Nebraska Synod ELCA

When Vicar Kim Bate logged onto a video call to talk about the ELCA’s new Social Message on Child Protection, he admitted he felt “like a little boy waiting for Christmas.”

“I’ve been waiting for this all my life,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this moment to stand up for God, and stand up against the people who’ve hurt children.”

Kim is a TEEM student in his internship year, serving as vicar at Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church in Palmyra, Nebraska. He’ll graduate from Wartburg Theological Seminary in May and, God willing, be ordained soon after. His path to this call has been long and winding, through deep personal trauma, serious illness, and decades of lay ministry.

And at this point in his journey, Kim calls the ELCA’s Social Message on Child Protection “the greatest gift I’ve ever received in my life.”

“For the first time, I felt heard by the church and my pain is recognized,” he says. “There has to be somebody else in our world who will feel the healing and the cleansing and the freedom that I feel in this statement.”

“We were told we were chosen”

Kim grew up one of six children, four brothers and a sister, whose lives were marked by abuse both at home and in the church.

“We were all abused in the church itself and at home,” he shares. “Our parents knew. My dad was involved. My mom was complacent.”

Those who hurt them wrapped that harm in religious language.

“It was all done under the guise that we were chosen,” Kim says. “We were told God had given these people permission to do this to us. And we were charged with not telling, not talking, not saying anything, because it would hurt the church. It would hurt our relationship with God. God would be mad at us.”

The message to the children was clear: this is holy, this is God’s will, and you must protect the church by keeping silent.

“What that results in, at the very least, is confusion in the heart of a person who’s trying to know God and understand Jesus Christ,” Kim says.

The cost to his siblings was devastating.

“My brothers and my sister struggled with their faith all their lives,” he says. “Two of them committed suicide. All of them struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. My sister got clean and lived sober for a long time, 25 years, but still mad. I was called so many times to intervene and help. You can’t take a broken heart like they had and put it back together.”

Now that all of his brothers and sister are gone, Kim says, “I don’t have to be the gatekeeper of the secrets anymore. I don’t have to be the guardian. That was the weight that was put on us.”

What he wants survivors to hear first is simple and urgent: “God did not hurt you. The church harmed you. That was never God.”

“A soldier for Christ” on a broken-looking path

Given what he lived through, even Kim sees that his story might be surprising.

“Often, my siblings’ stories are easier to understand than mine,” he says. “Their pathway to suicide, to despair, to hating the church…that’s easier to understand than how you go from what I experienced to where I am now. It’s nothing short of a miracle.”

Kim traces his call back to his grandmother’s living room, listening to Billy Graham on television in 1964.

“I was eight years old,” he remembers. “And I said, okay, there’s got to be something more than me. I don’t know how I got here, but I know there’s something more than me. So that must be God. And I’m okay being a soldier for God. I’m okay being a servant for Christ.”

“All my life, from the time I was eight years on, I have been a minister,” he says. “It’s never stopped. It’s never slowed down. It’s just changed. My nickname in college was ‘Reverend Kim.’ And I liked that.”

Kim’s church journey has moved across traditions. His mother was Catholic; his father was Mennonite.

“I left the Mennonite church and found peace in a Baptist church,” he says with a small smile. “Now I’m Lutheran.”

Later in life, another turning point came in the form of a frightening diagnosis.

In a short span of time, Kim lost his sister and his twin brother to pancreatic cancer. Then he was diagnosed with the same disease in 2018.

“Cancer was a gift to me,” he says, without hesitation. “That’s a big statement, but it’s true. It caused me to stop and slow down. I was self‑employed, working 70 hours a week. I got my butt kicked by cancer and chemo. And in that butt kicking, I was given an opportunity to take advantage of the pause in my life and go back to school.”

He entered Wartburg, completed 17 classes in three years, served in small congregations, and eventually entered the TEEM program.

“When I got into Wartburg, I was like a kid in a candy store,” he says. “I had a lot of questions. I wanted to really focus my theology, to get a grasp on it, and compare that with Lutheran theology.”

Looking back now, he reflects:

“There have been times in my life where I’ve looked back and thought, ‘My God, what a broken path. How the hell did I get here? What a broken path.’ But when you look at it clearly, you see a straight line. This has just been a straight line all my life that has brought us to this place.”

“Extra, extra: Church confesses wrong‑doing”

That “place” includes a surprising assignment in a Wartburg classroom.

One of Kim’s professors, Dr. Craig Nessan, is among the advisors of the ELCA’s Social Message on Child Protection. Knowing Kim’s story and how important this work was to him, Nessan sent him a draft of the message when it was still in its public review phase.

At the same time, Kim’s class received an assignment: choose one of the ELCA’s social statements and prepare a presentation.

“This one wasn’t a social statement at the time,” Kim remembers. “But I asked him for permission to present on it anyway. I read through it, and it was different in the copy I saw because it wasn’t the polished final draft, so there was some supporting information. Some of the background for what they were saying.”

“It took me three days just to stop being overwhelmed by that,” he says quietly.

Nessan said yes. Kim became one of the first people to present on the draft Social Message in a classroom setting. Afterward, Nessan pulled him aside:

“He said, ‘You need to be a public speaker, and you need to present on this statement,’” Kim recalls. “I thought, who am I that the author of this social message would allow me to present it? Really? Are you kidding me?”

The Social Message, adopted by the ELCA Church Council in November 2025, does several crucial things at once. It:

• Names the many forms of child maltreatment, including sexual, physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse, as well as neglect and online exploitation.
• Confesses ways the church has been complacent or complicit, allowing abusers access to children, minimizing reports, misusing Scripture, and prioritizing institutional reputation over children’s safety.
• Offers a Lutheran theology that sees children as full neighbors, image‑bearers, and gifts, not property or miniature adults.
• Calls every congregation and ministry to specific practices to protect children and accompany survivors.

Kim hears those moves as nothing less than a long‑awaited confession.

“It is so important. It’s so necessary. It’s so long overdue,” he says. “It’s not an apology, but it’s a confession. The church confesses on five counts. That’s five different ways they allowed kids to get hurt and kept letting it happen when they knew somebody had hurt them.”

“You are not alone”

When asked if the Social Message has helped him heal, Kim doesn’t hesitate.

“Oh my God,” he says. “In overwhelming ways.”

“All my life I’ve told my family, my friends, anybody who would listen, that the church had screwed up. They needed to own up to it. And in those mistakes that were allowed to continue, now we’ve allowed the degradation of the church to get to a point where people are panicked that nobody’s in church anymore.”

He also points to one line that has particular power for survivors: the statement that forgiveness is not a condition for their healing or for God’s love.

“In one sentence, in one line, it tells the victims that you don’t have to forgive,” he says. “It’s not needed. It’s not necessary. And it admits that the church has put this burden on these victims, saying ‘‘you’re not a good Christian if you don’t forgive.’ That’s just one part of the healing that’s in this statement. People need to hear that. Pastors and leaders in the church need to teach that.”

When Kim imagines someone hurt by the church reading his story or the Social Message, he knows exactly what he hopes they hear:

“You are not alone.

Victims of abuse are held captive to the truth: ‘I can’t share it, I can’t talk about it.’ And it leads to incredibly ugly places in their lives. The ugliest place is loneliness, separation even from God.

Damn it, you are not alone. It’s not your fault. You don’t have to forgive. The church harmed you.

This statement can be an invitation to the broken heart to know that God is still with them. They’re not dirty.”

What he most wants the church to “get right” as we share this story is simple and profound:

“People need to know that God did not hurt them,” he says. “That’s the one thing I tried to teach my siblings all their lives. It’s just not God. This statement is God’s way of saying: put the onus where it needs to be. The onus is on the church. It’s not on God.”

A seed the church must plant

Kim is clear that the Social Message cannot simply be adopted, filed, and forgotten.

He’s watched other social statements create a spark and then fade.

“I had to ask myself: is what I’m feeling now what the authors and early readers of those other statements felt?” he says. “If so, what happened to that fire? They flash in a pan and they’re gone. This one can’t. This one just can’t.”

“The hope of our church lies in healing,” he continues. “Healing offered to the victim by the one who hurt. It’s a really, really difficult thing for the victim to accept. But somehow this statement gets past that. The only way I know that is because of the Spirit that’s moved in me.”

He imagines the Social Message being shared in a congregation, preached on, taught, presented not just as a dry policy document but as a living word of confession and hope. Somewhere in the pews, a survivor hears it.

“Somebody in that congregation will say, maybe not out loud, ‘Oh my God, this is for me. I hear you again, God. I hear you talking to me. And I know I can talk to you.’”

“Think about the opportunity that congregation has then,” Kim says. “Think about the opportunity that the pastor has to pick it up from there, to spread the joy that one person, or maybe more than one, felt in the healing that comes from this statement. It opens the doors for so much activity in our church. It just can’t be something where we say, ‘Okay, that’s done. Let’s move on.’”

“We have a seed that we can plant,” he says. “The seed comes from a confession. We don’t have an apology in this statement, but God knows we have a confession. So let’s plant that seed and see what happens. If we keep planting that seed, somewhere, a heart will grow again. A dead heart can come to life again. It’s the power of this statement.”

For Kim, that seed has already begun to bear fruit. It has named his pain, honored his siblings’ stories, and given him a new way to stand “as a more visible witness for Christ” on behalf of the most vulnerable.

“I am blessed beyond measure,” he says. “To be at this place in my life makes me know for sure that God has given me an opportunity to be very, very active in my faith. How that plays out, I’m not sure. How I hope it plays out is being very involved in this statement. I will work tirelessly on this. I don’t want it to be something that just comes and goes.”

“Somewhere, another little boy’s heart will be healed by this statement,” he says. “And that’s worth everything.”

Read the full Social Statement Here