Conference Call Follow-Up

On June 28, 2010, Teen Mania Ministries held a conference call to publicly respond to the many questions raised by former program participants that had a horrible experience at the Honor Academy. The call lasted for more than two and a half hours, and a lot of serious issues were addressed by Dave Hasz, the director of Teen Mania's Honor Academy. Interested parties can find a downloadable recording of the call on the Recovering Alumni Response website.

We'll be looking at some of the specific content of the conference call in future posts. But my general reaction is that the call was a completely inadequate response to the abuse allegations that have been raised by Honor Academy participants, and was basically just a desperate P.R. stunt instead of a real attempt at honest dialog and lasting change.

If you do a Google search for "Teen Mania Ministries" or "Honor Academy," you'll notice that there are lots of links to negative information on the first few pages of search results. Information about Teen Mania's cult-like atmosphere. Stories of emotional, spiritual, and even physical abuse at the Honor Academy. Today's teens are internet-savvy--of course they are Googling these things before they make serious commitments to an organization they aren't familiar with. The word on the street is that this negative information is starting to seriously hurt recruiting efforts for the Honor Academy, and as everyone knows, Teen Mania can't do much without free labor.

So Teen Mania is in crisis mode....trying to make the stories on the internet go away....dismissing them as "things that happened in the past." But unfortunately for Ron Luce & company, the crisis isn't going away as more and more young adults start to step forward and talk about the hurt they experienced at Teen Mania Ministries.