John Howard Yoder

Mennonite theologian, ethicist, and professor sexually harassed and assaulted dozens of women for decades; credentials eventually revoked

In 1992, John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) had his ministerial credentials suspended by the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference (IMMC) of what is now Mennonite Church USA after eight women reported Yoder’s unwelcome sexualized behavior. After a nearly four-year disciplinary process that Yoder resisted using theological and legal arguments, IMMC revoked Yoder’s ordination credentials at the end of 1995.

Editor’s Note: This brief summary can only hint at the decades of complex systemic and individual factors that enabled and protected Yoder’s abuses. There is also evidence that Yoder’s writings and actions influenced and protected other abusive Mennonite leaders. Much more work could be done on this story.

In 2014, a Mennonite Church USA discernment group asked historian Dr. Rachel Waltner Goossen to research and write a report of the history of Yoder’s actions and the church’s responses. In 2015, Dr. Waltner Goossen published “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse.”

Dr. Waltner Goossen wrote:

During the last 25 years of Yoder’s life, his sexual behaviors toward many women caused significant harm. A highly mobile professor and churchman, he approached (mostly Mennonite) women both near and far from home.

Yoder’s advances included making suggestive comments, sending sexually explicit correspondence and surprising women with physical coercion. In a 1974 solicitation in which he appealed to women to engage with him, Yoder wrote: “Only thanks to your friendship, sisterhood, can I do the theology.” Remarkably, he was conveying that they were tools for him to use in his quest to perfect Christian theology.

Precise numbers will never be known, but two mental health professionals who worked closely with him from 1992 to 1995 as part of Indiana-Michigan’s disciplinary process believe that more than 100 women experienced unwanted sexual violations by Yoder, ranging from sexual harassment in public places to, more rarely, sexual intercourse.

By 1979, Yoder’s supervisor at the [Goshen Biblical Seminary], President Marlin Miller, was documenting a surge of disturbing incidents involving Yoder from as far away as South Africa and Mennonite World Conference headquarters in Strasbourg, France.

Rather than firing Yoder, who was his intellectual mentor and predecessor in the seminary presidency, Miller kept meticulous records about what he learned. He summarized calls and letters received — mostly from English-speakers, but also some in German and French — about women’s encounters with Yoder. Miller’s diary-like entries included details about his informants’ marital status and whether they had reported “total disrobing,” as well as their rationales for engaging with Yoder in his project. Miller also kept notes about women who reported that they had rebuffed Yoder’s sexual aggressions.

Although Yoder and Miller, hoping to avoid potential for blackmail, destroyed an unknown number of letters in 1980, surviving documents reveal not only the egregious behavior of Yoder toward some women but also the power Miller used to enforce their silence.

In 1980, Miller established a disciplinary process with a small group at Goshen Biblical Seminary in an unsuccessful attempt to bring Yoder to accountability. This collection of faculty and board members, who drew up a secret “covenant” with Yoder, was the first of seven Mennonite groups to challenge Yoder from within institutional bases:

• Covenant Group, Goshen Biblical Seminary, 1980-84;
• Confidential Task Force, Goshen Biblical Seminary, 1982;
• Board of Elders, Prairie Street Mennonite Church, 1986;
• Prairie Street Mennonite Church/JHY Task Force, 1991-92;
• Church Life Commission, Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, 1992-96;
• Accountability and Support Group, Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, 1992-96;
• Executive Board, Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, 1992-97.

These groups had varying goals: to engage Yoder intellectually in his unconventional notions about sexuality; to investigate rumors of sexual misdeeds; to arrange for meetings between women accusers and Yoder as a step toward forgiveness; and to discipline him. No group succeeded completely. For the last two decades of his life, Yoder discussed, sparred and negotiated with these various parties.

[In] the 1990s, the secrecy that had veiled Yoder’s actions began to collapse. Some women who had experienced his sexual aggressiveness leveraged their collective will to force Mennonite leaders to stop his abuse. Their efforts at whistle- blowing culminated with several dramatic events in 1992 — including the withdrawal of an invitation for him to speak at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan. — a turning point in the denomination’s dealings with Yoder.

In 1992, a series of articles by journalist Tom Price of The Elkhart Truth helped break the story so that it could no longer be kept quiet. Price reported:

The women, who are in positions of national church leadership, said the allegations included improper hugging, use of sexual innuendo or overt sexual language, sexual harassment, kissing or attempts to kiss women, nudity and violent sexual behavior. Sexual intercourse was not among the allegations.

“It can range from suggesting, ‘sit on my lap,’ to actually pulling people down on his lap, inappropriately kissing and hugging,” one of the women said. “It certainly violated the professor-student relationship. It certainly violates the marriage covenant and our understanding of that within the church.”

Price quoted one of the women:

“One of the lines he’s used on a number of women I’ve met is, ‘We are on the cutting edge. We are developing some new models for the church. We are part of this grand, noble experiment. The Christian church will be indebted to us for years to come,'” she said. “He maintains that it’s even appropriate for two people, who may be married to other people, to be in bed nude together, as long as they don’t have intercourse.”

Dr. Waltner Goossen continued:

Over the next several years, Yoder sharply contested Mennonite conference officials’ right to retain records documenting his abuse. In 1996, concerned about the implications of the sexual abuse charges on his legacy, he informed Indiana-Michigan Conference officials that he was consulting a lawyer about the conference’s plan to retain hundreds of documents — correspondence, meeting minutes and mental health records — that they had used in determining not to reinstate his credential.

Yoder’s dispute with those officials signaled that their four-year disciplinary proceedings would miss the mark of reconciliation. A year before his death in 1997 at age 70, Yoder declared that “the initially stated goal of restoration has been abandoned.”

In 2012, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) issued a “Statement on Teaching and Scholarship related to John Howard Yoder,” which reported on the conclusion of the final disciplinary process, initiated in 1992, and the final years of Yoder’s life.

The Church Life Commission of Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference took on leadership of the disciplinary process. The CLC formed an accountability and support group that met with [Yoder] more than 30 times between fall of 1992 and spring of 1996. It also mandated that [Yoder] undergo psychological evaluation and counseling, and suspended his ministerial credentials. The accountability and support group’s final report stated that Yoder made sufficient changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to bring closure to the process. The Church Life Commission concluded its report by recommending continuing use of an accountability plan and encouraging “Yoder and the church to use his gifts of writing and teaching.” In the latter part of 1997, shortly before Yoder’s death, he was invited to again teach at AMBS as a substitute teacher for a professor who was ill, and he was also reconciled with his home congregation.

In 2015, after the release of Dr. Waltner Goossen’s report, the seminary and the denomination made efforts to apologize to Yoder’s survivors. The Washington Post reported:

In 2013, the seminary and the denomination began a process revisiting the church’s handling of the Yoder affair. Victims and their supporters pushed for full disclosure of the abuse claims. Among their complaints was that the church had largely ignored the women’s welfare and was more concerned with restoring Yoder and his reputation.

“Whether through misnaming, or negligence, or avoidance, or fear of scandal, we failed … what we know to be most true about the Gospel,” Sara Wenger Shenk, seminary president since 2010, told the victims during a March [2015] service in which the seminary publicly apologized. “We failed you.”

Long-term effects

Psychological and emotional toll

One woman, married and much younger than Yoder, whom he surprised in the mid-1970s with sexualized physical touching and who reacted with instant rebuke, later remembered the incident as deeply troubling: “It messes with the mind. I wondered, am I special to him? Is he lonely?”

Yoder’s advances included making suggestive comments, sending sexually explicit correspondence, and surprising women with physical coercion. Since Yoder’s death in 1997, additional women have come forward, confirming evidence from his writings to Marlin Miller and other confidantes that Yoder’s activities ranged across a spectrum from sexual harassment in public places to, more rarely, sexual intercourse. Some women found his sexual aggressions to be relatively inconsequential in their own lives. Other women’s experiences were devastating, with trauma exacting a steep toll on marriages and careers.

[S]ome women regarded his aggressiveness as coercive and deeply harmful, and they felt fear long after their encounters with him.

Betrayal and institutional silence

In 1985, … a young pastor named Charlie Cooper arrived in Elkhart to serve Prairie Street Mennonite Church, the congregation of which Yoder had been a member for years. Cooper had been on the job only a few months when he and the congregation’s leadership council, the Board of Elders, decided to confront Yoder about reports of ongoing sexual misbehavior. Years later, Cooper recalled: “I asked him, [taking a] personal, relational, pastoral approach, and was made dizzy by his verbiage, re-directs, subjugations, semantics. … To this day [I] have no idea what-the-[expletive] JHY did!” When Cooper appealed for help from Mennonite leaders in the community, those who knew the history of Yoder’s sexual violations were not sharing.

“For two decades, Mennonite administrators, committees, and task forces responded — mostly informally — to women who sent letters of complaint, phoned, or appeared in person. No one called in law enforcement, no legal charges were brought…”

Phyllis Bixler, a retired Mennonite professor of literature, notes that she has had a “visceral reaction” to Yoder’s legacy of sexually abusing women, because, she said, “it excavates the anger I felt growing up knowing that my dreams of certain kinds of church leadership (I wanted to be a pastor) were not open to me.” Yoder’s theological writings, she added, granted “the church an amazing amount of power, a power which is ripe for abuse in many, many ways… It is the kind of abuse that occurs when the reputation and perceived survival of the church seem more important to many of its leaders than justice toward its victims.”

Victim-blaming and silencing

[Carolyn Holderread] Heggen, like Martha Smith Good, had directly rebuffed Yoder’s sexual advances, but before the two women became acquainted with each other, each had experienced isolation and self-doubt; they had “agonized over what possible role we had played in his assumption that we were open to sexualizing the relationship with him.” Heggen had struggled to recall whether her choice of clothing might have provoked lascivious behavior, though modesty was her habit. Remembering her high anxiety over Yoder’s inexplicable actions toward her, she finally concluded that “both days [during Yoder’s work-related trip to Albuquerque] I wore outfits in which Mother Teresa would be comfortable walking the streets. Further, there was nothing I said or did which could have reasonably been interpreted as intentionally seductive.”

During the four years of Yoder’s disciplinary process — as friends and colleagues of Yoder expressed concern for his wellbeing — some of the women who had spoken out about his abuse struggled in emotional isolation. Heggen was dismayed when “angry, hateful letters came accusing me of trying to ‘destroy a good man,’ of ‘giving the church a bad name’ and of ‘seducing an important man.'”

Theological and institutional consequences

[P]atriarchal structures did not protect women in the church. Since Yoder assaulted many of his female students and rising female church leaders, his actions directly impacted a generation of women’s leadership. The continuing absence of women in so many centers of pacifist theology in Mennonite institutions today means that new generations of pacifist theologians may also not … take into consideration the privilege and entitlements that males enjoy.

Mennonite commentator Ruth Anne Abrahams of Texas offers this assessment: “[A]n atmosphere where women were disenfranchised from public church leadership created this bitter fruit… This story speaks to the great loss of talented, spiritually inclined women in the last fifty years. These are women who would have provided real leadership to the Mennonite Church.”

Canadian theologian Susie Guenther Loewen argues that “Yoder’s actions have affected the Mennonite theological landscape … ensuring that there is a generation of female academic theologians missing… It’s a devastating loss.”