Theory of Change
How this work produces safer churches — and real healing.
A theory of change states plainly how and why our work produces the outcomes we claim. Ours rests on one conviction and one institution.
What keeps children safe and helps survivors heal is not deeper feeling but better systems — prevention that can be taught, measured, and held to account.
The Black church — which we treat not as a venue where this work happens to occur, but as the mechanism through which it reaches Black families in ways nothing else can.
The claim rests on history, not sentiment.
The Black church is the oldest institution Black Americans built and governed for themselves — and again and again, it has converted moral authority into protection and deliverance for its people.
It existed first as the “invisible institution” — worship held in secret, often at the risk of punishment — where an enslaved people preserved their humanity and hope while the law defined them as property.1
It became the infrastructure of a freed people: the seedbed of schools, mutual-aid societies, banks, and the first Black colleges, when nearly every other institution was closed to them.2,3
They organized much of that work, building the missionary and reform movements that carried the community forward.4
It served as the literal headquarters — meeting hall, strategy room, and moral engine of the largest mass movement in modern American history.5
It remains among the most trusted and most attended institutions in Black life.6 No institution has more standing to protect Black children.
And that same authority is what makes it accountable. An institution trusted this deeply, with this much reach into family life, is precisely the one that must answer for the children harmed under its own roof — and for the theology that has, at times, been used to keep them silent.7
The history that makes the Black church powerful is the same history that makes its silence costly. Shield & Eden holds both: a tradition of refuge, and the unfinished work of extending that refuge to survivors of abuse in its own pews.
Common, not rare — and too often enabled by the very institution positioned to stop it.
Most abuse is never reported; most survivors delay disclosure for years, and male survivors disclose least of all, silenced by shame, homophobia, and the expectation of invulnerability.9,10 Background checks alone cannot keep children safe.
But the specific problem Shield & Eden exists to solve is sharper than prevalence. The institution with the deepest reach into Black family life has too often lacked the infrastructure — and at times the will — to protect the children inside it, while elements of its own theology have been turned into instruments of silence.7 Black survivors already face heightened barriers to disclosure and are less likely to be believed;12 Black male survivors carry the compounded weight of racism and rigid masculinity;13 and documented investigations show abuse concealed and moved quietly between congregations.14 And within the Black church specifically, rigorous data remains scarce — a gap our research arm exists to close.
Stated openly, because a theory of change should be testable.
- Prevention is teachable and measurable.
- Systems shift outcomes more reliably than sentiment.
- In the Black church, harmful theology must be dismantled, not bypassed.
- Survivor inclusion across all genders is non-negotiable.
- The church, properly equipped, will act on the protective tradition it already carries.
Inputs, activities, and the outputs we can count.
INPUTS
- Evidence-based research
- Lived experience
- Responsible theology
- The five-layer curriculum
- Trained facilitation — delivered through the church’s existing relationships and reach
ACTIVITIES
- Facilitated training across the four tracks
- Safeguarding-policy development
- Theological deconstruction
- Survivor healing resources
- Ongoing research
OUTPUTS
- Clergy, leaders & congregations trained
- Safeguarding policies adopted
- Modules delivered
- Survivors connected to resources
Each link in this chain runs through the church itself.
The church’s own messengers become capable.
Prevention works here because the church already possesses what secular programs spend millions trying to build: trusted messengers, regular gathering, intergenerational relationships, and shared moral language.6 When those messengers — clergy, lay leaders, ministry volunteers — are trained with an evidence-based program, their knowledge, attitudes, and preventive behaviors measurably improve;15 the only multi-site randomized trial of such training counted clergy explicitly among the professionals it equipped. Dissemination is, in turn, associated with increased recognition and reporting of suspected abuse.16 Equip the church’s messengers, and you reach families no school curriculum can.
The church builds infrastructure and dismantles what silenced children.
Safeguarding policies and protocols move a congregation from after-the-fact reaction toward prevention — the public-health posture the evidence favors over a purely criminal-justice one.17,18 But in the Black church, infrastructure alone will not hold: prevention that leaves the silencing theology intact will fail. The theological layer is therefore load-bearing, not decorative. Forgiveness misused as forced reconciliation, “touch not God’s anointed,” redemptive suffering that tells a child to endure — each must be dismantled before a culture of belief and accountability can take root.7
The church reclaims its identity as refuge.
Healing works here because, for Black survivors, faith community and religious coping are central to recovery19 — which means the very institution that failed a survivor is also where restoration is most possible, once it is made safe. Resourced for survivors of every gender20 and anchored in survivor-centered congregational response,21 the Black church reclaims what it has been since it met in secret: a sanctuary. Children are protected, survivors are believed, healing is possible, and accountability is non-negotiable — and the field gains community-specific evidence it did not have before.
Accountability is built, not wished for. Our research arm tracks whether each link in this chain actually holds, and we revise what the evidence does not support. The first link — equipping the church’s messengers to recognize and respond — is well established. The link from infrastructure to fewer abused children is supported more by public-health logic than by settled proof in congregational settings;17 rather than overclaim it, we name the gap and treat closing it as part of the work.
“Healing and accountability are not competing values — they are sacred partners in the pursuit of justice.”
ASHLEY COOK · FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE DIRECTORTheory of Change — references
- Raboteau, A. J. (1978). Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press (updated ed., 2004).
- Frazier, E. F. (1964). The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books.
- Lincoln, C. E., & Mamiya, L. H. (1990). The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Higginbotham, E. B. (1993). Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Morris, A. D. (1984). The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press.
- Pew Research Center (2021). Faith Among Black Americans.
- Douglas, K. B. (1999). Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. Orbis; West, T. C. (1999). Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics. NYU Press.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Child Sexual Abuse (US prevalence). cdc.gov.
- Darkness to Light. Child Sexual Abuse Statistics (disclosure and reporting). d2l.org.
- Easton, S. D., et al. (2014). Barriers to Disclosure of Child Sexual Abuse for Men. Psychology of Men & Masculinity.
- Snyder, H. N. (2000). Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement. U.S. DOJ, Bureau of Justice Statistics (NCJ 182990).
- Tillman, S., Bryant-Davis, T., Smith, K., & Marks, A. (2010). Shattering Silence. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 11(2), 59–70.
- Recovery Experiences from Childhood Sexual Abuse among Black Men. (2023). Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 32(1).
- Guidepost Solutions (2022), SBC Executive Committee investigation; Abuse of Faith (2019), Houston Chronicle / San Antonio Express-News.
- Rheingold, A. A., et al. (2015). Randomized controlled trial of Stewards of Children. Prevention Science, 16(3), 374–385.
- Letourneau, E. J., Nietert, P. J., & Rheingold, A. A. (2016). Stewards of Children effects on CSA reporting rates. Child Maltreatment.
- Finkelhor, D. (2009). The Prevention of Childhood Sexual Abuse. The Future of Children, 19(2), 169–194.
- Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse (E. Letourneau), Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
- Bryant-Davis, T., Ullman, S. E., Tsong, Y., & Gobin, R. (2011). Surviving the Storm: The role of social support and religious coping in sexual assault recovery of African American women. Violence Against Women, 17(12), 1601–1618.
- Gartner, R. B. (1999). Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men. Guilford Press.
- Coleman, M. A. (2004). The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence. Pilgrim Press.
Statistics are US-focused. “Black church” is used throughout; “African American” appears only inside cited source titles, reproduced as published.