Suspended Bethel leader, Ben Armstrong, was the mentor and spiritual father to Sarah who lived with him and his family for a period of time. He touched her in inappropriate ways and without her consent (allegedly).
When Sarah uncovered this inappropriate relationship to the leadership at Bethel, they treated her as an affair partner. Then they moved to fairly quickly “restore” Ben Armstrong to ministry.
Senior Leader, Danny Silk, later used the story of Ben Armstrong’s restoration from this as a shinning example for his book, UNPUNISHABLE. However, Silk never asked Sarah for permission to use her story.
The following is a video interview with Ron Cantor and Sarah discussing all of this:
I grabbed a few screenshots from the video.
The first is from an email Sarah sent to Senior Leader Danny Silk pleading with him to intervene with Heather Armstrong–I assume from context–to stop using the word “affair” to describe what happened between her and Ben Armstrong, Heather’s husband:
This is another screenshot from the video. Here Danny Silk writes back in response to Sarah:
“Although ‘affair’ has a typical sexual behavior to it, your physical and emotional involvement in another person’s marriage is an affair. A serious affair. It is not going to be an effective point for you to disagree about with her.”
This makes me angry!
While I understand that Silk seems to be trying to protect one victim, the faithful wife (Heather), he is doing it at the cost of harming BA’s other victim, Sarah. He makes a classical infidelity care error of focusing on the alleged “affair” partner–more on this wrong label later–as the problem as opposed to the cheater.
Compounding his error is Silk’s wrong diagnosis of the situation.
Sarah is 100% correct that labeling her relationship with her so-called spiritual father as an “affair” is wrong. If you believe Sarah (and I do), this was Clergy Sexual Abuse (CSA) as BA exploited his position over her spiritually to touch her inappropriately and against her will.
Calling it an “affair” is a critical misdiagnosis of the problem.
It was not a mutual relationship between equals but rather someone in power, Ben Armstrong, preying on someone under his power, Sarah.
A golden opportunity was missed to provide godly and sound pastoral care to both Sarah and Heather.
Silk could have gone the tack of agreeing with Sarah and holding BA accountable before Sarah and Heather. Instead, he unjustly heaps shame upon Sarah and leaves Heather vulnerable to believing the lie that this was caused by Sarah as opposed to her husband preying on Sarah.
Clergy Sexual Abuse was not a hot topic in evangelical circles back over decade when this exchange took place. However, one would hope once it became front and center a few years back in these circles with the Mike Bickle IHOP scandal that Silk would have reached out to make this right with Sarah. He didn’t, though.
