“The concepts of preemptive love — of loving anyway, loving your enemies, loving first, all those taglines that we used in marketing and fundraising over the years — really did feel like an alternative to the way the American church was running,” he said.
He eventually spent five years on staff.
Despite the success of Preemptive Love, Barnett had concerns about the way the organization was run. Anyone who disagreed with the Courtneys was belittled or pushed out.
Amanda Donnelly, the group’s former chief marketing officer, said she was fired by Jeremy Courtney after she disagreed with his wife, Jessica, the charity’s chief program officer.
“The minute I crossed her it was over for me,” she said.
Donnelly, who was based in the U.S., said she and other senior leaders had been summoned to a meeting in Iraq with the Courtneys in early June with a week’s notice, purportedly to work out their differences. The meeting, which would have included visits to refugee camps, was supposed to help leaders regain trust and to put the “fire of God” in their bones, according to an email from Courtney that was obtained by Religion News Service.
When Donnelly balked, she was let go. She also filed a formal human resources complaint.
In an email, Courtney told the staff at Preemptive Love that Donnelly and other leaders were not “fast in crisis,” a term the charity uses to describe its work.
“There will not be two classes of ‘citizens’ in this community,” he wrote. “Our top leadership team won’t be allowed to earn money off the pain and accomplishments of those they are unwilling to walk with face to face in the places where the substance of our work is taking place.”
Along with her concerns about the work culture at Preemptive Love, Donnelly and other staffers worried that Preemptive Love’s marketing overplayed the organization’s work in the field.
In December 2019, World magazine, an evangelical publication, raised questions about Preemptive Love’s work in Syria, reporting that the claims made in fundraising appeals did not match the work being done on the ground. The charity has long denied the assertion, though it did admit misstating the scope of some of its work in Syria.
A report on the Preemptive Love website states that its work in Syria began in March 2016 and ramped up after the fall of Aleppo in December of that year. A letter on the charity’s website also claims that in the final weeks of 2016, after Aleppo fell, Preemptive Love raised $6 million more than it had projected. According to a representative from Preemptive Love, $2.6 million of those funds were restricted.
However, while it was raising millions for its work in Syria, Preemptive Love did not hire its first staffer in that country until February 2017. (The charity now has three staffers there.) Most of the initial relief work by Preemptive Love in Syria was done by partner organizations, despite claims by Courtney that “our team” was on the ground.
Michelle Fisher, chair of Preemptive Love’s board and a longtime friend of the Courtneys, told RNS in an email that information about its partners was withheld to protect their safety.
“Because Preemptive Love’s mission is to serve vulnerable people in some of the most difficult and dangerous places, the organization has chosen to protect our partners by not publicly identifying them, especially on the internet,” she told RNS in an email response. “The regions where partners are located are often religiously, socially and geopolitically complex. There are many scenarios where working with a U.S. organization can put people and the partner organization itself at risk.”
Former staffers told RNS that they believe in the work being done by Preemptive Love and that the funds collected by the charity are used to help people in desperate situations. But they are concerned that Preemptive Love has preferred a dramatic story to the truth.
In his Medium post, Irwin linked to a pair of videos that he said were misleading. One details a food delivery in the city of Fallujah, Iraq, in 2016, after the city was retaken from ISIS. In the video, aid workers in Preemptive Love T-shirts distribute bags of food. At one point, Jeremy Courtney breaks in, saying that the distribution was interrupted by a clash between religious and tribal leaders.
