On the surface, a Newark, Ohio, church of about 200 shows no signs of the public scandal that blew a prior congregation apart eight years ago.

This summer, the youth group of Redemption Church, 40 miles east of Columbus, went to camp. The men had a barbecue. The women took a trip to Amish country. And Pastor John Schouten, 67, preached about community, standing in a Christian school gym where the church meets in one of the fastest growing regions of the country.

But Schouten’s career appeared to be over in 2018, when he was a 59-year-old megachurch pastor. Accusations of grooming and impregnating a teen decades earlier, when he was a teacher, surfaced in the wake of the 2017 #metoo movement. The scandal forced his resignation from Vineyard Grace Fellowship in Heath, Ohio.

But Schouten barely missed a beat. Almost immediately, he started a congregation that would become Redemption Church just four miles up the road in downtown Newark.

Years passed. Then on Sept. 2, Newark Crimestoppers made a Facebook post reminding locals of Schouten’s past.

“Would you want your child in this church?” it asked. The post has been shared more than 400 times and has more than 750 comments.

And now Schouten has made the list of thousands of church leaders accused of abuse in the newly published Protestant Accountability website. Clergy abuse survivor Chellee Taylor leads the nonprofit that manages the project.

“Our main goal, first and foremost, is to protect others from the harm that we’ve already endured,” Taylor told Roys Report (RR).

Also this week, Redemption Church seems to have shown signs it is aware of the scandal. A month ago, Schouten and his elders were listed on a “Leaders” page on Redemption Church’s website, smiling, arms wrapped around each other.

Website visitors who look for that page now find it has been deleted.

The congregation did not respond to an RR emailed request for comment. Neither did Granville Christian Academy, which allows Redemption Church to use its gym for Sunday services.

The 2018 accusation of sexual abuse

Until summer 2018, all seemed well with Vineyard Grace Fellowship (VGF), which Schouten founded in 1999. It was part of the nationwide Vineyard Association until 2017, when the church left, Vineyard USA confirmed to RR.

Then church leaders got a tip from a student in Schouten’s distant past, the Newark Advocate reported at the time. This student accused Schouten of sexually abusing a fellow teenager in the 1980s, when Schouten was her teacher at Liberty Christian Academy in Columbus.

By 1989, Schouten had gotten the teen pregnant, around the same time his own wife was pregnant, the Christian Post reported years later. The Wartburg Watch identified Schouten’s brother-in-law, David McIlrath, as the school principal.

It would be nearly 30 years before the teen would tell her own story. The alleged victim was Jodi Garwick. In 2019 she posted about Schouten’s grooming, abuse, threats and manipulation on “Something’s Not Right,” a website of author Wade Mullen.

Garwick, now married and known as Jodi Priest, described Schouten as a likable Bible teacher at Liberty Christian Academy who led prayer and theological discussions with students. While he was sexually abusing her in high school, he conditioned her to believe they were in love, and he threatened her so she’d stay silent. During her senior year, McIlrath found out about the abuse. He fired Schouten and expelled the girl, but he didn’t report the matter to police, the Advocate reported.

The following year, Priest said, Schouten continued his sexual abuse. Eventually she became pregnant when she was 19. He asked her to get an abortion, she said, but she refused and bore a son in January 1990.

By 2019, when she finally realized she had been groomed and sexually abused and got the courage to report what had happened to her, it was too late to press charges. The Ohio statute of limitations on child sexual abuse had run out for her at the age of 38.

The Bible study

The person who tipped off the VGF elders to Schouten’s actions was a former classmate of Priest’s who threatened to go to the media unless something was done about the pastor. A church council member contacted Priest about her abuser.

“It had been 30 years since I graduated,” Priest later wrote. “My son was 28 years old. Why was someone wanting to talk to me now? …

“There had never been any tangible consequences for his illegal and devastating actions, so it was both comforting and scary that the truth would finally be exposed!”

In July 2018, Schouten confessed to his VGF congregation that what he did was “horrible, disgusting, evil and abusive,” the Newark Advocate reported. Despite some sentiment that the pastor should be allowed to stay on, church leaders decided Schouten must leave.

In early November, just weeks after he resigned from VGF, Schouten started a Friday night Bible study. Almost one-third of the 1,500 members from his old congregation left with him, according to sermons from that time. They eventually relocated as Redemption Church to Newark’s historic downtown Skylight building, a fact the Newark Advocate and the Wartburg Watch briefly mentioned.

Those who joined Schouten were accused of following a “personality cult,” admitted Paul Latiolais, who preached for Schouten’s Bible study on Dec. 1, 2018. But Latiolais described it in milder terms on that chilly Ohio December day. He called the church’s disagreement over whether Schouten should keep pastoring a “disputable matter” with people “falling on either side.”

“If it was cut and dry, there wouldn’t be 400 people here the first night we met in this building,” Latiolais said then.

Latiolais fell on Schouten’s side and stayed there. He’s a current elder at Schouten’s latest church.

In December 2018, Schouten seemed to face what had happened head on in his newly named Redemption Church. He named his first sermon series, “Things that I’ve learned this summer.”

“Thirty years ago, I was having sex with an 18-year-old who was going to become pregnant,” Schouten said in a Dec. 14, 2018, service. “And God in his eternal throne saw that and my redemption at the same time.”

He implied he hadn’t been a Christian at that time.

“Through that filth God was not despising, God was not condemning,” Schouten said. “He’d already determined for me to come to know him as a son.”

“Yes!” the congregation can be heard shouting and clapping on the recording.

Except the woman wasn’t 18 when the abuse started. She told the Newark Advocate that Schouten first kissed her when she was 13 and started sexually abusing her when she was 14.

Also, about him claiming he wasn’t a Christian back then? Schouten was her Bible teacher.

‘Unfaithful’ and unsaved?

In 2016, before his sexual misconduct became known, Schouten and his wife, Marilyn, shared their testimony with the Newark Advocate.

“Married for 35 years, they often counsel couples getting ready to take their own vows on the importance of faith in their relationship,” the article stated.

As for the first 12 years of their marriage, which began in 1981, Schouten told the newspaper he wasn’t a Christian.

Although the Advocate said Schouten had abused drugs, lied, and been “unfaithful,” the piece didn’t include details on his adultery.

Years before the interview took place, Marilyn gave her husband an ultimatum: change, or she’d leave him. The 2016 article said he was uncomfortable with religion, but he finally started reading a Bible that she bought him.

“When you are not raised in it, reading the Bible, the concept of worship, singing and praying is foreign,” he told the Advocate.

In 1995, he committed his life to the Lord at a Promise Keepers event, he told the Advocate. He graduated from Vineyard Leadership Institute in 1999 and then started VGF.

That was the narrative that church leaders followed during the 2018 scandal.

“The incident in question happened well before John Schouten was a Christian,” VGF spokesman Mark Weaver told the Christian Post. “He was married, but he had not come to Christ. He came to Christ several years later. And of course he became a pastor several years after that. He’s nearly 60.”

But Schouten and his wife met at Asbury College, according to the Advocate. Asbury, located in central Kentucky, is a Christian college from the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, with a decades-long history of revivals. Records from the alumni magazine Ambassador show students have long had to agree to a moral code and attend chapel services.

A lengthy 2019 post in the Wartburg Watch by someone who was one of Schouten’s students at Liberty in the 1980s also contests the idea that he was not a believer.

“He led in-depth biblical discussions about the charismatic gifts, grace, mercy, and many other doctrinal issues,” the student wrote. “He would ask thought-provoking questions about God and speak with such authority that made so much sense.”

‘As time passes’

In 2019, VGF got a new pastor and changed its name to Cornerstone Church. In March 2019, the Ohio Department of Education permanently revoked Schouten’s teaching license.

If Schouten’s Redemption Church is typical of American churches, most of its congregants don’t know about Schouten’s past. (On average, 38% of American church attendees started attending their current church within the last five years, according to a 2025 study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.)

“Most of the time congregants walk into a church and they assume … this is safe, these are people of God speaking for God for my good, and they intrinsically trust,” Protestant Accountability President Chellee Taylor told RR. “It is so rare for offenders to have only one victim.”

Vineyard, which no longer credentials Schouten, has no governing role in any discipline.

Lack of denominational credentialing doesn’t stop many abusive American Protestant pastors from switching denominations, which makes them hard to trace, Taylor told RR.  And if pastors instead decide to start a new nondenominational church, they may escape a background check altogether.

Priest declined an interview with RR. But she explained in her blog post why she stayed silent for so long. “I was afraid if I spoke up about the truth of his past, people would tell me that it didn’t matter. That I didn’t matter.”

The Crimestoppers’ post from last week shows that for some, this information is new and shocking.

“NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” a commenter named Jennifer Chisholm posted.

But the post’s commenters also show the ongoing division in this community on whether Schouten is qualified to pastor.

Latiolais, the current elder who stayed with Schouten from VGF, still maintains that Schouten wasn’t a Christian 30-plus years ago and is now transformed.

“Working in a Christian school and professing to be a Christian does not equal being washed, sanctified and justified,” he wrote as a comment on the Crimestoppers post.  “If this sin would have taken place after being a real believer, then I agree. That would have disqualified him from the ministry.” 

In contrast, commenter Evelyn Hahn-Mellars thanked Crimestoppers for re-exposing Schouten.

“As time passes, most is forgotten or unknown,” she wrote. “I pray he hasn’t and never has the opportunity to do this again. Unfortunately, this type of person has a deeply imbedded fault in his ‘wiring.’”

Still others —  such as former VGF member Brook Green Baker — believe Priest’s story still matters.

Baker wrote, “She is brave and truly a beautiful spirit.”

Rebecca Hopkins is a journalist based in Colorado.