Member Spotlight: Douglas and Lisa Cherry, Frontline Family Ministries

Douglas and Lisa Cherry are turning their family tragedy into family ministry and a way to help others suffering the same experiences they and their daughter, Kalyn, did.

From ages 14 to 15, Kalyn was the victim of a sexual predator. The married man, who was an active member of the church that Douglas pastors in Carbondale, Illinois, engaged Kalyn in an illicit online and phone relationship for two years. The abuse only ended when an $800 phone bill ended up in Doug and Lisa’s hands.

Now 26 and married to Adam Waller, Kalyn and her nine siblings support their parents in ministries aimed at helping families and youth to avoid similar pitfalls and to recover if the unthinkable happens. The Cherrys do this through their Frontline Family Ministries as well as POTTS (Parents of Teens and Tweens), a support group program they started. POTTS now has more than 1,000 members in chapters.

They also have published the books Unmask the Predators: The Battle to Protect Your Child, Straight Talk in a Sex-Saturated Culture, and Hot Romance: A Family Guide for Dating, Courtship, Love and Sex, and offer video and online resources.

Their materials have been endorsed by such Christians as singer-songwriter Michael W. Smith, singer-songwriter Darlene Zschech, Ron Luce of Teen Mania, life coach and author of the Every Woman’s Battle series Shannon Ethridge, and worship leader and author Dennis Jernigan.

But their most direct and interactive mode of helping families is through weekend conferences, Acquire the Fire youth conferences, and church appearances at which they outline the dangers and temptations faced by today’s young people and how parents—and churches—can help to protect them.

Sexual abuse in its many forms riddles American society. Some studies indicate one in four girls are sexually abused by age 18.¹ Nearly nine out of 10 cases of child sexual abuse involve a family member or acquaintance.²

The Cherrys came by their helpful knowledge the hard way, first realizing that Kalyn’s relationship had been happening under their noses and then grinding their way through her spiritual and emotional recovery. Doug and Lisa are brutally honest about their struggles as they became aware of their daughter’s abuse and came to terms with it. When they confronted Kalyn about her relationship with the 40 something-year-old man, her walls went up, reinforced by deceit—both on her part and the predator’s part—and confusion.

“I remember the night they confronted me,” Kalyn says, relating a story that is detailed in the book Unmask the Predators, co-written with her mother. “All the darkness, confusion, and pain inside me exploded.”

She told her parents that they couldn’t “take this man from me.” He is my life, Kalyn told them.

“Just the deception and the horrible lies I had been believing manifested themselves and started a spiral for me over the next several months,” Kalyn says.

She became depressed and rebellious, and started “acting out my sexual wounds, running around with whatever boy would take me.” She ran away from home more than once, would sneak around on her parents, and lie to them. She started cutting herself and developed an eating disorder.

“My parents were doing everything they could to find out what had happened to me and try to restore my life,” she says. “But it seemed like I was sinking further and further down. But God had a plan to renew my life.”

The first sign of renewal was when she was able to tell her dad, Doug, what had happened.

“Truth always brings freedom,” Kalyn says. “But there was still a long road of healing after that.”

After all, she says, she had taken three years to get to the state she was in, but it took her longer than that to get back into a good relationship with her parents and with God. Looking back, though, she expresses gratitude for her parents’ insistence on restoring her and their relationship with her.

“They refused to lose me to the world,” she says. “I’m so thankful they put their foot down and didn’t let me ruin my life. They knew they were still called to parent me, even as an older teen.”

A major breakthrough occurred when she was nearly 18, when she served a ministry internship at Teen Mania Ministries in Texas.

“I had an encounter with God that saved my life,” she says.

During prayer and fasting, she heard from God that she had been a rebel and that her path was leading to destruction.

“That woke me up,” she says. “I saw how much deception had been allowed into my life. I knew God was giving me a season to rebuild. I had run from the help available to me. I ran right back into the arms of God.”

She “ran back to the authority of God, ran home to my parents.” Confessing she had been a prodigal child, she asked Doug and Lisa for forgiveness, for an opportunity to rebuild her family relationships.

“It was such a sweet time,” she says. “God began to heal my heart deeply. I lost my desire for those things that were damaging.”

Now Kalyn and her parents take the dual message of precaution and healing to churches, conferences, and concerts.

“We are grateful for the opportunity to both proclaim a testimony of God’s healing power and be able to issue a wake-up call and warning, but not to instill fear but a spirit of awareness and faith,” Doug says. “This is another instance of having to stand firm in a culture that’s gone crazy.”

Sex crazy, to be specific.

“The gateway issue hurting our kids today is sex,” Lisa says. “God intended sex to be a wonderful gift, but the rates of sexual abuse and predators in the form of people, ideas and internet content is overwhelming.”

Doug says that the increasing pornographic content and orientation of our culture is “tearing down natural and spiritual protection in our churches and families.”

“The sexual perversion that has been released across America has opened up spiritual and natural forces to work against us,” he says. “Satan hates the Church. He hates believers. He is working through the door of sexual perversion.”

Because sexuality is an issue that can be difficult to discuss, it rarely is. In the meantime, the eyes and hearts of our children run the risk of becoming inundated with sexual imagery, causing confusion in their minds and drawing them away from church and family.

Thankfully, Unmask the Predators has chapters dedicated to helping parents in several ways on this and other topics:

• A 12-step “battle plan” for parenting crises.
• “Sexual Abuse 101,” a summary of signs that something isn’t right with your child.
• “Twenty-six Keys for Protecting Your Child from Sexual Predators.”

The Cherrys plan to continue to build “frontline famlies,” says Doug, who pastors Victory Dream Center in Carbondale and runs a personal financial planning service. They want to help families, both victims and parents, recover lost ground. They will continue to focus on the Parents of Teens and Tweens ministry, described as something of the equivalent of Moms of Preschoolers. They want to grow the number of subscribers to their newsletter, and encourage churches, families, and Christian organizations to develop ministries for parents to come together for spiritual power. Also, Lisa is working on a new book with the working title of Not Open, how to find refuge in days of wickedness.

“Ours is a message of hope,” Doug says. “You can see what happened as destruction, but we know God’s got something greater than that.”

^{1. Eliot J. Briere, “Prevalence and Psychological Sequalae of Self-Reported Childhood Physical and Sexual Abuse in the General Population,” Child Abuse and Neglect 27 (2003), 1205-1222, www.johnbriere.com/CAN%20csa%2..., cited in Unmask the Predators.}

^{2. H.N. Snyder (2000). Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics, NCJ 182990 Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Justic Programs, Bureau of Justice statistics, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/conte..., 6. Cited in Unmask the Predators.}