The Starbucks Fallout
The following email was sent to Bert Thomson on Wednesday May 31, 2023. Every Nation GTA Toronto verified his email and received a copy on August 1, 2023. As of November 8, 2023 there has been no response.
Ps. Bert:
On Feb 25, 2012 I came to you for help regarding a potential child endangerment situation spanning the US and Canada. Dr. Brian Miller suggested I reach out to you due to your familiarity with the region. He had been working closely with me on this issue. You weren’t a stranger to me as we’d had thanksgiving at Wayne Headley’s together and you’d prophesied over me encouraging me that there would be something I’d be involved in. I never realized how big until this issuer with the child endangerment came forth.
We met at a Starbucks near Bethel World Outreach Center and I explained to you what was happening. I had encountered a young girl trying to go to Canada and several of us had suspected it might be a sex trafficking / human trafficking / sex abuse situation waiting to happen. I needed help.
I was looking for insight and guidance as the young girl was trying to get to Canada any way she could. Her parents were dead and she was alone – but she was in contact with people in Canada trying to get her to move up there – people she’d never met and never knew in the real world. There was no one looking out for her.
As I explained it I thought I was going to get help or insight from you. I came from the church in New York City where I had been raised that the church was the first line of defense, where we got involved in stopping child trafficking and so many other important causes. I came to you for help.
At the end of the coffee you stated that I should be the one that should be investigated for sex / human / child trafficking and really seemed alarmed. I’d never see anyone in such a hurry to end a meeting. I was very disappointed.
Word matter and looking back on this 10 years later it’s disturbing to me. I sat with Pastor James Lowe as I’m preparing to write a book and unpacked some of this. Questions came up – if you were so alarmed, why didn’t you notify the senior leadership of Bethel i.e. Ps. James or Ps. Rice? Or one of the associate pastors like Ps. Verbs who was the youth pastor? Those kinds of accusations should have some kind of proof presented or gathered before making them, at least in general estimation.
The teenage girl I spoke to you about eventually moved in with me. We became a family and appeared before a judge to form a legal adoption. My attorney allowed her to co-petition so as to assure the court there was no coercion involved. She moved out of my home soon after and is a functioning adult with regular millennial problems as she turns 30 this June. No more escapism, no more vulnerability, and she now has a family structure to fall back on as well as access to people like Ps. James Lowe should the need arise. It’s a far cry from a teenage girl with no parents being lured to Winnipeg possibly never to be heard from again and no one to question her disappearance. She won’t be an episode of CBS’s 48 hours or NBC’s Dateline – or the newly revived Unsolved Mysteries (now available exclusively on Netflix).
By contrast I asked another Canadian Pastor for help soon after – Pastor Adam Burt of EveryNation New York City. He was able to connect me to one of his congregants who was going to the region and we came up with the idea, along with my private investigator, to photograph the exact location where she was being told she’d move to – license plates, exteriors, etc. When we got the photos and reviewed them, the girl said the photos didn’t match where she was being told she’d live and what she was told it would be like. That was a turning point. It was like scales falling from her eyes. That was also a solid example of me going to the church for help and the kind of help I was expecting from you. Pastor Adam Burt helped save the day and the irony is the was the pastor in NYC I thought understood me the least – and he needed very little explanation before jumping into action.
As I recount all of this and re-live it to write my memoirs – I was a Vietnam war orphan – my parents were presumed killed and I was airlifted out of Saigon in April 1975 (and subsequently adopted myself) – the coffee with you was one of the most painful parts of this experience – because I’d been raised that the church is the first line of defense and that the church and their people are the people who should be the ones helping intervene in situations like this – the body of Christ should respond.
You never followed up – if you truly believed this – I should have been approached by James Lowe, Rice Broocks, etc – and if you didn’t – it never should have been said – because those aren’t words and phrases one just throws around.
I’ve left this email open ended. I’ve talked to most of the other people I need to talk to as I continue to develop my memoirs. But this was one of the hardest moments of the story and the ‘war orphan to adoptee to adoptive parent’ is the core narrative. But it wasn’t a painless one. This moment at the Starbucks with you was perhaps the most painful part of it.
I still attend and serve at Bethel World Outreach (now “Church”) and serve both here helping an organization rescue Ukrainian refugees abroad and locally serve the Hispanic Immigrant community in Nashville.
As with any memoirs it’s largely from my point of view as the disclaimer goes but re-processing this experience has been more painful than I thought it would be.
Ron Hall
We reached out to Bert Thomson and his church EveryNation GTA Toronto for comment but no one responded beyond verifying we had his correct email address.
