Note: This is the fourth article in a multipart series. Read Part 1, which details how Anne Edward came to the Lord and found freedom from same-sex attraction. In Part 2, Edward and John Paulk marry and the couple become poster children for ministries seeking to help people dealing with same-sex attraction. In Part 3, scandal rocked their marriage, and Paulk left his job at Focus on the Family to move back to Oregon.

When Alan Chambers was elected as the new executive director of Exodus International in October 2001, it was still the nation’s largest ministry to people seeking to leave homosexuality behind. Anne Edward wasn’t yet on the board, but members asked her to join the hiring committee. She interviewed candidates, including Chambers, reported to the board, and watched them deliberate, but she wasn’t involved in making the decision.

Then, a few days after Chambers was hired, she was officially elected onto the board along with a few other people. Edward then noticed something unsettling about Chambers in light of his interview:

He was the only candidate who was on the Exodus board when he applied to be executive director. That meant he also was the only candidate who knew the board was using one question as a litmus test: whether he or she would keep the ministry’s headquarters in Seattle. But the interviewers didn’t tell the candidates that part; the board wanted to see what the candidates would say without the pressure of knowing the requirement.

There were many qualified candidates, older and more experienced than Chambers, but they all said they would move the headquarters to wherever in the country they lived. Chambers was the only candidate who said he’d keep Exodus in Seattle. As a result, he was the only applicant the board really considered.

But when he got the job, one of the first things Chambers did was make a motion to move the Exodus headquarters to Orlando, Florida, where he lived. And the board, which had so recently been turned over, accepted that motion. Only Edward opposed it, because it contradicted what the previous board had stated was a requirement.

Edward also thought the board should reconsider the candidates they’d passed over, given that the secret requirement was no longer being treated as important. She openly voiced her concerns to the board in front of Chambers. But the new board, which had only four holdovers, accepted Chambers’s request to move the headquarters and rejected Edward’s request to reconsider other candidates.

“Nobody else backed me up,” Edward says.

More Concerns Come to Light

Edward was upset, and spoke about the issue several times. She had already noticed another troubling matter.

The organization’s bylaws had been changed just before Edward’s term began, so she had read them carefully. They had been greatly strengthened, but one weakness evident to Edward was that any changes now needed only a simple majority vote from a board quorum. “So anything could be changed — anything at all — if you had the right composition of board members at one meeting who were willing to go with whatever [Chambers] suggested,” Edward says.” And that was problematic to me.”

Then other people began approaching her with concerns about Chambers.

One had been a board member of Eleutheros, a ministry in Orlando (now Exchange Ministries) where Chambers had previously served as director. That person said that when they had disagreed with Chambers, he had ensured they were removed from the board, Edward told The Stream. (The Stream was unable to independently verify this information.)

“He didn’t do well with somebody who disagreed with him, even though they were the authority and he was not,” Edward said. “That came out in the interview process, too.” But “somehow the problem did not hold significant weight for the Exodus board. They didn’t pay attention.”

Edward Moves On

With three young sons now at home, Edward stepped off the board two years into her three-year term to care for her family, around the time she and John moved the family back to Oregon. For those two years, she’d been “the sore thumb,” she says — she stood out as the person who pointed out problems.

“I was glad to leave,” she says now. “I didn’t want to pay attention to Exodus after I left.”

In her parting letter to the board, Edward warned that Chambers might try to consolidate power to himself. Her warning proved true.

“After five years or so, it happened,” she said. “All he needed was a simple majority of the current board to vote that structure in. And then, he had his pastor, his pastor’s wife, and a few other people on that board.”

Member Ministries Lose Power

Melissa Ingraham, who was chairman of the Exodus board from 2005 to 2009, told The Stream she witnessed a move toward appointing, rather than electing, board members. At the time, she thought this was a good idea, as involvement from member ministry leaders was waning. Why? Because anytime someone disagreed with Chambers, she said, “there were fireworks.”

“They could see it was his way or the highway,” she said.

Ingraham, a licensed professional counselor in Arizona, told The Stream, “As a clinician, my professional opinion is that Alan had narcissistic tendencies and his leadership style alienated much of the membership. That’s why we got where he was able to then basically run things on his own. The membership, which is the lifeblood, stopped engaging.”

Edward recalls the members being active during her years on the board, preceding Ingraham’s tenure. Previously, leaders of Exodus’s member ministries annually voted in representatives from among themselves as new board members. The candidates had to appear at a member ministry meeting, take questions, and respond to the concerns of the member ministry leaders prior to the vote. 

Jeff Buchanan was executive vice president of Exodus from 2011 to 2012, shortly before the organization crumbled. Before that he was on staff as the senior director of Exodus’s church association for two years, as well as a leader of a member ministry in Nashville for five years. Buchanan told The Stream that after 2009, Chambers could appoint people who weren’t part of Exodus member ministries to the board, leaving only two board positions for member ministry leaders. And rather than member ministries nominating and electing the candidates for those two remaining positions, those board members were also personally chosen by Chambers.

Tax filings from 2010 through 2012 show that if member ministries disagreed with Chambers’s choices, it took a two-thirds majority vote to block their appointment. Edward called that “a huge change” and “a high bar to jump over.” There’s no mention in the tax filings of board candidates being subjected to interviews with member ministry leaders before a vote. Buchanan affirmed that’s because the board members were appointed by Chambers.

“The members were simply informed and persuaded that they no longer should have the right to elect board members,” Edward said. After that, she added, the members had “no more [ability] … to hold him accountable for anything he did.”

Stay-at-Home Mom Concerns Herself with Exodus Again

After leaving Exodus, Edward sought to focus on her own life. But several years later, people in ministries related to Exodus began to find her number — “somehow” she says — and alert her to their concerns.

“People came out of the woodwork as I was a stay-at-home mom, homeschooling my kids, paying attention to my own family, to say, ‘Anne, did you know what Alan did?’”

As an exhausted mother, Edward’s response was, I’m not trying to do ministry right now at all. I don’t even have time for this. I just want to take a nap. Edward asked the callers why they weren’t dealing with their concerns amongst themselves, or taking them to the board.

The responses were, “He’s hostile. He won’t listen to us. The board doesn’t care.” Edward learned that member ministry leaders who had gone to an Exodus leadership event had been asked to sign nondisclosure agreements.

“That was the first time ever [that happened],” Edward says. “So they couldn’t even talk to me about it — but they were talking to me about it.”

Though Edward didn’t want to be involved, the fact that she had previously recognized red flags, had nothing to lose, and hadn’t signed an NDA was giving her a position of influence.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this. I’m not afraid of Alan Chambers, and everybody else seemed to be because he was intimidating them,” she says. “But I didn’t care. I’m a stay-at-home mom. He can’t fire me! I just want him to answer what the truth is.’”

By that point, Chambers had made several public statements that Edward and others found deeply disturbing — even contrary to Scripture. During a 2007 appearance on Anderson Cooper 360, Chambers said, “I think there are plenty of gay people out there who are Christians as well, but for me homosexuality wasn’t compatible with my faith.” And in 2011, he told Our America’s Lisa Ling, “I do believe [people living an active gay life] will be in Heaven with me … if they have a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

After Paulk left Focus on the Family, Exodus took over running the Love Won Out conferences. Edward was invited to become a speaker there again. She accepted, and during one event, she spoke with Chambers privately, asking if he had fumbled his answers to Lisa Ling on homosexuality and Heaven. “He said, ‘Yeah,’” Edward recalls.

But he continued to make concerning statements.

In January 2012, Chambers took part in a panel discussion at the annual Gay Christian Network conference, where he again said homosexually active believers would be in Heaven. He also apologized to the attendees, saying he regretted saying that “change is possible” — in short, repudiating the entire mission of Exodus International.

“We’re not using ‘change’ as a slogan anymore,” he said. “I’m very, very clear to say, we used ‘Change Is Possible’ for so many years, and it was used on me, and we used it, and the people who used it wanted it to mean something more than it did … but we don’t use that phrase anymore.

“I am sorry that that is something we used,” he said when a panelist asked if Exodus had apologized for using the phrase over a 30-year period. “This is something we regret very much being ambiguous about, because I don’t think ambiguity with this subject is helpful, so that is something that we’re very, very sorry about.”

While Edward speaks of experiencing “degrees of change” over time (now being attracted to men, and no longer being controlled by homosexual desires), Chambers was far less clear — or hopeful — in his statements.

“I would say the majority, meaning 99.9 percent of [people seeking to leave homosexuality], have not experienced a change in their orientation, or have gotten to a place where they could say that they could never be tempted, or are not tempted in some way or experience some level of same-sex attraction,” Chambers said.

Five months later, Chambers said similar things when The Atlantic asked if a person living a gay lifestyle would go to Hell: “My personal belief is that … while behavior matters, those things don’t interrupt someone’s relationship with Christ.”

On July 6, 2012, The New York Times reported that Chambers

said Exodus could no longer condone reparative therapy, which blames homosexuality on emotional scars in childhood and claims to reshape the psyche. And in a theological departure that has caused the sharpest reaction from conservative pastors, Mr. Chambers said he believed that those who persist in homosexual behavior could still be saved by Christ and go to heaven.

In response, with the editing help of two trusted colleagues, Edward wrote to Chambers and the Exodus board in March 2012. She knew she had no choice but to address the direction Chambers was leading the organization. She urged the board to fire him over his public statements, and suggested giving him a generous severance package, then bring in founding members of Exodus to right the ship, create a new board, and hire a new executive director.

When the board responded, they said they would stick with Chambers because they thought he was going in the right direction.

But the new direction wouldn’t last.

Within a year, Chambers realized his new vision for Exodus had no actual purpose, and he shuttered the organization. A press release at that time read: “Exodus International, a group that billed itself as ‘the oldest and largest Christian ministry dealing with faith and homosexuality,’ announced June 19, 2013 that it was shutting its doors.”

Look for Part 5 of this series tomorrow.

 

Aliya Kuykendall is a staff writer and proofreader for The Stream. You can follow her on X @AliyaKuykendall and follow The Stream @Streamdotorg.

 

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly started the amount of time it took the board to respond to Edwards’s letter. The Stream regrets the error.