The Person Before the Institution: A Pentecostal Rule of Safeguarding

Pentecostal churches are often places of intimate trust. People bring their bodies for prayer, their family struggles for counsel, their children for formation, their money for mission and their deepest experiences for testimony. This relational nearness can sustain remarkable care. It also creates power that must be governed.

A church's response to harm is tested most severely when the person accused is spiritually influential, financially important or closely connected to those who receive the complaint. At that moment, reputation can be renamed mission, silence can be renamed unity and institutional survival can be presented as the good of the whole congregation. The person reporting harm may then be asked to carry the cost of preserving the ministry that failed to protect them.

The Pentecostal rule of safeguarding must be the person before the institution. This does not mean deciding guilt by allegation, abandoning fair process or treating every conflict as abuse. It means that immediate safety, dignified listening and freedom from retaliation come before reputation management; that pastoral prayer does not replace professional care or lawful referral; and that no spiritual office places a person beyond independent scrutiny.

A peer-reviewed study published on 22 October 2026 examined authority and sexual violence in African-diasporic Pentecostal churches in Los Angeles. Corey Williams drew on three months of participant observation, interviews with 18 church members and five pastors,…