New revelations about Nashville pastor's misconduct sheds light on accountability measures

Tracy Wells apologized to her pastor.

Yet it was the pastor, the Rev. Ian Sears at Grace Presbyterian Church who spoke to Wells inappropriately, rubbed her feet and kissed her forehead. Still, it was Wells who church leaders considered equally culpable.

As part of a disciplinary inquiry led by the Nashville Presbytery — the regional authority for churches in Middle Tennessee affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) — Wells and Sears both apologized in a 2004 meeting.

“I feel like I had to apologize,” Wells said in a recent interview with The Tennessean. “I trusted him (Sears) that he knew what was right, and maybe I was too harsh on someone who’s supposed to be a loving, pastoral shepherd.”

Partly influenced by presbytery leaders’ assessment the misconduct was part of an affair, not a pattern of predatory behavior, Wells’ apology to Sears reinforced her own self-doubt. Wells continued to question whether she was at fault for Sears’ advances. Sears, on the other hand, served a six-month disciplinary suspension, returned to the pulpit, and eventually ascended into a leadership role within the presbytery on its shepherding committee, which handles pastoral oversight.

Nearly 20 years later, the tides have turned. Sears resigned from his church, now known as The Church of Grace Village, in September following newer allegations of sexual misconduct reported by a second woman. The recent revelations have also helped Wells see her past experiences differently.

“Now I know what it was,” Wells said. “I was being groomed.”

Wells’ story, which she’s sharing publicly for the first time, is critical to understanding subsequent reports against Sears, though it had little bearing on the presbytery’s response to those reports. Despite his discipline in 2004 and even after a 2020 report alleging misconduct, Sears continued serving on the shepherding committee and eventually became its chair.

Sears’ case is one of deference to someone for whom there were repeated warnings, so much so that he helped evaluate others’ fitness for ministry. The cycle raises questions about accountability in the Nashville Presbytery, and it points to what advocates say is a problem throughout the PCA.

“The judicial process exists to protect the accused,” Ann Maree Goudzwaard, founder of HelpHer Ministry and a victim’s advocate working with Wells and the other woman who reported Sears, said in an interview. “It happens over and over.”

Sears has previously denied the newer allegations of sexual misconduct reported by the second woman. In response to a request for comment, Sears addressed his behavior toward Wells in a statement from Rev. Dominic Aquila, a PCA minister representing Sears in a pending case before the PCA Standing Judicial Commission, which is the denomination’s highest court.

“There was never any romantic, sexual communication, or any untoward or suggestive touching involved,” Aquila said. “The relationship was characterized by the (Nashville Presbytery) Shepherding Committee as an ‘unhealthy emotional entanglement.’”

The PCA has recently wrestled with the idea of fairness in the denomination’s judicial system for those raising abuse allegations, not just those facing them. The PCA General Assembly has taken up legislative proposals to address procedural inadequacies inspired by a June 2022 report from an ad interim committee on domestic abuse and sexual assault, which Goudzwaard was a consultant for, inspired legislative proposals at the PCA General Assembly.

Even when a presbytery disciplines a minister, the PCA Standing Judicial Commission sometimes reverses that judgment on procedural grounds. Sears is currently pursuing that possibility in a challenge to the Nashville Presbytery’s decision in September to censure Sears with deposition, a form of discipline in the PCA barring a pastor from serving in ministry.

The censure, a result of the newer allegations of sexual misconduct against Sears, is delayed from taking effect until after the PCA Standing Judicial Commission rules.

“It’s not a matter of enabling,” Goudzwaard said, referring to how the system benefits ministers. “It’s baked in.”

‘I must be wrong’

Up until a few months ago, Wells trusted the outcome of her case was appropriate given the circumstances and the authority who handled it.

“The Presbyterian faith gave me a lot of confidence and gave me a willingness to say, ‘I must be wrong here,’” Wells said in an interview.

The presbytery did not respond to a request for comment.

The PCA, among other Presbyterian groups, takes pride in its system of presbyteries and church elder boards, called sessions, to provide checks and balances over campus pastors. The PCA’s structure and its conservative Reformed theology appealed to Wells and her family, her now ex-husband and their seven (of ultimately nine) kids, to join Covenant Presbyterian Church in Green Hills when they moved to Nashville in 2001.

Soon after, Wells’ family transferred to Grace Presbyterian, a nearby sister congregation along Edmondson Pike, which received financial support from Covenant Presbyterian. Around that time, Sears was a Covenant Presbyterian associate pastor and stepped up to lead Grace Presbyterian.

The Rev. Jim Bachmann, a former Covenant Presbyterian senior pastor, and Rick Wells, who is Wells’ now ex-husband, corroborated details from Wells’ account in email correspondence and in an interview, respectively. Wells also provided The Tennessean with selections of journal entries she wrote in 2003 about interactions with Sears, who she initially got to know through volunteering with Grace Presbyterian’s nursery and youth ministries.

One of the earliest red flags for Wells was an email she received from Sears, which he signed, “affectionately yours.” In response, Wells mentioned it to Sears’ wife, Anne Marie Sears, who Wells said responded with indifference. After that moment, Wells was more reserved about what she shared with whom.

Instead of “affectionately yours,” Sears contended in a statement from Aquila he likely signed the email “with affection,” which Sears said was common practice for emails he sent both men and women. Anne Marie Sears did not respond to a request for comment.

Other times, Sears expressed affection through music references, including when he sang to Wells a verse from “Canticle of the Bride” by John Michael Talbot, according to Wells in a journal entry.

Sears’ actions escalated to physical gestures, such as several instances when he kissed Wells on the top of her head upon greeting her with a side hug. Also, one time when Wells visited Sears in his office after bringing her daughters to the church for piano practice, Sears rubbed Wells’ feet as she was sitting down.

“I’m not a person who can respond quickly to something,” Wells recalled in an interview.  “Two days later, I was like ‘I should have said this or should have done this.’”

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‘Nothing I needed to confess’

Defying the guilt she felt for not reacting in the moment, Wells said in a journal entry she later expressed discomfort about the foot rub in a letter she wrote to Sears.

She also avoided one-on-one interactions with Sears in private settings. Still, Wells said she felt shame, and it kept her quiet.

But that all changed after a fellow congregant, who noticed some of Sears’ behavior toward Wells, confronted Sears and notified Rick Wells. The heightened awareness eventually caused the Wellses to leave Grace Presbyterian and transfer back to Covenant Presbyterian, where they informed Bachmann of what happened. That triggered the Nashville Presbytery’s intervention, led by its shepherding committee.

“In 2004, the presbytery acted wisely by displaying both justice and mercy with a spirit of meekness,” Bachmann, currently pastor of Stephens Valley Church in Nashville, said in an email. “Ian submitted to the church discipline then was restored based on his repentance and has served Grace until recently.”

The shepherding committee’s findings following an inquiry resulted in a confession that Sears agreed to and shared with the presbytery in executive session during a Jan. 16, 2004 meeting, according to copies of presbytery records The Tennessean obtained. Sears agreed to the confession, the details of which remain undisclosed, in accordance with a guideline known as “case without process.” The same measure was also part of the presbytery’s most recent disciplinary case against Sears.

For Wells, the shepherding committee inquiry in 2004 involved significant debate over Wells’ role in what some committee members saw as a consensual affair with Sears.

The committee ultimately decided not to recommend discipline for Wells. Yet she still received a form of judgment when she apologized in that 2004 meeting with Sears and Anne Marie Sears, Rick Wells, and a presbytery representative.

Other presbytery leaders involved in Sears’ disciplinary evaluation in 2004, Jack Watkins and the Rev. Richard Jennings, did not respond to a request for comment.

“Looking back now, the information I was giving, I was told that it was something that I had done wrong. So, I felt like I was confessing my sins,” Wells said in an interview. “Whereas now, I can see there was nothing I needed to confess because I didn’t do what was wrong.”

Other deep dives on Sears and PCA : How cases of pastors Scott Sauls, Ian Sears highlight accountability issues within the PCA

‘Not been dealt with’

Ten years after calling Sears’ behavior “unbecoming a minister of the Gospel” in a 2004 motion to censure Sears, Sears found himself serving on the very same shepherding committee.

Within another 7.5 years, Sears became the shepherding committee’s chair. During Sears’ tenure, the shepherding committee led inquiries into at least two pastors in the Nashville Presbytery as part of disciplinary evaluations: Bachmann and Rev. Scott Sauls, former pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church.

Bachmann said his history with Sears was a source of tension during his disciplinary case in 2016, which ultimately led Bachmann to leave the PCA. But Bachmann never thought Sears was unfit to serve on the shepherding committee, including for Sears' discipline in 2004. “I felt Ian had sincerely repented,” Bachmann said in an email.

Due to evolving church polity, or governance standards, and awareness of patterns of clergy abuse, Goudzwaard is wary about retroactively applying present-day frameworks onto 10- to 20-year-old decisions. But on the flip side, the past should guide future decisions.

“We aren’t necessarily able to apply how we would have wanted it to be play out because of past restrictions of our polity,” Goudzwaard said. “What’s happening today is revealing the holes in our system.”

But in Sears’ case, the past was either unknown or insignificant to future decision-making.

The second woman to report Sears for alleged misconduct, with the help of a PCA pastor in Georgia, first notified the presbytery in 2020 when the pair shared information with the presbytery’s shepherding committee. The shepherding committee’s subsequent review “didn’t find…any legitimacy to the report,” said Aquila, Sears’ ecclesiastic counsel, in an interview in September.

It was only after a second report in a February 2023 letter to the whole presbytery that the second woman’s allegations resulted in disciplinary action against Sears. Sears previously denied the woman’s allegations.

It’s unclear why the shepherding committee didn’t act on the second woman’s initial report in 2020 and if it took into consideration Sears’ discipline in 2004. The presbytery recently established a special committee to investigate its past responses to reports against Sears.

Wells is also searching for answers, but with a different set of questions. Wells previously pondered whether she could have acted differently to deter Sears, whereas now she asks why the system didn’t intervene at key moments despite Sears' consistent pattern of behavior.

The shift for Wells followed her first conversation with the other woman who reported Sears. “It was confirming to each of us that there was a bigger picture for our part of this story,” Wells said in an interview.

Wells looks differently at her own case and the severity of Sears’ discipline, now knowing that Sears’ alleged sexual misconduct toward the second woman occurred six years later. Thirteen years after that, the presbytery determined that behavior disqualified Sears from ministry.

“The bigger story is ‘We don’t want this to happen anymore,’” Wells said. “And ‘why has this been happening and not been dealt with?’”

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on social media @liamsadams.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: In wake of Nashville pastor misconduct, PCA to rework oversight