CN: Clergy sexual abuse
For those without ties to Canadian evangelical circles, it might be hard to grasp just how significant Bruxy Cavey's fall from grace truly is. He not only led The Meeting House—one of Canada's largest megachurches—but he had achieved celebrity pastor fame largely unparalleled in Canada. He was a very big fish in a relatively small pond. This is probably the single most prominent clergy sexual abuse scandal to hit Canadian evangelicalism. (And it was clergy sexual abuse, don't kid yourself otherwise. By his own "confession" he had a sexual relationship with a parishioner; we have learned from that parishioner that "[t]his began during a pastoral counselling relationship when [she] was 23 and he was 46." The Meeting House has rightly acknowledge that this was abuse of power. And what do we call a clergyperson who secures sexual contact with a parishioner through abuse of power?).
This now casts a very large shadow over Cavey's entire legacy. As I reflect upon this, I am reminded of Jean Vanier, once virtually treated as a saint and whom we now know to have been a sexual predator. In his case, much of his legacy probably stands on its own, as L'Arche has done and continues to do good work with and for persons with developmental disabilities. But even with Vanier, we have to recognize that his own motivations in founding L'Arche were surely less than noble. We know that he used his spiritual influence over his victims to secure sexual contact, and so it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to imagine that at least part of why he established himself as a spiritual leader in the first place was precisely so that he could engage in such misconduct.
The Cavey case is remarkably parallel. Cavey built The Meeting House. When he was hired as its pastor in 1997, it was a single congregation meeting in a school gymnasium in the west end of the Greater Toronto Area. It now has twenty satellite location throughout the province of Ontario. It would take six hours to drive from the western-most location of The Meeting House (located in my hometown, London, ON) to the eastern-most (located in the nation's capital, Ottawa). This success was largely due to Cavey's energy, his charisma, his drive. But now we know that he used the spiritual power that this gave him to abuse at least one parishioner. And The Meeting House seems aware that there are potentially other victims out there, as they've engaged a third-party victim advocate to receive concerns and complaints regarding current or historic sexual misconduct. He's also incidentally not the first Meeting House pastor to end his time at the church in disgrace due to sexual abuse and/or assault. There is reason to believe that sexual abuse is endemic at The Meeting House, part of a culture established by the guy at the very top for the last quarter-century. And this makes me wonder: what really motivated Cavey to turn this one rented room congregation into a megachurch in the first place?
Perhaps Cavey himself gives us a hint, in a blog post written last year. He writes "When people’s lives lack enough meaning, purpose, and value, they will invent meaning which generates purpose and then derive their value from there." This reads like a truer confession than the one he posted about his offenses online. And it leads us to ask what meaning Cavey invented for himself. For what is truy meaningful meaning would seem not to be the Anabaptist peace church rhetoric that he espouses, as peace is radically incompatible with sexual exploitation. Rather, perhaps his invented meaning something closer to the bog standard toxic male belief that life is not worth living unless one is an alpha with a wolfpack at one's beck and call. And perhaps his purpose has been to forge such a wolfpack, in the form of The Meeting House, and his drive derived from the adulation of said pack. That is to say: what if his exploitation of women is not incidental to his work, but his very reason for building the The Meeting House in the first place? Perhaps Cavey expanded The Meeting House not to glorify Jesus, but rather to enable greater access to vulnerable female persons that he could exploit. Perhaps he did this because in Cavey's soul lies a whimpering abyss lacking any true meaning, purpose, or drive.
Now, let me be clear: that Cavey is a bad egg does not necessarily mean that The Meeting House is itself irredeemable. Just as L'Arche contributes value apart from Jean Vanier, so can The Meeting House (at least in principle). It will need to do what L'Arche did, which is to name Vanier's actions as sexual abuse—without any effort to minimize or evade or obfuscate. That will be a first step, and only a first step. It will be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for moving forward. Because without that, the choir might be able to convince itself that all is right at The Meeting House, but those beyond the walls will be washing their hands of the institution.
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