your friends are, where your weeks are organized, where holidays are celebrated, where your identity took shape. Speaking out against a pastor, a youth leader, or a missions director is not just speaking out against a person. It is risking the entire architecture of your life.

Researchers studying institutional abuse have noted that the cost of disclosure tends to be highest when the institution and the survivor’s social world are the same thing. A child who tells the truth about their basketball coach loses a coach. A child who tells the truth about their pastor risks losing their family, their friend group, their place at the dinner table, and the only spiritual home they have ever known. Many survivors weigh that cost as children, weigh it again as teenagers, weigh it again in their twenties, and decide each time that the cost is still too high.

This is one of the reasons disclosure often comes in middle age. By then, the survivor has often built a life outside the church. Parents may have passed away. The grip of the original community has loosened. The cost of speaking finally feels smaller than the cost of carrying it any longer. Reporting from civil cases involving Pentecostal and Assemblies of God churches has surfaced patterns that align with this timeline, and you can read a broader picture of what claims involving these churches have alleged in published court filings and investigations into Assemblies of God abuse.

Shame, Self-Blame, and the Confusion of Memory

There is another layer to all of this that researchers consistently name, and that is the role of shame and self-blame in keeping survivors silent.

Researchers have consistently found that children abused by trusted adults commonly internalize blame. They search their own behavior for what caused it. Did I sit too close? Did I smile at him? Did I go to his office when I should not have? Did I stay quiet the first time and somehow agree to what came after? This pattern of self-blame is one of the most consistent findings across the field of child sexual abuse research.

In a religious context, that self-blame deepens. The survivor may have been taught that the body is sacred, that purity matters, that what happened to them made them dirty in the eyes of God. They may have wondered whether they were being punished. They may have prayed for years asking forgiveness for something that was done to them. By the time they reach an age where they could articulate what happened, the shame has often calcified into something heavier than the original event, and naming the abuse means breaking through that shame first.

Researchers also point out that memories of childhood abuse often surface in pieces rather than as one organized story. A smell. A sound. A song on the radio. A moment when their own child reaches the age they were. Many survivors describe a long process of slowly understanding what happened to them, sometimes over years, sometimes triggered by a news story about another survivor finally coming forward. That slow process is recognized in the literature. It does not mean the memory is false. It often means the mind protected the child by keeping the full picture at a distance until the adult was ready to look at it.

How Assemblies of God Church Culture Shapes These Barriers

The research on clergy abuse disclosure was not conducted specifically inside Assemblies of God churches. Several features described in survivor accounts and civil filings involving AoG churches have reflected dynamics similar to those identified in broader clergy-abuse research.

Those features show up repeatedly. The strong emphasis on the spiritual authority of the pastor. The role of the Holy Spirit and prophecy in shaping how members understand a leader’s words. The use of prayer, deliverance, and counseling sessions as private settings in which a pastor or youth leader might meet alone with a young person. The high value placed on loyalty, submission, and not bringing reproach on the ministry. The tight bonds between member families, where a public accusation cuts across decades of shared history.

Civil lawsuits filed against Assemblies of God churches in recent years have alleged that these same dynamics were present in the abuse the plaintiffs experienced and in the response when they tried to raise concerns. According to published court filings and news reporting, survivors have alleged that disclosure was discouraged, that they were prayed over instead of believed, that leadership was told and did not act, and that the threat of community loss kept them silent for years. These are allegations made by plaintiffs in civil litigation, not findings of fact, but the patterns they describe align with what the broader research on clergy abuse has documented for decades.

What Recent Cases Allege About Survivors Coming Forward Years Later

The pattern of long delays is visible in the timeline of recent Assemblies of God civil cases. In one widely reported Arkansas matter, six women filed a civil lawsuit alleging that they were sexually abused as children over a fifteen-year period at an AoG church in Jonesboro, and you can read the news coverage of the Jonesboro civil lawsuit against the Assemblies of God for context on how the allegations are framed and when the plaintiffs came forward.

The plaintiffs in cases like that one were not children when they filed. Many were adults in their twenties, thirties, and beyond. According to the filed complaint, the abuse had occurred years earlier, and the disclosure process happened slowly, often after the plaintiffs had separated from the church, sometimes after speaking with other survivors, and almost always after years of private reckoning with what had happened to them.

That timeline is not unusual. It is what the research predicts. It is what survivors of clergy abuse have been describing for as long as researchers have been asking.

What Delayed Disclosure Means Legally

There is a common worry among survivors that waiting somehow weakens a claim. The thinking goes something like this: if it really happened, you would have said something then. If you waited, maybe a court will not believe you.

The actual legal landscape has moved in the opposite direction. Lawmakers and courts across the country have increasingly recognized that delayed disclosure in childhood sexual abuse cases is the rule, not the exception. That recognition has shaped how statutes of limitation are written, how expert testimony is admitted, and how juries are instructed.

Many states, including Arkansas through legislative changes enacted in recent years and in certain legal circumstances, have expanded the time period in which survivors of childhood sexual abuse can file civil claims, reflecting what researchers have been documenting for decades. Whether a particular claim falls within those expanded windows depends on case-specific analysis, including when the abuse occurred, when the survivor disclosed, and how the relevant statute reads at the time of filing. Survivors do not come forward on a tidy timeline. They come forward when they can, and the law has been adjusting to that reality.

In a civil case, expert witnesses can explain to a jury why a person might wait twenty or thirty years to disclose. Patterns of grooming, spiritual coercion, community pressure, and trauma response can all be presented as part of the case. The delay, in other words, becomes part of the story, not a hole in the story.

You Are Not on Anyone Else’s Schedule

If you are reading this, there is a real chance you have been carrying something for a long time. You may not have a clear sense yet of what you want to do about it. You may not even be sure you want to call it what it is. That is okay. The research is clear that this process takes time, and that it takes the time it takes for reasons that are not your fault.

What is worth knowing is that the silence you kept does not disqualify you. It does not mean your memory is wrong. It does not mean a court would not believe you. It means you were a child, or a teenager, in a place that made disclosure feel impossible, and you found a way through it on the timeline you could.

When you are ready, there are people who understand the specific dynamics of clergy abuse cases, including how punitive damages may apply in a church sexual abuse claim, and how the law has changed to reflect what survivors have been saying all along. There is no timeline you are supposed to be on. There is only the one that is yours.