Leaving the room empty - Facilitators’ report concludes that MCC boards caused further harm
Facilitated Conversation Final Report - MCC leaves the table with the task of listening unfinished. Click the image above to read the full report.
Following the facilitated conversations between two MCC board representatives and John Clarke and Anicka Fast (held over five sessions between December 2, 2025 and March 2, 2026), facilitators Rus Funk and Cory Lockhart have submitted their (non-confidential) final report to all parties in the conversations. Read the April 23, 2026 report here.
This report offers new externally validated evidence that the MCC boards caused further harm through this process, that board chairs were controlling and shutting down the process of conversation despite the goodwill of the individual board members who participated, and that MCC boards lack trauma-awareness, appropriate attention to power dynamics, and a culture of accountability. In other words, this report points the finger squarely at MCC boards for continued harm. The facilitators close by recommending that John and Anicka – and by implication, other survivors – not engage in further discussions with boards or executive staff until "trauma-informed practices are clearly in place."
Read on for selected highlights from the report and for a statement by John and Anicka in response.
Highlights from the report
1. The report concludes that the process was harmful and re-traumatizing, and that failure was due to a structural lack of accountability inside MCC (not an individual lack of goodwill from participants):
“Despite extensive safeguards, intentional efforts to ensure balanced power, and the goodwill of all participants, these facilitated conversations resulted in further harm from MCC to John and Anicka, re-traumatizing them. In our view, this outcome stems from the MCC Board’s failure to engage in trauma-informed practices, inattention to power dynamics, and lack of a culture of accountability.”
“Truncating the process created another experience of harm to John and Anicka. In the initial facilitated conversations, John and Anicka had experienced, for the first time, MCC Board members listening to them – that was important for them. Having the process cut short replicated previous experiences with MCC; it re-opened wounds.”
2. MCC’s assumption that the conversations had taken long enough, and could legitimately be cut short, fails to account for the need to rebuild broken trust:
“Trauma-informed processes “happen at the speed of trust.” Trust-building is slow and intentional. It is iterative and cumulative – as people begin to trust those they’re working with, they often extend that trust into the fuller process; as they trust the process, they often extend trust to the other people in the process.”
3. The report exposes the role of the MCC Canada board chair in controlling and shutting down the process of conversation with survivors. (The board chair mentioned in the report refers to Ron Ratzlaff (MCC Canada board chair) – who was also named in John and Anicka’s grievance to MCC Boards in November 2023.)
“A Board Chair who was named in the complaint, and who seemed to have a critical role in the harm toward John and Anicka, was also in the role of negotiating (and prematurely ending) our contract for the facilitated process. In his role, even while a named person in the complaint, he maintained authority over this process. His role in the process exacerbated the stress Anicka and John felt as they participated in it.”
4. MCC boards are revealed as incapable of having safe conversations with survivors of abuse due to their lack of trauma-awareness. The facilitators recommend against further engagement:
“In the case of Anicka and John we recommend against any further engagement with MCC Boards until trauma-informed practices are clearly in place; we recommend that John and Anicka not expose themselves to a facilitated process with the Boards or senior staff again until there is clear evidence that MCC is ready to engage in this way; as facilitators we will not engage in such a process again.”
Statement by Anicka and John in response to the facilitators’ report
This statement has also been shared with Canadian Mennonite and Anabaptist World.
“We believe that the only path towards repair, reconciliation and healing starts with truth-telling. These sacred conversations were supposed to allow MCC boards to hear our story of abuse. We've waited almost three years to do so. MCC boards have now ended any hope of reconciliation by unilaterally cutting them short.
We see the facilitators’ report as accurate. It summarizes what we experienced: the process did not lead toward repair and, in fact, caused significant further harm. The conversations with MCC board members ended without us being able to tell our full story and without any accountability for those who caused harm to us or to others. We took a significant personal risk to participate in this process, and the cost to us has been extremely high.
The hard truth is that there is no easy option out there for bystanders – which includes the two MCC board members who participated in the conversations as well as the MCC constituency more broadly. Once the knowledge of abuse has become public, there is no comforting place of innocence to return to. Ruth Krall, retired professor at Goshen College and former program director of its Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies program, names this reality well. Krall observes that “when ... abuse accusations become public information, there is no place of communal innocence to which to retreat. One’s choices in situations of lost innocence are limited: one can choose to believe, disbelieve, or retreat into a false innocence of not seeing, not hearing, and not speaking – the false innocence of non-involvement.”[1]
We observed the board members wrestling with the decision of how to respond. Choosing to believe us fully would be costly and would call on them to take courageous and decisive action against an entrenched system. Choosing to completely disbelieve us was an option which, thankfully, they did not take. But in the end, faced with no easy options, they found a way not to know—so they would not have to act.
This is a pattern we have seen repeatedly both inside MCC and among bystanders, but it was particularly painful to experience it here, after waiting so long for these meetings and after the already heavy cost of showing up. When the truth is too costly, people choose not to know it.
We continue to believe that external accountability for MCC is essential. There must be an investigation into the allegations that is not controlled by MCC in any way. We long to see more MCC constituents take a clear stand in favor of such accountability for the sake of our global faith community. Otherwise, our peace witness in the name of Christ becomes a travesty.
Our prayer for MCC leadership is that they would drastically change course and have the courage to allow others to perform an independent, trauma-informed, survivor-centered investigation of all allegations so that the truth can be exposed.
Our prayer for our church leaders is that they would have the courage to publicly support survivors and take steps to hold MCC leadership accountable.
We believe that the truth will set us all free, allowing for true healing and reconciliation.”
[1] Ruth E. Krall, “Bearing Witness,” in Resistance: Confronting Violence, Power, and Abuse within Peace Churches, ed. Cameron Altaras and Carol Penner (Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2022), 197.