How a Christian college ministry glorified and enabled a sex offender
Daniel Savala, a revered Pentecostal missionary, challenged his young followers to live for Jesus. In a 2023 confession, he revealed religion was just “a cover” to get them undressed.
In a video filmed by his lawyer, Savala described how, for decades, he gained the trust of college students who sought spiritual guidance to sexually exploit them. He would touch their penises and pressure them to touch his, all under the guise of bringing them closer to Jesus.
“He would say things like, ‘Hey, you know it’s OK to masturbate,’” said Joseph Cleveland, adding that Savala groomed and sexually abused him for a decade beginning in 2004, when he was 15. “‘Because we’re brothers, we can do it together.’”
The pastors who shepherded hundreds of high school and college students to Savala’s home were part of Chi Alpha, a Christian ministry that evangelizes on university campuses. The group is run by the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.
Savala was deeply entrenched in Chi Alpha, hailed by many as a brilliant theologist. The reporting reveals that Assemblies of God leaders — all the way up to the denomination’s national superintendent — were warned repeatedly about Savala’s troubling history but did not cut off his influence. These failures allowed more children and young men to be abused, the reporting shows.
Ministry officials defended Savala in 2012 when was charged with sexually abusing boys as a youth minister in the 1990s. In the decade that followed, multiple whistleblowers tried to alert Assemblies of God that Chi Alpha was exposing students to a sex offender. Again and again, they were dismissed or ignored.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chr...rcna222816
Daniel Savala, a revered Pentecostal missionary, challenged his young followers to live for Jesus. In a 2023 confession, he revealed religion was just “a cover” to get them undressed.
In a video filmed by his lawyer, Savala described how, for decades, he gained the trust of college students who sought spiritual guidance to sexually exploit them. He would touch their penises and pressure them to touch his, all under the guise of bringing them closer to Jesus.
“He would say things like, ‘Hey, you know it’s OK to masturbate,’” said Joseph Cleveland, adding that Savala groomed and sexually abused him for a decade beginning in 2004, when he was 15. “‘Because we’re brothers, we can do it together.’”
The pastors who shepherded hundreds of high school and college students to Savala’s home were part of Chi Alpha, a Christian ministry that evangelizes on university campuses. The group is run by the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.
Savala was deeply entrenched in Chi Alpha, hailed by many as a brilliant theologist. The reporting reveals that Assemblies of God leaders — all the way up to the denomination’s national superintendent — were warned repeatedly about Savala’s troubling history but did not cut off his influence. These failures allowed more children and young men to be abused, the reporting shows.
Ministry officials defended Savala in 2012 when was charged with sexually abusing boys as a youth minister in the 1990s. In the decade that followed, multiple whistleblowers tried to alert Assemblies of God that Chi Alpha was exposing students to a sex offender. Again and again, they were dismissed or ignored.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chr...rcna222816
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
