Content Warning: The following article contains discussion of depression, suicide and sexual abuse.
After five years as an involved member and eventual staff intern for the Gracepoint Church on UC Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) campus, Jane Doe, a source who does not feel safe revealing her identity to individuals still associated with Gracepoint, faced a debilitating mental health crisis catalyzed by her involvement with the church. This mental health crisis caused Doe to suddenly move back home, where she entered intensive therapy for an eating disorder and later attempted to end her life.
“When I had my unsuccessful attempt, that’s when everything kind of came to light for me like, ‘Oh, I was spiritually abused,’” Doe said.
“I attribute my experience of suicidal ideation and my eventual failed attempt to my experience in Gracepoint, specifically the gaslighting I experienced and what I would call an intentional erosion of independent thinking and reasoning faculties,” Doe said in a statement to The Triton.
Gracepoint Church, founded in 2006, currently runs a variety of campus ministry groups across the University of California, including Klesis and Acts2Fellowship at UC San Diego. Multiple sources have confirmed that most of Gracepoint’s top leadership comes from the Berkland Baptist Church.
In recent years, former members and staff of campus ministry groups have spoken out about the trauma they experienced as members of Gracepoint on UC campus subreddits, including UCSD, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UC Davis.
“My time at Gracepoint ended with me feeling at the lowest point of my life,” reads a testimonial shared in April via r/UCSD. One individual, who writes under the pseudonym “John Kim,” started a blog in June 2010 detailing Gracepoint’s faults, and in recent months, former members have established a subreddit dedicated to discussing Gracepoint.
After Doe and her significant other crossed physical boundaries, church leadership placed Doe on a “repentance process” and revoked her staff post.
Doe stated that during the repentance process, the church leadership’s repeated statements about her character eventually made her question her reality. These included statements like “You are a hopeless, morally bankrupt sinner, and nothing good can come from you.”
“It took me a year of therapy and an unsuccessful suicide attempt to start dismantling those things that I was told about myself,” Doe said.
Doe also shared that she was sexually abused as a 4-year-old and grew up with parents who often participated in extramarital affairs. “I was told that in order to accept the truth about myself … I need to accept that I committed the same sins as my abuser and as my parents and that it would be extremely sinful and arrogant of me to think that I’m any different,” Doe said.
Doe initially planned on returning to Gracepoint, until she realized it was no longer a safe place for her.
Allegations of abuse within campus ministry groups run by Gracepoint and its predecessor Berkland Baptist Church date back at least two decades.
UC Davis alumnus Sam C. (‘05), who asked to be identified by his first name and last initial due to the sensitive subject matter, recalled a similar struggle with his mental health after getting involved with the Asian Baptist Student Koinonia (ABSK), a Berkland-run campus ministry group. Sam C. participated in ABSK from 1999 to 2003, eventually taking on a leadership role within the group.
Sam C., who has since been diagnosed with depression, said, “It’s something that I still work on, you know, 18 years later. And it’s something that affects my marriage, affects my kids, and the reality is you know the source of it and when it started was 2003.”
According to Sam C., the church’s impact on his academic standing and mental health took a turn for the worse during his fifth year. After sharing with church leadership that he was put on academic probation, Sam C. was later summoned to meet with the pastor and his wife at their house in Davis, a meeting which he described to The Triton as a “traumatic experience.”
According to Sam C, the couple scolded him for 20 to 30 minutes, “and it brought me to tears, as if my parents were scolding me as a five or six year old.”
“I had seen it…a couple years before, when other students had trouble academically and seeing what standard practice was when the church is trying to help the students get their academics and I knew it was going to be [a] suffocating environment,” Sam C. said.
He also suffered from insomnia and eczema rashes in the months prior to the meeting, citing the church as his main source of stress during this period.
Just a handful of credits short of earning his degree, Sam C. took a leave of absence from UC Davis, eventually completing his bachelor’s degree via extension classes at Cal State East Bay and UC Berkeley in 2005. Sam C. told The Triton he wished to avoid seeing Gracepoint personnel on campus.
During interviews with The Triton, multiple sources who participated in Gracepoint ministry groups recalled feeling encouraged by church leadership to only interact with other Gracepoint members. One source who attended Gracepoint during their time at UCSD asserted this resulted in a Gracepoint “social bubble” that made it difficult to interact with others outside of that “bubble.”
Julia Smith, who remained anonymous due to fear of retaliation, attended Gracepoint at UCSD from 2013 to 2017 and attributed her hesitation to leave the church to her fear of losing the community.
“Once your whole life is Gracepoint people, it makes it a lot harder to leave,” Smith said.
Smith also noted this pressure to remain in the Gracepoint community also affected students’ relationships with their families.
Trena Hendrickson, whose son started attending Gracepoint’s UCLA chapter in 2016 as a freshman, echoed Smith’s sentiment and told The Triton that her son came home less often due to his involvement in Gracepoint. According to Hendrickson, that was when her relationship with her son began deteriorating.
“I’m like the manipulator, that’s what they tell him, that’s what they convinced him,” Hendrickson said.
Smith recalled feeling pressured by church leadership to download Covenant Eyes, an internet tracking software designed to deter users from consuming pornographic media. According to Smith, church leadership would receive a regular report of which websites she visited and the duration of her internet usage.
Smith also recalled getting reprimanded for using YouTube to listen to secular music, including Taylor Swift, and for watching a Japanese anime film that was part of her coursework for a film class. “After installing that, I was so scared so I stopped using Facebook or even YouTube or things like that,” Smith said.
An anonymous source, who first encountered Gracepoint Church on UC Berkeley’s campus, attended throughout their time as a undergrad and continued participating in church activities after graduation, noted that within Gracepoint, church leadership encourage LGBTQ+ members of their congregation to implement “guardrails.”
The source defined guardrails as “something that was very prominent at various points in terms of how a person should make decisions and behave, particularly in opposite gender relationships.”
The source, who disclosed their bisexual orientation to church leadership, was advised not to be alone in a car or have a roommate of the same gender.
“There’s this kind of encouragement to keep up this facade because at the same time you weren’t supposed to just be openly out as being bi or whatnot. This was like a secret thing and perceived as shameful,” the source said.
In April 2021, Gracepoint published a now private YouTube video of Ed Kang, the senior pastor of Gracepoint Church. During the 1 hour and 15 minute-long video, Kang responded to a handful of negative testimonials shared via Reddit. “I’ve learned to just be grateful over the chastising we get even though the form and the content may be exaggerated or straight up not true,” Kang said.
Gracepoint personnel did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Triton and declined to comment when approached in person.
On March 12, 2017, UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla received an email from a concerned community member about Gracepoint’s presence on UCSD’s campus and classified the church as a “cult.”
“Many of its members have to seek psychiatric treatment at the UC Hospitals after going to this cult and joining their ‘core’ group,” the email read.
According to internal emails obtained by The Triton, Center for Student Involvement (CSI) Executive Director Emily Trask “followed up individually with the president and did a check-in with the group” and the CSI “sent educational information to all student organization principal members about high pressure groups via the student organization listserv.”
In response to an email inquiry from The Triton, UCSD’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) said they were “not aware of any allegations involving Gracepoint Church.”
Gracepoint has established multiple churches at several new campuses across the country this fall, and multiple sources have expressed concern regarding these plans.
“I don’t see reconciliation efforts made on their side. Besides, hearing out my story and telling me I’m sorry you were hurt, but I don’t think they realize that they almost had blood on their hands,” Doe told The Triton.
Sarah Naughten is an Assistant News Editor for The Triton.