Shawn Miller

Ohio Mennonite church member credibly accused of sexual misconduct with a minor

Shawn Miller (b. 1972) allegedly kissed and groped a minor female who was employed as a babysitter in his home in approximately 2007. Both Miller and the victim were at the time part of United Bethel Mennonite Church (UBMC), a congregation in Plain City, Ohio, that is affiliated with the Biblical Mennonite Alliance (BMA).

In 2023, the leadership at UBMC engaged Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE) after the public criminal cases of two church members. GRACE investigated how UBMC handled those and other allegations of abuse and in 2024 released the report of their independent investigation.

GRACE investigators found the victim’s allegations of sexual misconduct by Miller to be credible and to meet the evidentiary threshold of the GRACE evidentiary standard. According to the GRACE report, the victim reported the sexual abuse in 2009 to the principal of Shekinah Christian School, a local school where many UBMC children have attended. The principal then met with the victim’s father and a UBMC leader and told them what the victim had reported. Then the principal, with the support of the parents, filed a full report with the police, who did not pursue charges.

UBMC leaders reportedly did not share any information about the alleged abuse with the congregation. A UBMC pastor told GRACE that he and Miller met for two or three months and went through a book on sexual purity and said it seemed like Miller “responded well.”

Miller continued to attend UBMC with no restrictions or public knowledge, and the victim’s father, a UBMC leader, reportedly said he soon realized “it was just not helpful at all for [the victim] to go to the same church while [Miller] was there.” The victim told GRACE that when she felt forced to continue to babysit for Miller and interact with him after she had reported the abuse, she began to harm herself.

“I was in such a dark place, and I felt so alone and so isolated and whatever, that I would read my schoolwork and then go to answer the questions and forget everything I just read. My brain would … It just didn’t work. I couldn’t retain anything. So, my parents were mad that I wasn’t caring about school, and I was mad that they didn’t understand why I couldn’t focus enough to even try to do well at school. And this whole time, Dad just talked to [Miller, told] him not to do that [sexually abuse her].”

While Miller continued to attend UBMC, the victim soon began attending a church some distance away, driving herself and reportedly paying to use her parents’ car. The victim’s father took a sabbatical from leadership at UBMC soon after her disclosures. One UBMC member reported that he understood that the sabbatical related to the victim being “wild” and leaving the church. He reportedly had no idea about allegations against Miller or any trauma that the victim experienced.

According to the GRACE report, the victim’s father now believes that people should have been made aware of the allegations to the extent the victim was comfortable and said that Miller should not have been allowed to continue to attend UBMC.

In 2022, a UBMC leader wrote to a concerned community member, “Although the case with Shawn Miller was not publicized to the church body, that would have been best. That situation was reported to law enforcement, and everybody cooperated in the investigation. There was honest admission, accountability, and cooperation with all authorities. Since then we have more safeguards in place, and we continue to work on policies and other ways to increase safety in all situations.”

Excerpts of GRACE’s analysis:

Power differentials

Understanding the nature and function of power is important to responding well to abuse disclosures. Power is the potential to influence others. There are many bases or sources of power and/or authority in relationships, and these are often multi-layered. For example, each of the following can confer a type of power on someone who holds it: a role or job title within a hierarchy, specific expertise, respect or trust within a community, the ability to control resources or rewards, the use of fear/force/punishment, charisma, control of information, relationships or connections, age and level of maturity, and/or spiritual position and authority.

Dr. [Diane] Langberg states that there are several types of power a person can use either to build and cultivate or to do harm: physical, verbal, emotional, educational, and economic power. Dr. Langberg describes how many types of power that can intersect in complex ways when it is abused in the context of the church. Power can find its source in words, emotions, physical size and strength, personality, positions of authority, spirituality, and culture. How one uses their power impacts others and tells us something about the person in power.

Abuse often occurs in the context of a power differential in which someone with greater power misuses that power to control or manipulate someone with less power. In the case of sexual misconduct, that power is misused to engage in some form of sexual activity or gratification. Several instances of sexual misconduct described in this Report involve one or more layers of differences in power that contributed to the ability of the offender to perpetrate his misconduct.

Miller was in multiple layered positions of power relative to [the victim]: he was her employer; he was approximately twenty years older than her as a 16-year-old; he was a physically imposing man with an accessible cache of weapons; he was a friend of her parents; and he was a respected adult male member of her church, where men have greater power serving as the pastors and elders, and access to power, given the occurrence of male only meetings where women had to hear information from their fathers and/or husbands. In contrast, as discussed further in subsection 2 below, [the victim] was a 16-year-old girl who did not understand appropriate physical boundaries, sex, sexual abuse, consent, and the appropriate right to disobey an adult and/or employer.

At least one witness reported Miller’s wife describing the allegations as an “affair,” suggesting equal perceived responsibility of [the victim]. This terminology has historically been prevalent in Christian environments, often influenced by the perspectives of the church, surrounding cultures, and traditions. In some situations, use of this terminology may stem from the inclination to frame abusive actions as mere moral failings necessitating swift forgiveness and restitution. The use of this terminology raises concerns about a potential lack of awareness regarding various power dynamics within relationships, especially those between an adult and a child, despite being at or barely above the legal age of consent in Ohio.

Because Miller was someone in a position of authority over [the victim] as her employer, as well as holding other layers of heightened power, it is important to understand that positions of power and authority like what Miller held over [the victim] make meaningful consent impossible. In the context of clergy sexual abuse, even where one party is a legal adult, Patricia L. Liberty writes, “It is assumed that because two people are adults that there is consent. In reality, consent is far more complex. In order for two people to give authentic consent to sexual activity there must be equal power.” It is also important to note that just because an offender influences a victim to believe they are an equal partner, that does not make it so. The actual characterization by an offender to someone with substantially less power than them (such as teenage babysitter, child of family friends, female teen within their male-led church body) that they are equals is often part of the grooming process itself, to convince the victim they share equal responsibility for the abuse and thus shaming them into silence.

Grooming

[The victim] described behaviors by Shawn Miller that are consistent with grooming. He was significantly older than her and was also her employer, so she was already inclined to follow his instructions. By initially then continually directing her to come down into the basement alone for a seemingly legitimate purpose, he isolated her in his home to an area where he had even greater control, as well as intimidation given that he stored his significant array of guns and knives in that area as well. Over time, he initiated non-sexual touch in the form of rubbing shoulders, again offering a seemingly legitimate justification of her shoulders being sore while doing this work that he personally requested. He slowly increased the touch to more intimate parts of the body, then to more obvious sexual touching and attempts to urge her into a bedroom space. Miller also encouraged her to keep the behavior a secret, and even suggested he was like a brother figure, although she did not have a context to understand that these behaviors were inappropriate.

Minimization of abuse

The responses of UBMC’s leadership and others to various allegations within this Report involve a pattern of minimizing the conduct through their use of language and their responses. Minimization occurs when the serious nature of abuse is not conveyed, when abuse or its impact is treated or described as minor or in a reductive way, or when the response is wholly inadequate to the misconduct or abuse.

The reported description of Miller’s abuse of [the victim] as an “affair” minimized the serious nature of grooming and sexual abuse of a teenager by an adult male employer twice her age. This description may have originated with Miller himself, as it also reportedly reduced the entire course of misconduct as “an emotional affair with [the victim] that led to a kiss at some point.” However, the disproportionately minor response of UBMC to the allegations also served to minimize its seriousness, as if it were only worthy of a few meetings with the pastor.

Victim blaming

One especially harmful response to abuse is to place blame on the victim for not preventing their sexual abuse, not stopping the abuse, or not speaking up (sooner) about the abuse. While there are factors that make some individuals more susceptible to abuse, these factors only attempt to explain, in part, how some abuse occurs, but should never be used to place responsibility on the victim much less excuse the actions of the abuser.

[T]he description of [the victim’s] abuse as an “affair” attempts to lay equal blame on the victim for the manipulation of her offender when he was her employer and in his late thirties and she was approximately 16, vulnerable, and unaware of her body and sex.

Lack of transparency / covering up

A lack of transparency can occur by omission, in failing to disclose information needed by others to make informed decisions, or by commission, in actively hiding, obfuscating, or deceiving others about acts of abuse. Both seemingly occurred in the course of UBMC’s handling of instances of abuse.

The known abuse by each of Miller and Corbin was not disclosed to the UBMC congregation despite the risk that they might reoffend (and Corbin in fact did) within UBMC members and their families. Even worse was the fact that each individual continued to attend UBMC for some period and their victims were forced to choose whether to stop attending their own church or interact with their abuser. Both of these factors reduced the safety of all involved, reduced the trust of victims in UBMC leadership, and eliminated peer support and victims’ voices as others did not know about the abuse and victims expressed that they did not feel free to share because leadership had not.

Marginalization of victims

One pattern that emerged across many of these cases was the marginalization of the victims – their exclusion, whether intentionally or unintentionally, from their former community as a result of their abuse, its disclosure, and how it was handled by UBMC. Marginalization is the opposite of the trauma-informed principles of peer support and collaboration and mutuality.

After Miller’s abuse became known to UBMC leadership, [the victim] left to attend another church over an hour away, losing support and a sense of community. This was because Miller continued to attend UBMC and, despite several members of UBMC leadership knowing the seriousness of the grooming and abuse, they did not empower [the victim] or seek collaboration with her to offer transparency, as appropriate, to the congregation.