How to Welcome Back the Whistleblower
Last month, Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) sent my husband and me an email inviting us to its headquarters in Idaho for a special event.
“MAF 80th Anniversary Celebration and open house,” the email stated. “Come and go as you wish.”
For the six years since we left MAF and Indonesia as a result of our whistleblowing efforts, I’ve longed for an invitation like this. So, for a moment, I allowed myself to dream of what this could be. We could get reconnected to an organization where we worked and to which we donated regularly for 14 years. It wasn’t just any job. We lived together with our young families on remote Indonesian islands on the other side of the world from all that is familiar serving with sacrifice in the adventure of a lifetime.
When we joined MAF in 2004, we became family. Our MAF team got together for sweaty tropical Christmases and Easters and Thanksgivings. When my babies were born, they slept in a hand-me-down crib that our boss had used for his own kids. Our teammates were each other’s powers of attorney for our kids in case we got kidnapped or killed. Our kids called our co-workers and leaders “aunt” and “uncle” before they met their own blood relatives.
More than that, especially due to the dangerous bush aviation aspect part of the job, we sometimes depended on each other for the safety of our own lives. And when my 3-year-old was in critical condition in the hospital, our MAF teammates took my other two kids into their homes so my husband and I could care for our baby. Bonds were forged in both shared mission and trauma.
But when we blew the whistle on MAF in 2018 and 2019, the job and everything else soon ended. (See part 1 and part 2 of my whistleblower story.) Because we were like family, it felt like betrayal that caused a divorce that resulted in estrangement that unfolded in a string of crushing death-like endings.
I know from talking with other whistleblowers in my journalism work, you understand. Some of you were married by your pastors who harmed you, their faces next to yours in wedding photos on the mantel. Some depended on your community to get you through cancer treatment. Some named your kids after leaders who betrayed you. Some lost actual blood relatives by speaking up about a toxic system that also once promised that your whole family belonged.
The endings that come with speaking up are personal, confusing, and traumatic.
At MAF’s 80-year anniversary this summer, they’re welcoming all MAF alumni to also meet for a reunion. The weekend will likely be filled with remembering the good times, slipping into foreign languages we rarely get to speak anymore, telling outlandish but true tales of BIG snakes, strange-to-us foods, and exotic travels.
Anyone who worked for MAF and left a forwarding email with the organization is technically invited. So, MAF’s emailed invitation we got a few weeks ago, though kindly worded, wasn’t personal. Who knows if the MAF leaders who we believe mistreated us even realize my husband and me got the invite.
So, a few moments after I saw that emailed invitation from MAF, my stomach clenched, my hands got clammy, and my heart sank. I love MAF.
But after everything that happened, I also fear it.
‘The position of the dead’
When organizations mishandle abuse and wrongdoing, victims often experience additional symptoms of PTSD, researchers Jennifer Freyd and Carly Parnitzke Smith found.1 Institutional betrayal traumatizes already traumatized people, these researchers found.
You have nightmares about meetings in which leaders you thought would help you threw you under the bus. You avoid certain parts of town or weddings or activities out of fear a particular toxic leader will see you and talk to you or talk about you or ignore you completely. You may be trying to untangle lies from truth, voices living rent-free in your head, shaming you.
C. Fred Alford, a University of Maryland professor who studies moral psychology, joined a grief support group for whistleblowers for his research. It left him with many questions.
“What if (the whistleblower) has lost that container that held everything he cared about and valued?” Alford wrote.2
His conclusion is that whistleblowers who learn that leaders lie and cover up feel like aliens trying to live in a new world, or worse, like astronauts whose lifeline to the spaceship has suddenly been cut.
Most whistleblowing is met with ongoing injustice. So, whistleblowers have to watch old truths die and are forced to face new, heartbreaking realities, Alford wrote. They discover that many organizations care more about their systems than individuals. Many leaders and bystanders don’t always want to hear the truth that the system has caused harm. The choice to speak up in integrity isn’t applauded but rather can get you cast out. Law and justice often fail.3
Whistleblowers can struggle to find meaning in the face of so much injustice, Alford wrote. But mostly, they feel alone with their stories and new realities as others continue to turn away, not wanting to know.4
As a result, whistleblowers live in the “position of the dead,” Alford wrote.
“Everyone wants to hear about the (whistleblower-hero) stereotype, but no one want to hear about how vulnerable we are to power, and how much it can take from us, including the meaning of our lives,” Alford wrote. “It is this that the whistle-blower has to teach but no one wants to learn.”
The position of the honored guest
For her book, “Truth and Repair,” psychiatrist Judith Herman invited survivors to envision justice.
“Survivors do not want their injuries to be trivialized or ridiculed, and they do not want to be blamed for them,” she wrote. “They do not want to be dismissed as overly emotional or told to ‘get over it.’ They want their communities to recognize and respect their suffering and to acknowledge the seriousness of the harm they have endured.”5
In one word, we want our voices to be honored rather than shamed.
What if your former organization and mine recognized the betrayal, losses, and trauma experienced by its whistleblowers? What if they truly listened, acknowledged, and lamented the harm they’ve done? What if they then made a clear plan for accountability and change, offered restitution, and invited feedback on that plan? What if—just dreaming here—MAF treated our group of whistleblowers at its reunion as honored guests?
A few weeks ago, MAF welcomed a king. An actual king. King Charles of the United Kingdom made an appearance at MAF-International’s (MAF-I) own 80-year celebration in London. International news covered it. MAF-US, our former organization, posted this social media message about it.
MAF-US is, on paper, a separate organization from MAF-I but shares a core ministry vision and some staffing. MAF-I’s CEO Dave Fyock, pictured in news reports standing next to a tail of an MAF plane with King Charles, was an MAF-US vice president during our time there, for instance.
One of my favorite memories of Dave Fyock as VP of MAF-US was when he came all the way from the United States, where he was living at the time, to visit our small float plane base in the middle of Borneo, Indonesia. Many MAF staff were resigning from MAF after only a brief time of service, and Dave came with questions and a willingness to listen. He stayed in our home, played with our kids, ate dinner with us on our back porch that was surrounded by palm trees. The man who held my kids’ sticky hands in prayer over dinner has now shaken the hand of a king. He invited us to share our thoughts on MAF’s problems.
But our own last interaction with Dave was a confusing one. He’d left his VP role at MAF-US and moved to the UK to become CEO of MAF-I not long before MAF-US told us we must leave our Indonesian base following our whistleblowing.
(For those who haven’t read our whistleblower story, here’s a quick summary. We reported aviation safety and leadership concerns to our managers, which destabilized our relationship with them. Our managers determined that Brad had been insubordinate. However, we’ve documented, through emails and legally recorded Zoom meetings, how Brad, as base manager, showed deference to leaders in respectfully advocating for healthier and safer practices in this high-stakes work. MAF-US demoted my husband and then pressured us to go to counseling to become more submissive. But we believe this is an inappropriate requirement for whistleblowers. So, we declined. And then, because lost confidence in the health of MAF, we resigned from MAF-US in 2019.)
Upon hearing of our sudden exit from Indonesia, Dave Fyock reached out to Brad and me.
Dave Fyock emailed us that in a conversation with MAF-US’s president David Holsten “your names came up.” Dave Fyock wrote that David Holsten said we’d left Indonesia due to some “struggles.” Dave Fyock didn’t say what exactly Holsten told him, but said Brad and I could use “healing as well as growth.”
He kindly made us an offer. He asked that we come work for MAF-I in a different country.
“Brad and Rebecca, I do not want you to leave MAF thinking there is no place for you to use the skills and passion that God has put in you,” he wrote in an email.
Brad and I agreed to a phone call. We put Dave on speaker phone as we sat together surrounded by our suitcases in my parents’ basement in Colorado where we were staying temporarily.
Dave’s offer to allow us to keep serving and flying overseas but in a different (and hopefully healthier) organization felt like a lifeline. Maybe this could be a fresh start and a way forward but with a mission that we still loved.
But there was a catch. Dave told us he’d only hire us if we followed MAF-US’s improvement plan that included getting counseling first.
My heart sank. Would MAF-US’s narrative that we’d done wrong by reporting our concerns follow us around the MAF world? If we saw or experienced abuse or safety problems in MAF-I’s work in other countries, would we ever feel confident to speak up? Or, with this label of “insubordinate” following us around, would anyone listen? Could I really take my three young kids to another remote location with such big, unresolved questions? What if, for instance, a charming, well-liked MAF leader abused my daughter? Would the organization protect her over him?
Dave Fyock didn’t ask our perspective on MAF-US’s requirement or on the “struggles” we’d had in Indonesia. And if he had, I’m not sure we would’ve felt safe to be forthright with him given that our manager had threatened to fire us if we questioned his decisions.
We took some time to pray and consider Dave’s offer. The answer was clear. We just couldn’t say yes to this. We declined. And our hearts broke again.
“(W)e’ve come to a decision to leave MAF-US for the time being, and to turn down your offer of going on loan from MAF-US to MAF-I at this time,” we wrote. “(W)e do feel confident that this is the best God-honoring decision for our family at this time.”
However, we made one request.
“We’ve always been a family that cares about both people and planes,” we wrote. “Relationships really matter to us. So, we hope that we can continue to stay in touch with you.”
It’s still the request we have of MAF. We desire that the divide between us be filled with relationship—genuine, safe, honoring, humble connection.
But after everything that has happened, how?
A call for public lament
First, we start with welcoming the truth. I’m calling on MAF to also spend 80 days of public lament this summer for all harm it has caused throughout its 80 years of ministry.
During that time of lament, I’m asking for MAF leaders to reach out to the whistleblower group that recently brought a list of concerns to MAF’s board with both private and public apologies and a plan to listen. I’m respectfully requesting an external audit of this problematic investigation MAF hired and a commitment to publish the audit’s results online. And I’m inviting current MAF staff to request MAF leaders to hire Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment to guide MAF through true accountability and change.
It will take work, sacrifice, humility, and an unshakeable commitment to overcome barriers faced by isolated communities of whistleblowers, traumatized missionary kids, and the abused. But I believe that is at the very heart of MAF’s mission that goes to such lengths to reach physically isolated communities with airplanes and resources. And the result? MAF could become an organization that values not just positive stories and kings but also true hard stories and whistleblowers.
And that would be worth celebrating.
Jennifer Freyd and Carly Parnitzke Smith, “Dangerous Safe Havens: Institutional Betrayal Exacerbates Sexual Trauma,” J Trauma Stress, 2013.
C. Fred Alford, “Whistleblower Narratives: The Experience of Choiceless Choice,” Social Research, spring 2007.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Judith Herman, “Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice,” Hachette Book Group, 2023.
Thank you, yet again, for your words. You articulate the loss and pain (and longings) so, so well.
This resonates.