"Caleb" Followup to Deacons

Trent and Deacons of Vision Baptist Church

I realize that you men must have an incredible weight upon your shoulders right now. No doubt you have received many testimonies that you have had to painfully walk through and discuss over the course of the last month. I don’t intend to pile on, just for the sake of piling on, but I felt it necessary to present to you further evidence of what I and many others have claimed to have experienced at VBM. I am not writing simply to defend myself or others, but I write to give evidence that at the heart of VBM lies a much deeper problem than Austin Gardner. I have seen and heard several within VBM in recent days make statements such as “Austin is already gone, what else do you want?” I want to make clear, I am others have no ill will towards Austin or any of the other leaders. We are not seeking to destroy a man or his ministry as some may believe to be true. We are however calling on those within the church to act, and to do so with a proper understanding of what has been going on behind closed doors. Specifically, I am calling on not just Austin to be held accountable, but for those leaders who have enabled him and who have covered for him for so long to also be held accountable. I include myself in the list of those whose previous actions lead to the enablement of Austin’s sinful actions for so many years. I am grateful that you men have shown a willingness to hear the stories of those who have come forward. This is a much needed change from what many of us have experienced in the past from other VBM/VBC leaders. You surely have enough information to prove that Austin is unqualified for biblical ministry, but I want to highlight that his sinful behavior extends itself into the other leaders of VBM. These men, as members of your church, must be held accountable.

I have already submitted my statement that gave an overview of my time at VBM, as has my wife, but I want to highlight the concerning behavior of VBM leadership since my departure last summer.

Leading up to my letter of confrontation to Austin in Dec 2019, I had tried to have conversations with Travis and Teri Snode at different points in which I attempted to address these concerns about Austin and the culture that he had created. I also tried to show them how they too had been victim to Austin’s abusive treatment. Just this week I wrote them both a letter in which I detail the many ways in which that has taken place. In Oct 2019, two months prior to my confrontational letter to Austin and the leaders, Travis told me “Spiritual abuse is not a real thing” and that “everyone manipulates”. He did tell me that if I had a problem with Austin that I should go see him, and that he would even go with me if I wanted him to. However, having already seen how terrible that had worked out for others in the past, and the fact that Travis had just told me that he didn’t even believe in the concept of spiritual abuse, I didn’t take him up on that what seemed to me to be a half-hearted offer.

I sent the letter in 2019 that I have already shared with you. From that time until my letter of resignation in July 2020, I had more conversations with Jeff Bush and Travis Snode. I will include a text conversation that I had with Jeff. I have on record every single conversation that I have had with Jeff from Dec 2019 until today. We have not spoken on the phone or in person. You have in this document every correspondence between the two of us. You will notice that he was not remotely interested in discussing the matters of abuse and continued to downplay and minimize these serious allegations. He refused to even have a discussion about them due to his relationship with Austin. Jeff is the general director of the mission board that I served under. If one cannot speak to him about such serious matters, to whom should a person go? You will notice even in the text below, Jeff refers to my reason for leaving as “something about our philosophy” despite my extreme clarity in the matter of abuse. This pattern of misrepresenting people extends well beyond his words to me and about me.

I have attached an email thread to this email. This email is a conversation that I attempted to have with Travis Snode about these serious allegations. Travis, according to his own testimony given to me, took this email to Jeff and asked what he should do before replying to me. Jeff instructed Travis to not speak to me about these issues at all. I continued to try and speak to Travis to no avail.

From Dec 2019 until the end of May 2020, our family was still in _, still serving as missionaries, and still members of VBM. When my family arrived back to the States, we attempted to meet with our (now former) pastor _. __ had already made it clear to me that he did not agree with my decision to confront Austin the way that I did. He did not support our family’s decision at all. We were heartbroken to once again not be believed or supported. We felt alone, and we know that the narrative about our departure from Vision would be grossly misrepresented by the leadership. I tried for over a month to meet with him and was finally able to in early July. We were able to talk and I explained to him once again why we needed to resign from VBM. That very week I sent our resignation letter to Jeff and to our supporting churches. I have attached that letter to Jeff below. You may still have a copy of my letter that I sent to our churches. In it, I made no mention of the abuse taking place at Vision.

Jeff’s response to the email above:

You will notice in Jeff’s response to my email that he agrees to handle our support through the end of Oct 2020. This is a common practice at VBM up until that point to handle a missionaries support for 3 months after they resign.

The next month, I received a message from a supporting pastor that received a letter from VBM stating that they were not in fact going to handle our support as Jeff had promised. This letter was sent out without my prior knowledge. I had many pastors reach out to me to inquire as to why we had resigned and why Vision had written such a poorly worded letter about us, and why they were not going to handle our support for the time that they had agreed to. This put our family in a very difficult position as you can imagine.

I immediately wrote to Jeff and Austin and began to try to understand why he had gone against his word. I have included that email thread to this email. Jeff gave excuse after excuse but refused to answer my direct questions. Austin never responded to any email. Later, I would hear rumors that Austin and Jeff had begun to tell the team that “there is a missionary (my name being implied) that secretly lived in the States for a year taking support and got mad at us when we cut off his support”. This lying behavior is a common practice at VBM to silence those who have been mistreated and lied about. I then began to hear wild tales that I had stolen $60,000 from an escrow account and used that money to put as a down payment on a house. That I would go to the pub every Monday in _ to get drunk to ease the pain of ministry burdens. That I only quit being a missionary because “Austin told me to go soul winning and plant a church but I didn’t want to”. Jeff told the team that I only left because I was bitter, that I had isolated myself, that I had let the "Devil win” in my life. These slanderous lies have continued to be spread around for well over a year now. One pastor wrote me not long ago and said that he had heard that I was asked to leave the mission field.

Jeff sent the following email out after Ed resigned. He mistakenly thought that Ed had been removed from the email ring, but Ed had not been removed yet so Ed received this message: You will notice that Jeff again covers up our real reasons for resigning and makes no mention of any of our allegations of spiritual abuse. Please be aware that other directors were already aware of our true reasons for leaving when this email went out. No one spoke up to confront Jeff’s lies about us. Tyler specifically asked Jeff in writing if he could address the team to explain the truth behind his departure. Jeff’s answer was no. It was clear then, and by our sudden and secret removal from all email communication from the team, several months before our resignation, that we were being silenced.

Furthermore, the missionaries who have resigned since my Dec 2019 letter have been blamed on me to some degree. It has been said that I have simply gone around and poisoned people’s minds. I can assure you that my departure from Vision was done as quietly as possible. I was very well aware of the ramifications of speaking out, for I have seen time and time again what happens to those who speak out against Austin and his team.

One last example I will give. A pastor friend of mine in FL reached out to me last summer. He wanted to know why I had resigned from VBM. I had never previously spoken to him about VBM nor did he know about my letter to Austin. I had never said a bad word about Vision to him. I told him that day why we left. To my surprise, he informed me that he too had seen warning signs, and that several months prior he had a special meeting with his deacons where he decided to drop all VBM missionaries. Jason Holt was one of them. This pastor then called Jason to tell him that he would no longer support VBM missionaries. Jason then began to tell this pastor that he only felt this way about VBM because I had poisoned his mind, despite me never speaking to this pastor about these issues until AFTER he had already come to his own conclusions. I have attached the conversation that I had with Jason regarding this. You will see that Jason continued to defend the actions of Austin and made no attempt to hear my concerns. We never spoke on the phone.

Mark Coffey has spread lies about our family and continues to defend the actions of Austin. The lies told about those who leave Vision seem to grow by the day.

While I don’t have personal dealings with Mark Tolson, there are those who have worked under him that will give testimony to his disqualifying behavior.

I have also had conversations with both Tony Howeth and John Pearson. Both of these men assured me that they believed what I was telling them was true, and that they too had seen similar things. Both men however, told me that there was little that I, or they could do about it. It seemed that they both understood what has become clear, that Austin and the leaders at VBM, up until this point, have had no meaningful structure of accountability. Given their positions, they had no recourse but to give me support as a friend, which I am grateful for.

My point in this letter is to show that it is simply not enough to allow Austin to fall on his sword and take the fall. This is not a matter of one man at the top causing problems, and now that he is gone everything can go back to normal. There is at VBM a deeply rooted and systemic culture of abuse that includes but is not limited to the general director as well as the newly appointed field directors. I am not saying that these are evil men that ought never return to ministry, but their actions have proven that there is much needed work to be done that requires significant time to prove profitable. I urge you to not allow this to continue and I specifically call for the resignation of these men if what I am saying, and what others have said, is found to be true. It would be the duty of the church to see that biblical steps of discipline, reconciliation, and restoration are carried out, but I cannot imagine a scenario where these men are allowed to continuing serving in their current ministry roles for a significant period of time. I am continuing to pray for you all to have wisdom, discernment, and courage.

"Caleb"