Category: New Testimonies

I, Will C., first heard of Gospel for Asia in the fall of 2005 when a Gospel for Asia speaker came to my church. The Lord used his presentation, along with the book Revolution in World Missions, to help me have a heart for those who do not know Christ. I immediately began supporting national missionaries with Gospel for Asia. I found out they had a volunteer program and I flew to their USA headquarters for training to be able to represent the ministry at conferences or at Churches.

In 2006 the ministry invited me to visit the mission field of India with major donors. It was a wonderful trip getting to see the brothers and sisters laboring to make the name of Christ known. At this point GFA represented itself as a non-denominational evangelical mission organization dedicated to spreading the gospel.

While in India I saw the “preachers” dressed in cassocks. It was explained to us that the Indian government recognized the Episcopal governance due to the long standing influence of the British Empire. While they were structured this way for the Indian government’s sake, they were really evangelical in practice, they said. I remember thinking, “Ok, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” It wasn’t till years later that I discovered that they were pushing hard toward the Episcopal structure and practice. (Note: I want it to be clear it is not that I have something against Episcopal Church structures; the problem is that we were led to believe that the Church coming out of Gospel for Asia in India in practice was more aligned with a evangelical practices, like, say, a Calvary Chapel.)

I came back from India and continued to be a volunteer on the East coast. In 2009 my wife Tina and I interviewed with Gospel for Asia. During one of the interviews we were asked how long we were going to stay at GFA if we were invited to join staff. I remember my response was this:

We feel God is calling us to come and work in missions with Gospel for Asia. We will be here until either He makes it clear for us to leave or if GFA begins to deviate from godly principles.

We were told it wasn’t a yes or a no; it was wait. So we waited for a year, and in 2010 we began to raise support. In April 2012 we left Maryland, family and friends, and a good Federal job of 14 years and headed to TX.

I am thankful for the mission work we were able to do as we served as “unto the Lord”. I am thankful that we did not experience many of the abuse stories as others did. What we did begin to notice were little things.

We began to notice that people never confronted you directly, but that many “issues” were handled third party. As an example, at GFA we were told that as staff we babysat for each other and didn’t charge one another since we were all on poverty level salaries. One day a leader took me to lunch and told me we needed to pay for our babysitters. I told him that we would gladly do so but we were given different instructions. I asked him who complained so we could make it right with the young lady or perhaps her parents, and he said he could not tell me. This happened to us on other occasions in which the person with the problem didn’t talk to us directly but used a leader to come talk to us. We were annoyed with this and found it rather childish. We chalked it up to spiritual immaturity and didn’t hold it against them.

The other strange thing to us was we were strongly encouraged NOT to get involved with a local church because we could become so involved that we would eventually “drift away from reaching the lost in Asia.” The Bible makes it clear to be in a Bible-believing church, so we disregarded this “advice” and attended a local church, signed up for one of their marriage classes, and also participated in men’s and women’s retreats. This church was in Carrollton, the town we lived in before we moved out to the East Campus in Wills Point, TX. Later when we left GFA and moved in with friends who lived in Carrollton, we attended this same church, and this church family helped us overcome the loss of what was unfolding at GFA, and we didn’t feel as alone or isolated.

Also, I was perplexed that, with this many awesome Christians at GFA, there weren’t any Bible Studies going on at each other’s houses. I asked about that, and leadership told me that they were discouraged since their experience was that people became so hotly divided on topics like Calvinism vs. Armenianism and different views of eschatology that division was caused in the body and the work of reaching the lost in Asia was hindered. You don’t know these answers until you are there, and so, while it seems weird, you give the benefit of the doubt to the leaders, even though this never set well with us. Later on when we were all moved onto the campus, I raised the issue of Bible studies once more as a way to promote unity and still I got the answer: no not a good idea. (Not a good idea to study the Bible together?)

We were having a tough time making it financially with the shoestring budget that GFA told us to raise for our family, but we were trying to be good soldiers and not complain. To help us we were dipping into our savings (we had some $$ from the sale of our house in Maryland). We used up all of that savings while living in Carrollton, and were hoping to be able to save quite a bit once we moved onto campus. Well, moving onto campus didn’t end up being as cheap as they had told us it would be. Between now having to pay for our own health insurance (GFA dropped the group policy), more gas money because we now lived so far away from everything, etc., we ended up applying for WIC and Food Stamps just to help us survive. In hindsight I now believe GFA wanted people to deplete their savings so in the future you had no other options but to come to leadership for financial help, and, if you ever decided to leave it would be very, very hard. This is exactly what happened to us, as we now have a five figure debt as a result of starting over from GFA. It would have been worse if not for some great friends who let us live with them for 7 months.

Backing up a bit, during our time there, we were enjoying the prayer meeting, the mission, and the friends at GFA, and both Tina and I began talking about wanting to give a gift to the Lord to help in missions. We prayed and pulled out money from our IRA, which we, of course, were encouraged to do by leadership. We gave a five figured gift for very specific things we were told our money would go for, but by February, it was becoming doubtful that our gift really went for those things. We made several internal requests for all or part of our gift back since some of the gift was to sponsor children and missionaries for multiple years. We were told they couldn’t return the gifts, and they hid behind ECFA rules. I kept my email campaign to document the exchange, but to no avail.

In the summer of 2014 I remember the staff meeting when leadership addressed the letter from the Diaspora. David Carroll’s language and body language were apologetic like he was really sorry that so many former staff were hurt, yet KP Yohannan, sitting right next to him was the exact opposite—arms crossed and defiant. Tina and I didn’t want to read the letter, thinking it was a bunch of disgruntled former staff, and we had assurance that GFA leadership was addressing it. So we kept preparing for the move to the East Campus. As staff we were told that the Diaspora had taken things to the GFA board and that the board would address the issues.

We moved to the East Campus in August of 2014 and again we had great friends and neighbors on the working level who wanted to see the great commission fulfilled. We all had great hearts and our biggest desire was to honor God with our lives.

In the fall of 2014, during a staff meeting, we were told by leadership that a family was going to take a sabbatical, that they had been “in the battle” for a long time and they were taking a break. We were told “there is nothing wrong with their marriage” and that the ministry was going to start doing this for all the senior leaders. Later it came out that this was a lie and the couple was in fact having marital problems. Leadership didn’t have to address their marital problems with the staff, but they shouldn’t have gone out of their way to tell us a lie that “there were no marital problems.”

KP, in another staff meeting, told us that Gayle Erwin, one of the board members, was investigating the claims by the Diaspora. They told us he would be on campus talking to people, so feel free to talk with him. At the time I saw this, as many others did, as a good sign of openness. It turns out that Gayle Erwin didn’t interview any current staff or anyone in the Diaspora to see if the claims had any merit. He only interviewed GFA leadership.

In March the board of GFA issued their letter, and, after reading it, I was totally disappointed. Even though we hadn’t read the Diaspora’s 1^st letter we did know the five things the former staff wanted addressed. We even agreed that some things needed to be addressed and had some merit. Gayle’s letter by the board found no merit to the Diaspora’s claims. (Months later Gayle Erwin resigned from the board, and let the Diaspora know his original report found that many of the Diaspora concerns had merit. See Gayle Erwin’s letter to the Diaspora. I encourage you to read it).

We were both shaken by this poor response and had hoped for so much more from leadership. I told David Carroll how disappointed I was in the board’s response, and he basically said that leadership was too, but that since the board is leadership’s higher authority, we have to live with it. We began to ask who was on the board—at the time there were seven, three of which were KP, his wife and his son. Not real independent.

People began to leave the ministry, and for us it began with my boss announcing he was leaving after serving 12 years. He has six children and was resigning with no job. He was the Communications Coordinator. Another man who was higher up in the leadership chain announced he also was leaving after 8 years. I told Tina I was going to take both of them to lunch to find out why they were leaving. What did they know that I didn’t?

First I took my coordinator out to eat. He told me the things he saw at his level of management and his efforts to affect change. I listened, and, while disturbing, I felt that organizations take time to change and things don’t happen overnight. Maybe it was my turn to step into his old position and do 5-8 years to help reform Gospel for Asia through policies and procedures. Your mind justifies quite a bit when looking for reasons to stay. This was on a Friday. I was going to take Travis, who served as the next level up in management, out to eat the next Monday. During our lunch he shared with me an email from a Canadian GFA leader addressing KP. In the email the leader ascribed to KP a Bible verse that was only meant for Jesus.

Why would GFA leadership feel it was appropriate to address KP like this? Secondly why would KP allow his staff to address him this way? I knew then that policies and procedures would not fix this but that the issue was pride—pride in KP. If he was this lifted up, then he could justify any lies to the staff. I came home and told my wife that we couldn’t stay. We prayed and cried and then tried to think of how to move on. That week was such an internal struggle of sadness, grief and anger.

Somewhere in there, there was a staff meeting where a GFA leader accused KP of letting people kiss his rings. KP, his son and other staff members denied that this happened, and KP actually stated that they taught against it. Really? Then what is this video?

Later when this video of people kissing KP’s ring came out, the next day a staff meeting was held in which he stated that (paraphrasing now):

You know the evangelical community eats its own, and you sin, I sin. We need to get past this, and, if you can’t, maybe you should leave. You would be surprised how defiled your heart has become. (End of paraphrase.)

Later there was going to be a staff meeting and staff were encouraged to submit questions ahead of time. So I asked the following.

1. Why would GFA leadership knowingly endanger students by making them carry $4,500 on their persons while going to India?
2. Was Donor money used to purchase the $65,000 statue of Jesus in the new hospital? (Yes it was.)
3. Why would GFA accept a $20 million dollar gift from the mission field (Believers Church) to finish building the Texas campus? That looks like donor fraud!

The answers to these questions were so patronizing and sad it just continued to confirm they were hiding the truth.

One day Debbie C. stopped me in front of the GFA building one day and flat out asked me, “Whose side are you on?” We proceeded to have a very heated discussion, she basically accusing me of being disloyal and expressing her frustration over all the people who leave GFA and then join that terrible group, the Diaspora. I told her that, while this could all be persecution as she and leadership was telling everyone, it could also be discipline from God. It was an uncomfortable conversation to have in public, and I chalked it up to a wife defending her husband who was under a lot of stress. What I rationalized is that she doesn’t know the other side since she doesn’t read any of the testimonies or Diaspora stuff; she just blindly follows what leadership tells her, and much of the stress is self-induced by following a corrupt leader.

Once it was announced that we were leaving, certain people began to give me the cold shoulder. People that I worked with for three years sitting across the cubical didn’t speak to me anymore. I was shunned.

Certain staff and students came and asked me why I was leaving, and I would share with them my issues and concerns. On one occasion a person asked me and I began to share a few of my reasons. At that point a senior leader, Fred S., came along and proceeded to brow beat me and call me disloyal and a troublemaker. He stated that I was going around to staff and poisoning their minds and souls with my issues. He proceeded to ask/intimidate me: “Why are you leaving Will? You never came to me?” This was all very public in an open cubical area. I was totally caught off guard. I asked him who told him I’m going around “poisoning” people, and he wouldn’t say. He falsely accused me in public and offered no evidence to back up his claim.

He wanted to know why we were leaving right there so when I told him one reason was KP lied to staff saying people didn’t kiss his ring, yet there is a video of people kissing his ring that is out there on YouTube, his response was: “Were you there Will? Were you there?” I responded that I couldn’t know if Abraham Lincoln ever lived because “I wasn’t there”. Absurd reasoning! I pointed out that two current staff testified that they were in India and saw it—were they lying? He wouldn’t answer that.

After this incident I had other folks ask me why I was leaving, and I didn’t know if they were truly wanting to know or if they were trying to set me up. Fred’s conversation had a chilling effect. I was very ill until I left. Packing up my house and putting it in storage and moving my wife and kids in with friends was all very stressful, and doing it on a campus with hostile employers was even harder. It would have been easier to ignore all these facts as they came out and bury my head in the sand. Did I want to put my stuff in storage and move in with friends, uprooting my kids and wife from our day-to-day friends? Not really, but the alternative would be to live a lie and violate our consciences. I left with my wife and three kids with no job. About 4 weeks later I came down with a bad case of Shingles. Eight months later we moved back to Maryland, and I landed a job in my former field.

I am giving you this record of the last month of our time there to give you a picture of what life was like at Gospel for Asia AFTER the Diaspora letter accusing them of the five points of mistreating staff. Did they change their conduct? No. They did not have to be this way with me or the many others who left.

GFA falsely advertised themselves to potential staff, telling the potential staff they are joining an interdenominational missions movement, when in fact KP Yohannan is just building his denomination, Believers Church, with funds from unsuspecting donors and sponsors.

I give this testimony but I want to say that many of the worker bees, of which I was one, truly love the Lord and want to see His kingdom built. They, like us, want to see the love of Jesus shared across the world. Please pray for my friends who are still there and for those of us who have left, for this has been a very shaking time in my Christian walk. I came to GFA to serve the Lord and it goes to show just how subtle deception can be. I was deceived, but once the evidence is presented to you, you have a choice to make and for us it was clear.

Some are hung up on this “calling”. One current staff asked me how I know God was calling me out of GFA. It makes the assumption that one cannot make a decision unless you receive a special dream or word from the Lord. Well this is how I know we were called to leave: anytime you are in a church or group or place that begins to deviate from scripture, you have a choice to make—follow Jesus and what he has clearly laid down in His word or follow man. Yes, everyone sins, but when the leadership is habitually sinning, and, in this case habitually lying, you can’t follow them. You must follow Jesus and His word. That is why it is important to be grounded in His word and the truth of scripture like Hebrews says: “don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves as some are in the habit of doing”. That trumps anyone (in this case GFA leaders) implying that you really shouldn’t have close connections to a church or be involved because you might be led away. Stay true to Jesus my friends.

Blessings, Will and Tina C.

When I started at GFA on May 30, 2012, I felt like I knew the ministry well. I had visited the field for three weeks in 2005, interned at the office for a month in 2009, and I had been amazed and challenged by GFA’s ministry updates and books throughout. I was thrilled to be working with people I so deeply admired at a ministry that was so fruitful.

Pretty close to the beginning, I noticed some things that made me uncomfortable: Whenever we had a staff Q&A, KP almost inevitably dismissed questions by talking about how he had walked with God longer than most of us had been alive. A senior leader highly discouraged my new staff class from attending Bible studies. Elitist talk about staff was everywhere. And there were some unfounded teachings on biblical authority.

As someone who loved the ministry, who thought she had the greatest job in the world and was often overwhelmed by how lucky she was, I took it in stride. I didn’t speak up at Q&A meetings, I found a good Bible study, I praised my supporters, and I decided I could live with the authority teachings as long as they didn’t directly affect me.

Meanwhile, however, I began noticing some things I couldn’t ignore.

The First Two Years

Whenever we used a field report for a larger writing project, we had the option of asking for follow-up from the field. Sometimes it would be to clarify something; often it was just to get more detail. We generally weren’t asking because we doubted anything in the story, but over time, I started noting frequent discrepancies between the original reports and the follow-up.

In one instance, a dead mother had actually just run away. Another time, I asked about the symptoms a sick man had experienced, only to be told that he had never been sick. Sometimes there were cultural explanations (in the case of the mother, culturally, they would consider her as being dead), which comforted me. I never considered that if we were finding all these errors in the reports we did ask for follow-up on (the minority of reports used), there were probably similar errors in the reports we did not ask for follow-up on (the majority). I did, however, begin working farther ahead so I would have time to recover when projects had to be scrapped.

Another issue was the frequent dismissal of ellipses. When taking words out of a quote, standard journalistic ethics demand that one put an ellipsis (…) to show that something has been removed. Some writers, however, felt that readers would distrust the quotes if there were breaks in them. To the credit of my editors, whenever I insisted on ellipses, they told me I didn’t have to do anything I was uncomfortable with, but the practice continued around me.

June 19, 2014: A ministry partner wrote in, concerned that a missionary had said, “If you believe in Jesus and depend on Him, Jesus will heal you.” The partner was concerned because he didn’t believe we had any assurance of healing just because someone believes.

After speaking with a senior leader, the call center representative responded that he thought the quote was a paraphrase of what was said, not an actual quote. After just two years on staff, I knew the quote was a common thing missionaries said, so it is hard to believe that a senior leader would not also know this. (KP also confirmed to me, later, that missionaries frequently say this.) Nevertheless, a non-senior leader (NSL) asked the web team to change the quote to “can heal,” and said everyone should be on the lookout for these quotes and change them to “can heal.”

Date unknown: I wrote a description for a video about a girl who was abused and hated by both her mother and her father. When it reached my editor, she told me she had read the transcript from the interviews for the video. The transcript showed that the mother had actually been a protector of the girl, sneaking her food when her father wasn’t looking.

We rewrote the description to reflect only the father’s abuse, but we were told that it would be too much work to change the video. I was discouraged to hear that the slander of a woman was preferable to some extra work—however difficult that work might have been. This video continues to be reposted online.

Date unknown: I found out that some quotes from a School of Discipleship video had been tampered with. One student was quoted as saying something along the lines of, “I HAVE a devotional life that nothing can shake,” (emphasis mine) which was credited to her year at GFA. However, this former student says the quote was taken from the beginning of her year, when she said, “I WANT a devotional life that nothing can shake.”

Spring or Summer 2014: A frequent concern of mine was that students and interns learn to write engaging stories without embellishing. When I edited articles that speculated on events (without noting it as speculation), I marked it as such and asked students to rewrite it. Most students learned quickly, but one struggled with this throughout the year. Eventually, I was told, “You call it speculation, but” I needed to stop telling her “no,” because I was going to crush her creativity.

As all of these events added up I increasingly took comfort in the knowledge that, whatever anyone else’s standards, I could at least guarantee the integrity of my own work. On July 28, 2014, however, I began to realize that this was not true.

The Beginning of the End

July 28: I was writing a story based on a field report from 2010. I had received follow-up from the field (2014) and everything matched. When it reached my editor, however, she realized we had a transcript from an interview with the subject, taken in 2011. She noted several differences between the transcript and what I had written. Upon closer inspection, we realized that the transcript could not be reconciled with the report and follow-up.

Apart from a flood, a mom with five kids and the fact of Compassion Services teams, the two are completely different stories. A few examples: In the report, the father is gone and the family goes (with great detail) to a local shelter, where they stay for days. In the transcript, the father bails water out of the house, and the family stays at home because they don’t want to get separated while they go to a shelter. In the report, the mother watches her children sleeping without mats on the cold floor. In the transcript, she and her husband hold them in their laps because the water is covering the floor.

TO BE CLEAR: We are certain this transcript is an interview with the same woman from the report. Not only did the names match, but we also received pictures of the woman and her children in all three instances. There were also other identifying details that made it quite clear.

Our stateside field communications department was baffled as to how this happened, and the manager called the field. In the midst of this, I thought back to all the discrepancies I had seen in the past, and I began to wonder how I could do my work with the possibility of such great discrepancies as what we had seen in the Sri Lanka report and transcript. How did I really know which reports were solid and which were not?

July 30: I met with David Carroll and shared about the Sri Lanka report and transcript and the conflict I now felt about my job. David prayed for me and said this issue needed to be fixed. He asked if it were possible to verify all the reports we used, and I responded that we would have to drastically decrease our communications.

David suggested the possibility of working in another department, but I told him that if I couldn’t bring myself to work in the writing department, I didn’t think it would be right to work somewhere else and simply pass off the problem to another writer.

David strongly advised me not to go against my conscience. We prayed again, and I asked if I could take some time out of the office to continue praying. He agreed, and I went home.

August 3: After several people mentioned the possibility that most of our reports were trustworthy, I decided to look through the reports with follow-up from the last 12 months. My hope was that I would discover a very small number of discrepancies in these reports, indicating a small number of discrepancies in the reports we didn’t request follow-up for.

We didn’t ask for follow-up for most of our stories, so the number of reports I had to work with was small. It was enough, however, to indicate a large problem.

Out of 29 reports, I found that 13 had discrepancies. Some were insignificant, but about a quarter of the studied stories had significant errors. In some cases, our involvement was exaggerated or a situation was not as drastic as the original report made it seem (Or perhaps it’s the follow-up that’s wrong. There’s really no way to tell). This suggested that a good number of our other reports (that we didn’t request follow-up for) would reflect a similar problem.

August 4: After two workdays and a weekend out of the office, I asked for more time to pray, which was granted to me. Everyone acted very understandingly. I was informed that something had been changed already so our field communications department could talk more directly to the field.

August 6: My supervisor informed me that someone was being moved to the writing department. I was told this person wasn’t replacing me, and I think my supervisor truly believed this.

August 7: After completing my study of the last 12 months’ reports, I sent my findings to three supervisors within communications. I suggested that we might be asking too much of our correspondents and should ask for fewer reports so they have more time to solidly report on the stories they do send in.

One person replied to thank me for my hard work and feedback. She said, “I believe that only good can come from this, and that we all can learn so much from it. Definitely some good material to help us keep on refining our procedures.”

August 11: I met with a NSL, reiterating my concerns about the reports. He responded by asking me how accurate things would need to be for me to be happy. My response was that I didn’t know, but we should at least be trying for 100 percent. (I was asked this question several more times over the next few weeks. People insisted that we would never achieve 100 percent accuracy, which is true, but I thought we would get much closer to it if we aimed for 100 percent rather than 75.)

This NSL did tell me that Daniel Punnose had also received my spreadsheet of discrepancies and had already called our main Indian office about it. This was encouraging.

Next, I met with Daniel, and went through the entire issue with him. He explained one of the discrepancies as a cultural issue and said others were cultural issues or translation issues as well.

During the meeting, he expressed concern over how much writers waste reports. (This struck me as unnecessary because the reason I found the disagreeing transcript and report from Sri Lanka was that I was going through old reports from the last five years, trying not to ask the field for more if we already had things we could use.)

Daniel proceeded to tell me that the waste of reports bothered him more than the inaccuracies in the reports. He told me that he often apologized to the field correspondents, saying, “I’m sorry. They didn’t like your story.”

Later, I realized how absurd this claim was, because even as a writer and editor, I wasn’t aware of every report that was used or not used. How would a field correspondent who doesn’t get any of our mailings know what was used? And how would the vice president of the ministry have time to read everything we sent out? Further, Daniel would later claim that he didn’t realize how many projects we sent out.

As we talked further, I told Daniel that I wished we could verify the reports we sent out. Daniel very quickly said we could do that. This surprised me because he had previously talked about how insulting it was to question the field correspondents, and the information department had at times expressed concern about not overloading the field.

I asked Daniel if these things would be problems. He responded that it would be a problem if we asked the field to triple-check everything for the rest of their lives—then they would be insulted—but everyone knew there was a problem right now, and we could verify reports for the next few months while we worked things out.

I told Daniel that if that was the case, I could happily return to work. He suggested I take a couple more days for prayer. Later, I received an email from our field communications department saying Daniel had requested that they work out a verification system.

August 13: I emailed my direct supervisors to share about Daniel’s reassurance that we could verify reports. I told them I was eager to come back soon. We decided I would return that Tuesday.

August 14: Someone from field communications emailed me to let me know that the field was aware of the discrepancies and working on them. People had been communicating with the field about this. She also said she envisioned a checklist in the future to help correspondents double check chronology, ages, relationships, etc. at the interview level. In a meeting, they also discussed having regular cultural awareness meetings with the writers. She reiterated that we would be verifying the reports in conjunction with follow-up requests.

August 19: I returned to the office, excited to catch up on emails and get writing. My editor told me I could get started on some blog posts. I asked her what the process would be for verifying the reports the blog posts were based on. She told me we were only verifying reports for the bigger projects.

Several minutes later, she emailed me, telling me that if we had a report for a blog post or prayer digest email that seemed fishy or unclear, we could ask for verification. She added, “All of us are doing and will do our best to make sure we have completely truthful stories. We’re already verifying some reports.”

I responded that often, when we find a discrepancy between a report and follow-up, there isn’t any sign of the problem in the original report. Everything looks normal until we get the follow up, which means we would likely never ask for extra verification on short reports and thus never find the discrepancies in them. I told her that I wondered if I had returned too soon.

She responded, “So you’d like for us to verify every single report we use?” To which I responded affirmative.

Minutes Later

A NSL came to my desk and asked if he could talk to me. When we got to his office, he asked how I was doing and then began hemming and hawing, saying he wanted to be careful how he told me this, because he didn’t want it to look like I was being moved for asking too many questions. He said we had a need in the print room for someone who was organized, and he asked me how I would feel about moving.

I told him I had come to GFA willing to be placed anywhere, so I would normally say, “OK.” However, I had just come to the conclusion that I wasn’t ready to come back after all because I had returned on the false pretense that we would be verifying every report we used.

As we began discussing the issue, Daniel walked into the office and sat down. He immediately began telling me that I wasn’t being punished, but that my name had come up a long time ago. (He would later tell me, indirectly, that it was about the same time when I first started questioning reports.) He repeated the need for an organized individual.

I repeated what I had told the NSL. Danny then told me:

1. It would be too much work to verify all the reports we used, and that I had a colonialist mindset to ask for such a thing. (Remember, I had already asked if verifying all the reports would be impossible or insulting and been told it would not be.)

2. A previous writer had had issues with the lack of accuracy in our reports. K.P. had talked to the writer and given him binders of proof that our reports were accurate (no such binders were offered to me), but Daniel told me the man had ultimately left because this all came down to a trust issue. He told me there was no policy they could put in place that would assure me of the reports’ accuracy. I, too, would never be convinced if I didn’t get over this “trust issue.”

3. I was under spiritual attack because Satan had me in a place where I couldn’t do anything for the ministry.

4. Pointing out that I had never worked for another ministry, he told me I would be surprised to know that there are ministries that make up 90 percent of the information they send out.

After Daniel left, I pointed out to the NSL that it didn’t matter if every ministry made up all their stories out of whole cloth—we should base our standards on God’s commands. The NSL agreed, but proceeded to tell me that the inaccuracies didn’t bother him because the main thrusts of the stories were true.

After the meeting, I packed up my desk, knowing I would not return to the office before we moved to the new campus.

Later that night: I told my parents about my job change, and how I had been told that it wasn’t because I was asking questions and it wasn’t a punishment. My mother said, “Lying doesn’t suit them,” to which I emphatically responded that I did not think they were lying. I told her, We disagree on the reports issue, but if I thought they would flat-out lie to me, I couldn’t work for them at all.

Date unknown (I believe either August 20 or 21): I met with Daniel again. I told him that since I had shared my perspective on the issue with the leaders, I thought it would be helpful for me to hear his perspective. I asked him to share with me how this saga had gone down in his eyes and what his thought process had been throughout. He gave me the history of GFA field communications.

He told me that GFA regularly does training with correspondents and that there would be more training in January. He told me that they weren’t doing this because of me but because it was the right thing to do. This was encouraging, and made me think that he understood the problem. (When I asked, in January, about the training, I was told that it had not yet been scheduled and they would see what the new year looked like. It did take place in April.)

I also asked Danny why he had originally said we could verify our reports, reminding him that, in our first conversation, I had pointed out the problems he had mentioned about verification. He told me he hadn’t realized how many reports we use for various projects. He told me he wasn’t as worried about the shorter reports because there were fewer opportunities for mistakes. He said we would watch the accuracy of the larger ones to gauge the accuracy of the shorter ones.

It was either in this meeting or our prior one-on-one that he told me people generally don’t leave the ministry over big issues; they leave over small issues, the implication being that my issue was a small one.

In this meeting, he also told me that my name had come up for the print room job “a long time ago,” which he clarified to be about three weeks prior.

We talked more about how some of the discrepancies were cultural issues. I asked him if he would be willing to go through my spreadsheet of discrepancies and explain the issues at hand for each report. He agreed.

The next day: An NSL said Daniel had told him we had an encouraging meeting. He said he didn’t want to bother me, but people were asking, and he wanted to know if I knew when I would be back. I told him I didn’t.

The first week of September, after much prayer and counsel from others outside the ministry, I decided to trust Daniel’s word that the shorter reports were more accurate. For that, I have to apologize to our donors. At that point, I still highly doubted our field reports’ accuracy. I had no business printing the stories based on them.

September 1: I began working in the print room. When my co-workers were out of the room, my coordinator asked me how I was doing and if there was anything in particular that had caused my move. I told him what I had been told: that there was a need for someone organized and they had sent me.

He told me he had asked many times about why I was being moved. He was confused as to why they would move a writer to the print room, and he had told ministry leaders that everything was running perfectly fine with two staff members and a student. He said people kept refusing to answer until they finally told him “something about ‘enhancing the print room.'”

Later

With this new information, I met with the NSL who arranged my move and asked him why, if there was such a great need, my coordinator was confused about my even being there. He told me he had intended for me to take over as print room manager, but they weren’t telling people in case I didn’t stay.

I then asked the NSL why he did select me for the job. He told me that after I went home the first time, he started thinking about how he could give me a break from writing. He thought of the print room manager role and asked my supervisor questions about how I would do in it. Considering her answers and what he already knew of me, he decided I would be good for the job.

I asked him about what he had said in our first meeting, that I hadn’t been moved because of my questions, and he told me he hadn’t wanted me to think the role was being made up just so I would be out of the way. He wanted me to know I was filling an actual need.

I then asked him about Daniel’s claim that my name had come up before the issue with the reports. He told me, “I can’t think of any reason why your name would have come up.”

September 23: I decided to meet with Daniel and ask him why his and the above NSL’s stories about my job placement differed. To my surprise, he was prepared to meet about some follow-up we had received from the field about some of the report discrepancies.

In parts, this meeting was encouraging. Some of the stories had cultural explanations, and if these things were explained to the writers, it would eliminate some of the errors in our stories. (It eventually was passed on, in February.) Other parts of the meeting were deeply discouraging and disturbing.

1. One of our reports described a man who took the train to work every day and later expressed distress over his business. The follow-up, however, said that he was unemployed during this time. It seemed both of these could not be true. However, when we received the most recent round of follow-up, we found that the man had lost his job but his past employer still sometimes called him in for temp jobs.

Finding that each reporter had at least the partial truth was encouraging, but I asked Daniel, “You can see, though, how the first two reports seem to completely disagree with each other?”

Daniel responded that no, he couldn’t see that, because he would think that after two years in the writing department, he would know enough about the culture to understand that the man was being called in for random work at his old job.

2. One of our reports stated that a certain missionary’s bicycle was the only way he could reach a certain village. In our follow-up, however, we learned that before he received the bicycle, he had regularly taken the bus to the village. In the latest follow-up, we were further told that in the rainy season, the missionary continues to take the bus.

I pointed out that, deliberate or not, it was clearly a falsehood that the bicycle was the only way the missionary could reach the village. Further, had we not received the enlightening follow-up, we would have used that line and milked it for all it was worth, making sure people understood that an entire village wouldn’t have the Gospel without that bicycle.

Daniel insisted that people wouldn’t read it that way, however. He told me that I was reading into the line because I’m so analytical. He claimed that most people would assume that we were just saying it was the only way the missionary does go, not that it’s the only way he could go.

Even that interpretation wouldn’t be true, because we have two reports saying the missionary took the bus. Setting that aside, however, no one I have shared this anecdote with thought for a second that it could possibly mean anything other than that the missionary had only one way available to reach the village. This is the plain meaning of the text to anyone who is not trying to defend a ministry’s mistakes.

3. As we continued reviewing discrepancies, it seemed that Daniel saw me not as someone concerned about the ministry, but as someone trying to attack the ministry. At times, Daniel seemed willfully blind to what the discrepancies were, and I could only think that it was because he saw it as an attack on GFA.

4. At the end of the meeting, I finally got to ask Daniel why his story and the NSL’s story disagreed with each other. He repeated his claim that my name had come up before and said that the NSL must not have been in on those meetings.

Date unknown: At some point in October, the writing department began their cultural awareness training. During my time at GFA, it consisted of reading and discussing the book Cross-Cultural Servanthood, teaching the writers to be humble as they work with other cultures. It does not, however, teach them about the specific cultures they work with.

October 1: Confused by the conflicting stories I had heard about my job change, I asked to meet with David Carroll. Back in June, we had had a staff meeting about the Diaspora’s letter (even though staff didn’t receive it). While touching on the various points, David had actually tried to apologize for one of them. He was interrupted by another leader, who went on to defend the point, but that willingness to admit fault stood out to me. I trusted him.

Without giving any details of what I had heard, I told David that I had heard multiple stories of why I was placed in the print room and asked him the real reason.

He told me my name had been mentioned about two months ago (which would have been around the time I started asking questions), but that when I began struggling with the validity of our reports, it clinched the idea that I should be put in the print room. He said they were fixing things with the reports, but they had decided that, if for some reason I still wasn’t comfortable being in the writing department, I should be somewhere else. He told me he knew I was over-qualified for the job, and that he and other leaders didn’t see me there forever.

Couched as it was, it really didn’t sink in at that point that leaders had lied when they said I wasn’t moved because of the reports issue. It sounded like I was on the short list already and that the questions had been a minor thing.

October 31: In a meeting with several field leaders, K.P. Yohannan talked about the need for them to understand the needs of American culture. As an example, he said that they had recently moved one of the writers because she didn’t understand cultural things in the reports. When I heard about this later, the deception finally clicked. I had told my mom that I couldn’t stay if I thought GFA’s leadership would flat-out lie to me—because how can you trust someone capable of that kind of deliberate deceit? Now I knew, unless God performed a miracle, I would have to leave.

Christmas Weekend: I wrote a letter to KP, addressing deceit in communications, untrustworthy reports and the dishonest way my move had been handled. I laid out three suggestions: 1) Stop sending so many reports, so we can send more time ensuring accuracy (included in this was the idea of using each report for more projects); 2) verify every report we used until the new training had time to take effect; 3) take a strong stand on the issue of integrity. KP emailed me back, saying we would talk when he got back from India, and that we would do whatever we needed to do to fix the problem.

January 22, 2015: I met with KP. He told me, “We would die” before GFA would be dishonest. He said that if anyone in his family was purposely dishonest, “I would have no part with them.” He asked me what I suggested, and I repeated the recommendations from my letter. From that point on, I can’t remember the order of things, so I’ll just give some key points:

• He told me he admired my convictions, but went on to compare my objections over undependable reporting to the objections people had voiced when he was smuggling Bibles.

• When we talked about changing quotes to placate donors, he told me about missionaries who had reached a polygamist village. After much discussion, the missionaries had decided to advise husbands to stay with their multiple wives, rather than leaving them destitute. This decision had meant a loss in donations. KP asked me what I would have told supporters. I replied that I might not mention it at all if it didn’t come up naturally, but that if someone directly asked about it (as they had with the quote about Jesus healing people), “I would hope that we wouldn’t tell them, ‘Actually, the men each only had one wife.’”

On this note, KP explained to me that sometimes supporters will let smaller things distract them from the mission, so it was reasonable to change the quote. This is a common excuse at GFA: Donors won’t understand this or that thing, so we need to protect them or they’ll stop giving.

• We discussed the report from Sri Lanka (July 28). He told me it was probably just a mix up of two people with the same name.

• He told me he was concerned for my well-being more than he was concerned about the accuracy issue. He told me I should go live overseas for some time, and he would help make it happen.

• I had printed out the ECFA’s requirements for accuracy in communications. I read some key points that GFA’s practices conflicted with.

• KP told me he thought I should work with the field communications department (on the side of my regular job) to find out what had happened in the reports from my discrepancies list. I asked if we would make changes to our procedures accordingly. He said we would.

At this point, I almost thought I could stay. But I had to ask: What will we do to guarantee the accuracy of our reports in the meantime? The response was similar to what I had heard before: There are bound to be inaccuracies. There’s nothing else we can do.

With that answer, I almost resigned on the spot, but I wanted to see this problem fixed, so I went back to the start of the conversation, and we talked through everything a second time.

At the end of the meeting, I still didn’t resign. Full disclosure, I had a job interview the next day, and I didn’t know if I would be immediately kicked off the campus if I resigned (I wasn’t), so I decided to give KP a long weekend to think things through. It couldn’t hurt, right? I decided to wait until the following Tuesday, just in case he would have any news for me on Monday.

January 27: No news. I gave my two weeks’ notice. I was asked to keep things quiet until leadership had a chance to talk with me. I got permission to tell the co-worker who would be taking over for me. My close friends already knew the situation.

January 28: I asked if I could tell people about my leaving, and I was asked to maintain my silence. I did break the rules to tell a leader’s wife.

January 29: We had a staff meeting, during which KP told us never to trust a negative report, even if it comes from your closest friend. You should go to leadership and ask them if it’s true.

Shortly after I returned to my desk, I was cc’d on an email to the finance department, saying that January 29 would be my last day in the office and detailing my severance plan. When I asked my coordinator about this, he said the email wasn’t supposed to go out so soon. They had meant to talk to me first and offer to let me leave early but be paid through my two weeks. Given the gag order, and GFA’s history of sudden dismissals, I find the incident suspicious, but it is possible that it was a genuine mistake.

That afternoon: I met with my coordinator and David Carroll for my exit interview. We went over the reasons for my resignation. The first half was, admittedly, tense on both sides: I said I didn’t understand how we could call ourselves a people of integrity when we didn’t have any. David responded that we weren’t like other ministries who 1) ask a crowd of people how many of them want to go to America, 2) snap a photo, and 3) tell donors it’s people raising their hands to receive Christ.

We discussed the fact that I had been talking to other staff about the situation. We discussed whether I had to leave because I couldn’t be around other sinners or if it was that I felt like I would have to sin by being there (it was the latter).

David told me my last newsletter would have to be approved by my coordinator. I asked if I would be expected to just say that God had “called me on,” explaining that I would need to be honest with my supporters. David said I could be honest, and he thought they would be honest about why I was leaving. (In the end, he was outvoted, and the staff was told that I thought it was time to move on.)

We prayed, and then David asked if there was any way I would stay. I told him that, apart from my suggestions, I would have to have either a job completely divorced from the reports or a job actively working toward a solution. He asked about me working in field communications, to find the issues with reports and help make accurate stories. I said if that were a possibility, maybe I could stay. After the meeting, he went to talk to people about that.

I spent the rest of the day and evening praying about it. At that point, I was pretty sure it was time for me to just leave, but I wanted to be open to whatever God asked.

January 30: David told me he had talked with two other leaders. Those leaders didn’t think they could “shut down” everything like I wanted. For the record, I never asked anyone to shut down our communications, only to slow them down so we could guarantee our work. However, I didn’t argue the point. I had asked for clarity from God, and I had it.

The next week: I wrote my final newsletter, giving limited detail to my supporters about why I was leaving. I tried to stay upbeat about the ministry as I explained the conflict about the reports, but I did have to clarify something. In my previous newsletter (sent in October), I had told my supporters about my move to the print room and explained that I had been picked for the job because of the great need and my fitting skills. At that point, David had told me that the reports issue had clinched the job choice, but I still believed that my skills had put me on some kind of short list. Now that I knew that wasn’t true, I told my supporters the real reason, and said that I had originally given a different reason for the move because I had originally been told differently.

David wanted that explanation removed, saying he thought I knew the real reason. I told him that people had worked very hard to make me believe it was not related and that if I didn’t explain it now, it was like I was lying.

David told me he hadn’t realized that. He said I should keep it as it was, then, “because you never would have been moved” apart from the reports issue. “You were too valuable” to the writing department. He told me my name only came up for the print job because they were listing everyone in the office who could possibly do the job.

February 13 (after I had moved off the campus): Daniel Punnose told a room full of people that they had been seriously talking about moving me for the last year and a half, but I could never get the idea out my head that I was moved because of my issues with the reports.