Prairie Bible Institute faces claims of sexual abuse
THREE HILLS, AB—Prairie Bible Institute is inviting any of 17,000 alumni who are willing to disclose that they were sexually abused as students to come forward.
"We're honestly trying to throw out a heated welcome mat. We're warming it up, the doors are open, the lights are on," says president Mark Maxwell. "We would welcome the chance to hear the errors of our ways—not to be defensive, but to try and find peace for you."
Maxwell's invitation comes on the heels of claims leveled by Linda Fossen in her book, Out of the Miry Clay, that her father abused her when they were both students at Prairie in the late 1960s. He denies the allegations.
Fossen's claims encouraged dozens of other Prairie grads to tell their own stories of alleged sexual abuse on Facebook. To date, Fossen says she has heard from "90+ abuse survivors of my alma mater." And on her website, she further alleges she now faces "an all-out war to silence me and keep me from exposing the truth."
So far, says Maxwell, three former students have approached the school with claims of abuse. But apparently none is prepared to go public, let alone take PBI to court.
As for the claims made on Facebook, Prairie has handed over 890 pages of allegations to the RCMP to investigate. "If there's that much smoke, you'd think there must be a fire somewhere—and we couldn't find it," Maxwell says.
Airdrie pastor Tim Callaway's parents and siblings have been closely connected with Prairie since 1960. He has also done university-level research on sexual abuse and wrote a history of PBI for his doctoral dissertation. And so while he has no direct knowledge of these allegations, Callaway worries there seems to be at least a "ring of truth" to them.
"What I have both seen and heard from an academic and a pastoral perspective is enough to cause me great concern," he says.
Callaway also points out that for the first two-thirds of its 90-year history, Prairie "was renowned worldwide for its social regulations designed to keep male-female interactions at a minimum."
"In that kind of an environment, can you safely say to young people, 'Please leave your hormones at the door'?" he asks. "I don't say that to point fingers at anybody or to draw any conclusions. I'm just saying the truth isn't always pretty."
Fossen is demanding that Prairie bring in an American non-profit group called GRACE (Godly Response To Abuse in the Christian Environment) to investigate. Prairie has refused, stating it prefers to cooperate fully and openly with police and even the media.
But nor has it rejected any third-party involvement. Maxwell says two "prominent" Canadian churches and a church in South Carolina, whose pastor is a Prairie alumnus, have all volunteered to act as mediators.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up going with a third party that looks like that," he says. "We're working our way through that right now."
See Prairie's exclusive ChristianWeek response here.
See Linda Fossen's response in our Letters to the Editor section .
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