Pastor Who Abused People, Blames People
After Webworm's reporting in 2022, pastor John Cameron resigned. He says the problem was... the people.
Hi,
I spent about a year on Webworm reporting on an abusive megachurch called Arise, and it made me want to stab my eyes out with a fork.
I don’t regret that reporting in 2022 and 2023 — I am proud of it — but it made me angry.
Over three main stories (here, here, and here) Webworm outlined how pastor John Cameron ran Arise megachurch, the biggest megachurch in New Zealand.
We reported on emotional and physical abuse of interns and staff, and how sexual harassment was swept under the carpet.
Following our reporting, John Cameron and his brother Brent Cameron resigned.
After Webworm took a lot of legal advice (thanks, paying readers) we leaked the independent review the church was attempting to stall. It detailed the mostly horrible experience of 617 people who were interviewed for the review.
John and Brent never apologised, and the church put out a press release thanking them for “their incredible service and leadership of Arise Church for the past 20 years.”
Over that time, I heard from hundreds of people who suffered various forms of abuse at Arise church.
I heard from hundreds of others at similar Pentecostal and Evangelical Christian churches.
I could only report on a fraction of them.
Webworm readers responded with kindness and compassion to those coming forward with their stories (something the church was incapable of):
“I’m devastated that you were treated this way by someone who should have regarded your wellbeing as his utmost concern. You should have been safe in his presence but you were abused. I am so sorry this happened under the guise of doing “the Lord’s work”. God have mercy.”
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For a time, I kept tabs on John Cameron. Like all disgraced megachurch leaders, he was welcomed with open arms by other megachurch leaders.
He appeared in churches in Australia, and he appeared at churches in America.
Some of it Webworm reported on — including when John attempted a comeback in New Zealand, which saw a room of Christian leaders descending into unintelligible gibberish:
“Tongues are meant to be the language of angels. Either angels don’t know many words, or they repeat themselves often. People are saying the same phrases over and over again. Most of them sound like they’ve instructed an AI to invent a language that’s both utterly nonsensical and vaguely Arabic.”
But overall I just felt ill.
And I felt angry.
I’ve been known to hate-watch TV — you know, where you watch a show just so you can feel that emotion of “I hate this, this is shit. I am above this.”
Sometimes I hate-listen to a podcast.
I think we all do this sometimes — look at that person on Instagram we despise. It’s petty and it says more about us than them.
I wondered if I kept going back to see what John Cameron was up to just to make myself suffer.
Maybe that was part of it. That very human thing of “I’m a piece of shit, so let me feel like shit.”
Maybe.
I also think part of it was looking for an apology.
Any kind of apology to the hundreds of people he fucked over.
Because I was angry about that. I’m not sure that will ever leave me.
I am writing this on a Saturday night.
I was meant to be at a friend’s dinner, but then someone sent me an Instagram clip from a Christian podcaster. You can tell he’s a Christian podcaster because he looks like this:
It was a conversation with disgraced pastor John Cameron called “John Cameron On Ministry, Family + Revival”.
I was long — Joe Rogan long — but I sat down and I watched it. It was that hate-watch — but I was also looking for that apology.
Of course it never came.
I discovered what I already knew: Two years on, John Cameron hates the idea his victims had a voice.
“I think we are going to rue the day that we let the notion that people have been hurt by church be a valid reason for us to then pull the church down.”
Two years on from his abuse being reported on, he also takes the truly extraordinary step of blaming abuse on victims.
“Even those who are trying to say there are problems with the church — the way they are going about it is also causing a lot of pain.”
“At the end of the day the challenge we have is that the church is full of people.”
The problem John Cameron sees? People.
All the people, except one.
Him.
When I was a very Christian kid, there was this idea that you were only meant to feel positive emotions. Anything negative was meant to be pushed down, because it was bad.
It made you bad.
I was really good at doing that, and here in 2024 I’m still figuring out how to properly process the full spectrum of adult emotions — and feeling OK for doing so.
I realise it’s the suppression of emotions in many Christian circles that lets people like John Cameron function. It lets them do what they do without reproach.
I guess I’m saying that later in life, I’ve learnt that anger has its place.
David.
Remember David, you put all that anger to good use. You used your anger to spread sunshine on all the pain and suffering those people were feeling. You use your anger to expose the dreadful things they were doing, the harm they were causing.
You enable people to get out from underneath the control of that church .
By expressing your anger and keeping alive the memory of what happened and the story you brought out helps to prevent other people being sucked in to organisations that harm people.
Harnessing anger can do a lot of good . We appreciate you, David.
It’s the argument used by oppressors when we fight against racism and sexism too - ‘we won’t listen because you are too angry and you are not telling us nicely, so go away and do all this work to become superhuman at emotional control then come back and we might listen to your point (that we are sexist/racist/otherwise oppressing people). It makes me so angry I can’t contain myself.