The group offered first-hand accounts from those who allege abuse at CFC. According to Abbi Nye, a CFCtoo advocate who attended CFC until 2005, 18 individuals have shared stories of physical or sexual abuse with CFCtoo.
“For me, I see this as the latest incident in a pattern of covering up or minimizing abuse over many decades” Nye said, referring to CFC’s alleged mishandling of Ferguson’s abuse.
Most of the eight current or former CFC members interviewed for this story said loyalty to the pastor is a defining feature of the insular church community. They also point out that three of the six CFC pastors are members of the Sinclair family.
“My family was what I’d term an ‘insider family,’” said Nye. “There were different circles of influence in the church, and the more loyal you were to Rick Sinclair, the more influence you had.”
Rick Sinclair’s daughter, Julia Sinclair, a recording artist who goes by Sinclair, agreed. “In my teens, I think I started to kind of notice that there was a whole lot of worship of my dad, which even from a biblical perspective, I saw that as a red flag,” she said.
Justus Martin, a part-time lead pastor at CFC’s Moira location from 2016 until 2020, told RNS he was fired after he referred to men he’d appointed to help him lead the Moira church as elders. The title was officially reserved for a group of 18 elders — some of them pastors — responsible for leading all CFC locations.
Martin said Sinclair expressed full-throated support for his ministry until February 2020, Martin said, when a miscommunication over a fundraiser at CFC Moira prompted Martin to ask Sinclair for a meeting. When they met with the Moira leadership team on March 2, 2020, according to Martin, Sinclair harshly questioned Martin’s leadership abilities and reprimanded the other leaders.
“At that meeting, I shared some needed correction,” Sinclair said at an August 24 congregational meeting. “Justus had clearly failed by identifying these men as elders … I wanted there to be absolute clarity, leaving the meeting, that they had not been set aside as elders.”
After additional meetings and email exchanges, on April 28, 2020, Martin was told it was time to part ways with CFC. Some of Martin’s congregants then formed a new church, with Martin as pastor, which drew fire from Sinclair and the other CFC pastors, who asked Martin to repent for intentionally splitting the church. They also removed children from Martin’s church from the CFC-affiliated Christian Fellowship Academy, an enrichment program for the community’s many homeschoolers.
“We believe that Justus willingly and knowingly caused a devastating church split. He knew what was going to happen,” Sinclair claimed in the August congregational meeting. “We tried to appeal to him. We tried everything we could to try to prevent it and to reach out to him.”
Former CFC members told RNS the community can seem idyllic if you follow the CFC prescription for Christian living, which includes approval of corporal punishment — CFC pastors taught spanking techniques at annual conferences, they said — and what some characterize as an adherence to a “Quiverfull” ideology.
Kathryn Joyce, who wrote a 2009 book on the Quiverfull movement, told RNS that the movement is about “leaving your fertility in God’s hands.” In practice, said Joyce, it’s characterized by large families — think the Duggars — who often share other informal lifestyle elements, including homeschooling, purity culture and female submission.
