The Millstone and the Open Hand

A Faithful Response to the Wade Christofferson Case

Doctrinal Response · Current Events

What the record establishes, what it does not, and what the doctrine of mercy was never meant to cover.

Why We Are Addressing This Directly

On November 20, 2025, Wade Christofferson of Dublin, Ohio — younger brother of President D. Todd Christofferson of the First Presidency — was arrested by federal authorities on child exploitation charges. On July 9, 2026, he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio, to coercion and enticement of a minor, admitting he sexually abused two girls — both children under the age of ten — one in Ohio and one in Utah. He faces a minimum of ten years and up to life in prison, and will register as a sex offender under the plea agreement (Sources 3, 5).

Latter-day Saints do not serve the truth by looking away from this. The Restoration was built by a people commanded to seek “anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report” — and also commanded to be a people of record, of honest reckoning, and of protection for the innocent. This article is written for members or non-members who have encountered this story, who want an answer that is factually rigorous and explain what we know and what we do not know. It will not minimize what happened. It will also not concede claims the evidence does not establish. Those are the same discipline.

Two principles govern everything below. First: the Church is not culpable for the sins of its members. “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins” (Articles of Faith 1:2) is not a slogan; it is the doctrine of moral agency itself, and it applies to Wade Christofferson alone for the crimes he has now confessed. Second: the shepherds of the flock are accountable for the watch, whether or not they are accountable for the wolf (Ezekiel 33:6; Jacob 1:19). A faithful response holds both without flinching.

What the Record Establishes, What Is Alleged, and What Is Disputed

Before doctrine, evidence. Much public commentary on this case treats every claim as equally established. They are not. Three tiers:

Established (multiple independent sources, or admitted, or church-confirmed)

Wade Christofferson sexually abused children. This is no longer an allegation; he pleaded guilty on July 9, 2026 (Sources 3, 5).

He was excommunicated by the Church in the mid-1990s in Illinois over child sexual abuse allegations. Both the Church’s statements and eyewitnesses agree the discipline occurred and agree on its true cause (Sources 1, 3, 4, 6).

A survivor, Kristin Dunbar Mautz — who remains a committed Latter-day Saint — reported abuse to her bishop, Lee Donaldson, around 1991, years before formal discipline occurred (Sources 2, 4, 6).

A false story that the excommunication was for an extramarital affair circulated in the ward. High councilor Ed Nachel, who sat on the disciplinary council, says the rumor “was allowed to persist” (Sources 1, 6).

He was rebaptized in 1997, “following established disciplinary and confession processes,” per a Church spokesman (Source 6).

Per church records obtained by the research site Floodlit, he later served in three ward bishoprics and two other leadership positions between 2006 and 2025, including bishopric counselor roles in Ohio in 2006–11 and 2016–19 (Source 6).

The Church confirms President D. Todd Christofferson was told of his brother’s excommunication at the time but not the reasons, first learned of abuse allegations around 2020 through family disclosure, and — when he learned of an allegation involving a minor in late 2025 — reported it to legal authorities within hours (Sources 1, 4).

The two victims covered by the plea were children under the age of ten; per the federal case one was abused at approximately seven and eight years old, in roughly twenty acts, with coded letters exchanged over about six months before a November 2025 FaceTime call precipitated the arrest (Sources 3, 5).

The hands-on crimes in the current federal case did not occur on church property and were not part of a church activity — but two church-related facts are in the court record: Christofferson’s phone search history included a query on whether Ohio clergy are required to report a confession of child abuse, and in November 2025 he texted the father of one victim that he was “deeply sorry for what I have done” and “will be meeting with my bishop to start the repentance process” (Source 3).

In 2022 a separate female accuser reported to Crystal Lake police that Christofferson had abused her as a child at the Crystal Lake meetinghouse; no charges were filed because the statute of limitations had expired (Source 1).

Wade Christofferson held ward leadership callings into the 2020s (Source 6), and the conduct in the federal plea occurred in the years between President Christofferson’s 2020 family disclosure and the 2025 arrest (Sources 3, 5).

Alleged but unverified

That a protective annotation on his membership record was removed between roughly 1998 and 2006. This rests on a single second-hand chain: one survivor says a stake president told her in 2024 that the annotation had existed and been removed (Source 6). If true, it is the gravest institutional fact in the case, because Church policy permits annotation removal “only with First Presidency approval upon request of the stake president” (Source 9). It has been neither corroborated nor, to date, publicly denied. Yet the disclosure of the presence of an annotation by the stake president would in fact be contrary to church policies.

The total number of victims. Floodlit’s case file reports at least seven to ten alleged victims tied to the Crystal Lake First Ward in the 1980s and 1990s, with further alleged victims reported elsewhere; federal prosecutors have separately stated their evidence “reflects additional victims at church where he held leadership roles” (Sources 2, 6). The guilty plea covers two, and we give Floodlit’s range as stated rather than assert a single cross-state total, which is not firmly established.

Genuinely disputed

The excommunication date. Eyewitnesses anchor it to late 1996; the Church’s statements have been rendered by reporters as “mid-1990s,” “more than 30 years ago,” and in one Salt Lake Tribune account as 1993 (Sources 1, 4, 6, 10, 13). Because this single fact determines which institutional failure the case reveals — and because it is the point on which this article will be attacked — it receives its own full section below, where the evidence for each chronology is laid out and the conclusions are deliberately built to survive every chronology.

Whose Sins Are They?

Lets begin with the doctrine the critics’ framing quietly skips. Scripture is unambiguous that guilt does not transfer by association, office, or family: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). Wade Christofferson’s crimes are Wade Christofferson’s. They are not his apostle brother’s — the Church states President Christofferson “was never in a position” to know about or influence the membership decisions (Source 1) — and they are not the Church’s, any more than Judas’s betrayal was Peter’s.

This matters because the rhetorical engine of the coverage is proximity: brother of an apostle appears in nearly every headline. Proximity is not complicity. The one documented act of President Christofferson in this case when a child was at risk is that he reported to law enforcement within hours (Source 4). And when older allegations involving now-adult survivors were disclosed to him around 2020, the spokesman says he “respected the adult victims’ wishes not to involve law enforcement” (Source 3) — a choice that, on its face, centered the survivors’ own stated wishes, which is what trauma-informed practice asks. But that sentence is where most apologetic treatments stop, and it is not where an honest one can. The 2020 disclosure raises a harder question, and we give it a full reckoning below rather than a slogan.

“But how could he not have asked?” Critics find it implausible that an apostle was told of his own brother’s excommunication yet “was not informed of the specific reasons and had no reason to suspect it was for abuse” (Source 1). Readers outside the covenant community should understand: that sentence describes not an anomaly requiring explanation, but the confidentiality norm of Church discipline operating exactly as members expect it to — on everyone, including apostles, including family.

The privacy of a penitent’s sins is held sacred among the Saints, and the practice has doctrinal roots, not merely administrative ones. Private offenses are handled privately (D&C 42:88–92 reserves public rebuke for public sin); confession belongs to the sinner, the Lord, and the common judge; and of the truly repentant the Lord declares, “I, the Lord, remember them no more” (D&C 58:42–43). In practice, this meant that in the 1990s a disciplinary outcome was announced — if at all — without its cause, so that a man would not be asked to pray or serve, and nothing more. That is precisely what the eyewitness on the council describes: the action was made known, the reason was not, and the council members were bound to confidentiality (Sources 1, 13). Within Latter-day Saint culture, asking why a man was excommunicated — even a brother — is itself a breach of charity, something close to demanding access to another man’s confession. Members do not pry, not out of incuriosity, but because the whole theology of repentance requires that a confessed and disciplined sin not become family property or ward property. A faithful man told “your brother has been excommunicated; he is working through a repentance process” does the covenant thing: he grieves, he loves, and he does not interrogate. To read that confidentiality as sinister is to miss the community being described: the silence critics find suspicious is the same silence any ordinary member would expect around any other family’s discipline — and the careful reporters who broke this story, on whom this very article relies, are owed the presumption that they encountered a practice that reads very differently from inside the covenant than outside it, not one bent on concealment.

There is a second layer critics get exactly backwards. D. Todd Christofferson became a general authority in 1993 (Source 14) — meaning that during the entire disciplinary window, whichever chronology is correct, he held general Church office while his brother’s case sat before a local stake presidency. A general authority inquiring into, let alone influencing, the disciplinary file of his own brother is precisely what propriety forbids — and had it happened, the same critics would today be citing it, correctly, as corruption. The Church’s statement that he “was never in a position to know about and, in fact, did not know about or influence” those decisions (Source 1) is a claim of ignorance, not of a designed recusal — but the ignorance is exactly what propriety should produce. Had a general authority instead reached into his brother’s disciplinary file, that call to Buffalo Grove would rightly be the scandal. Its absence is not proof of virtue; but neither is it the anomaly the coverage implies.

The 2020 Disclosure and the Watchman Question

Here is the strongest form of the case against President Christofferson, and we will not shrink it. Around 2020 he learned his brother had a history of child sexual abuse. Wade Christofferson held ward leadership callings into the 2020s (Source 6). And the federal plea establishes that hands-on abuse of two young children — roughly twenty acts, with coded letters exchanged over about six months — was ongoing in the period before the November 2025 arrest, which is to say during part of the window that opened with that 2020 disclosure (Sources 3, 5). A critic assembles those facts and asks the watchman’s question directly: on learning in 2020 that his brother was a known abuser, did anyone press the only questions that protect a living child — does this man currently have access to children, and is his membership record annotated to keep him from it? Ed Nachel, the very high councilor whose memory anchors our chronology, has put the challenge in the sharpest personal terms: he has said President Christofferson should have “sat him down” and told his brother “either you go, or I go” to the police (Sources 6, 13). We cannot lean on Nachel’s testimony for the date and then pretend not to hear his indictment.

So we answer it, clearly precisely and directly. Begining with the distinction the sharpest critic will press, and grant it in full: knowledge of past child abuse is knowledge of present risk — that is the entire premise of the permanent annotation, which the Church’s own policy imposes precisely because it treats such a man as a danger for life (Source 8). We do not soften that premise; we insist on it. But notice where it leads. If past abuse means permanent risk, then the operative question the moment anyone learned of Wade Christofferson’s history was never the narrow one of whether a particular child was in danger at that instant — it was the institutional one of whether the mechanism built to neutralize that lifelong risk was in place and doing its work: was his record annotated, and did anyone check? If it was, his callings should have been impossible; if it was not, that is exactly the placement or removal failure we analyze at length below — a failure of the records system, which no family member controls. That is where this case turns, and it routes straight back to the branch analysis rather than to any one man’s conscience. As for President Christofferson himself, what the record places in his hands in 2020 is a disclosure by now-adult survivors about decades-old conduct; deferring to adult victims who did not want the police involved is a defensible, even trauma-informed, choice, and when a report finally did involve a minor, in late 2025, he reported to law enforcement within hours (Source 4). We do not exempt anyone who knew from the trumpet-duty of Ezekiel 33. We say only what the record supports: Nachel’s harder counsel — that a brother should have forced the issue in 2020 regardless — is a moral claim faithful people may weigh; what it is not is proof of a dereliction, and we decline to manufacture one in either direction.

And now the honest synthesis, because this article does not deal in half-truths: the same sacred veil that protects the penitent and shields victims’ privacy is also the mechanism by which, unmodified, a congregation and a family can be left unwarned — as they were here. The Restoration’s own answer to that tension is the annotation: a mark confidential to the whole world except the one watchman who must know, reconciling the duty of discretion with the duty of protection. Confidentiality with an annotation is mercy with its eyes open. Confidentiality without one is discretion doing a predator’s work for him — a failure, as we will see, as old as Nauvoo. That is why the annotation question, taken up fully below, is the true center of this case, and why the family’s ignorance, far from implicating them, is simply further evidence of how much weight the annotation system was designed to carry alone.

This however also demonstrates a weakness in this system. It allows the bishop to withold callings and keep a man from the classroom - but it tells the parents nothing. The ward that cannot be told the reason for a discipline also cannot be told the reason for a restriction; families in an annotated man's congregation are protected only at the gates the bishop controls, while every living room, friendship, and sleepover remains governed by information they do not have and under the system's own design, never will.

At the same time, the doctrine of individual accountability cuts toward institutional duty, not away from it. The Lord’s instruction to Alma — the founding revelation on Church discipline — required transgression to be dealt with, not absorbed: the unrepentant “shall not be numbered among my people” (Mosiah 26:29–36). The Church did deal with it: it convened a council and imposed its severest sanction, decades before any public exposure, in an era when almost no institution — religious or secular — formally disciplined ordinary members for abuse at all. The Church’s own materials note it is one of the only religious organizations that excommunicates lay members for child abuse (Source 8). That fact is routinely omitted from the coverage, and it should not be.

The Doctrine of the Second Chance — and Its Boundary

Here is the hard center of the case, and the theme faithful readers most need articulated: what happens when a doctrine of infinite mercy meets a predator who has learned to speak its language.

The Restoration teaches real transformation. Alma the Younger persecuted the Church and became its prophet. The Lord’s standard is staggering in its generosity: “as often as my people repent will I forgive them” (Mosiah 26:30), and to us the command is total: “of you it is required to forgive all men” (D&C 64:9–11).

But read D&C 64 to its end. The commandment to forgive is immediately paired with a retention of judgment: “let God judge between me and thee, and reward thee according to thy deeds.” Forgiveness surrenders vengeance; it does not surrender discernment. Nowhere — nowhere — does the doctrine require that a forgiven man be restored to access to children. The Savior who taught seventy-times-seven forgiveness is the same Savior who said of those who harm children that “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). Both sentences are His. The doctrine holds them together; the failure in this case is that, somewhere along the way, the holding broke — whether in a man’s judgment or in a system’s reach, the record does not yet say.

Forgiveness is commanded. Trust is not. Rebaptism restores fellowship with God and the Saints; it was never meant to restore a sexual abuser proximity to children. The Church’s own modern policy states this exactly: readmitted perpetrators are to remain “permanently marked with an annotation” precluding them from ever again serving with children or youth (Source 8). Whatever happened to Wade Christofferson’s record — whether an annotation was never placed, was removed, or was ignored — the doctrine was never the problem. The doctrine already contained the millstone. The failure was real; whether it was human or mechanical is unknown — a repentant man’s restored standing conflated with a restored right to be trusted, or simply an annotation system then only a year or two old, whose reach had not yet caught up with its promise.

For you see the very virtues the gospel cultivates in us — charity, the assumption of good faith, the refusal to gossip, the deep desire to believe a brother has changed — are the precise attack surface a predator exploits. Wade Christofferson was, by every account, warm, soft-spoken, and well-liked. Of course he was. An institution of grace will always be targeted by those who prey on grace. The answer is not less grace. The answer is grace with its eyes open — structures (annotations, two-adult rules, windows in doors, reporting) that let us love the sinner precisely because the system, not our optimism, is what guards the children.

This case supplies that argument in its most literal form. When Wade Christofferson was cornered in 2025, the court record shows him reaching at once for the very channel this doctrine protects: a text to a victim’s father promising he would “start the repentance process” with his bishop, and a phone search asking whether Ohio clergy must report a confession of child abuse (Source 3). Here is the predator studying the shepherd’s kindness — no longer a metaphor but a browser history — a man testing whether the confessional seal could be turned into a shield from the law. It is among the most damning facts in the file, and it is damning in a precise direction: not against the doctrine of confession, but against any use of it that would let the seal cover an ongoing crime against a child. The clergy-penitent privilege is part of the attack surface, and a church serious about the millstone must treat it as such. Confession absolves the soul; it was never meant to buy a predator’s silence from the authorities. The Church’s 1995 help line was built to route exactly such a disclosure toward protection — yet the help line’s real-world performance on this precise question is the most contested claim against the Church of the last five years. In the Bisbee, Arizona case of Paul Adams, an Associated Press investigation alleged that the help line channeled a bishop’s knowledge of ongoing abuse to church attorneys while the abuse continued and no report was made, sheltered by clergy-penitent privilege (Source 15) — a characterization the Church publicly and strongly disputed (Source 16) — and the Arizona courts ultimately dismissed the resulting suit on privilege grounds, an outcome that cuts both ways: it acquits the institution of lawbreaking while indicting the law itself.

And the law, not the Church, is where the seal is actually set. Wade Christofferson’s search asked about Ohio — because the answer depends entirely on which state’s statute applies. Per the AP’s fifty-state review, 33 states exempt clergy from their mandatory child-abuse reporting laws when the information comes through confession (Source 15); in most of those states clergy may still report what the law does not require them to report, while a few extend the seal further. So the standard we state — as a standard to be demanded, not one we claim is already in force — runs on two fronts, and we name both. Of the Church: that in every jurisdiction where a report is lawful, policy and the help line should treat a confession of ongoing harm to a child as a trumpet to be blown, not a seal to be kept. Of the law: that Latter-day Saints should be first in line, not last, to reform confessional exemptions where a child’s ongoing abuse is concerned — and here honesty requires the concession before the demand, because the same AP review found the Church among the religious institutions that have historically lobbied to preserve the privilege in state legislatures (Source 15). The better precedent is recent and close to home: in 2024 Utah enacted HB432, which — without breaching the privilege — expressly permits clergy to report ongoing abuse learned in confession and shields them from civil and criminal liability when they do; it passed both chambers unanimously, with no opposition from the Church (Source 17). That is the direction, and members should press for it in every statehouse. Ezekiel’s standard does not grade on procedure, and it does not grade on statute either: where the law sets the watchman’s duty lower than the Lord does, the covenant answer is to meet the Lord’s standard wherever it is lawful, and to change the law wherever it is not.

Joseph’s Friend: The Bennett Pattern

The Saints have seen this exact pattern before — at the very founding, involving the Prophet’s own trusted friend — and the parallel is instructive rather than embarrassing.

John C. Bennett arrived in Nauvoo in 1840: a physician, charming, capable, seemingly devoted. Within months he was mayor of Nauvoo and Assistant President of the Church. The Lord’s word concerning him, canonized in January 1841, was warm — and pointedly conditional: “his reward shall not fail if he receive counsel… I have seen the work which he hath done, which I accept if he continue” (D&C 124:16–17). He did not continue. Bennett was secretly using his office and a counterfeit doctrine he called “spiritual wifery” to seduce women in Nauvoo, telling them illicit relations were sanctioned. When first confronted in 1841, he wept, attempted suicide, and pleaded for mercy — and Joseph Smith, a man whose defining excess was love for his friends, extended it and kept the matter quiet. Bennett went back to his predation. By May 1842 he was expelled from the Church; the First Presidency published notice of his standing in the Times and Seasons (June 1842); and Bennett spent the rest of his energies as the Church’s most venomous public enemy, publishing his 1842 exposé The History of the Saints and lecturing against the Saints across the country (Source 12).

Note carefully what the Bennett episode establishes, because it is the interpretive key to the Christofferson case:

Mercy extended past its boundary is not a modern institutional corruption; it is the oldest failure mode of a covenant people. Joseph’s error with Bennett was not doctrine and not conspiracy — it was charity outrunning vigilance, forgiving a confession while leaving the man his access. The Lord had already flagged the condition (“if he continue”); the men administered the mercy without the condition.

The quiet handling protected no one. Keeping Bennett’s 1841 confession private felt like Christian discretion; it functioned as cover for continued predation — precisely as the 1996 adultery rumor functioned in Crystal Lake, where the congregation, never told the true cause of the excommunication, could not protect its daughters (Sources 1, 6).

The Church survived Bennett, and grew from him. The episode taught the Saints hard lessons about vetting, about the difference between confession and change, and about the cost of silence. The Christofferson case must be allowed to teach the same lessons, and a faithful people should be the first to insist on it, not the last.

Empathy, love of men, and forgiveness of others can be carried further than the Lord ever asked them to go. That sentence describes Nauvoo in 1841 and, on the evidence, Illinois in 1997. It does not describe a Church rotten at the root. It describes a Church of shepherds who keep learning — sometimes at terrible cost — that the wolf studies the shepherd’s kindness. We have learned by sad experience that mercy unbounded is not mercy at all; carried past the boundary the Lord Himself set, it becomes the wolf's own instrument — and the lambs pay for it.

A System Built in Real Time

The strongest factual context missing from most coverage: the mid-1990s discipline of Wade Christofferson occurred at the birth of the Church’s child-protection architecture — arguably occurred because of it.

1989 — The General Handbook adds abuse as a named category of transgression requiring action for the first time (Source 11).

1995 — Two mechanisms launch together: the 24-hour abuse help line connecting lay leaders with counselors and legal professionals, and the confidential membership-record annotation for members who have abused children — a flag that follows the record to any congregation in the world and bars its holder from callings involving children (Sources 7, 8). The Church describes itself as the first religious institution to create such a tracking mechanism.

Ongoing hardening — windows in all classrooms of new meetinghouses since 2006; the two-adult rule for all youth settings; mandatory youth-protection training; and current policy under which a membership council and record annotation are required — not optional — when an adult member abuses a child, with removal possible only by First Presidency approval (Sources 7, 9).

The Date Question, Handled Directly

Because the excommunication date determines whether an annotation was ever mandatory, this is the point critics will press hardest. So we set out the complete evidence and the complete logic, without shortcuts, and we do not choose the answer that suits us.

The evidence for late 1996. It is unusually well-anchored — this is not one man’s floating memory of a year. (a) Ed Nachel ties the council to three fixed points in his own life: his 1996 calling to the Buffalo Grove stake high council, his high priest ordination administered at the same time — a dated, recorded ordinance verifiable on his own membership record — and his statement that the council convened only a few months later, under stake president William Johnston, whose tenure ended in April 1997 (Sources 6, 13). (b) Kristin Dunbar Mautz’s disclosure to Bishop Jim Sherwood is fixed to December 1996 — she was home from college — and per her account it was that gathering of testimony which “ultimately led” to the excommunication (Sources 4, 6). This is causal sequence, not a recalled date: the discipline followed the December 1996 investigation. (c) Floodlit, which obtained church records in this case, dates the council to 1996 on the strength of both.

The evidence for earlier. The Church’s statements to media — there is no official news release; every statement is a private communication to a newsroom — have been rendered by reporters three ways: “mid-1990s” (Sun-Times, and the faithful analysis at Public Square summarizing the same statement), “more than 30 years ago” (Tribune, April 2026 — which, spoken in 2026, arithmetically implies before mid-1996), and, in one Tribune account, 1993 specifically (Sources 1, 4, 10). No primary document supporting any of these has been made public, and the Church has not published the statements on its own channels.

What the 1997 rebaptism proves — and what it does not. Some will reason: established discipline requires roughly a year before readmission; he was rebaptized in 1997; therefore excommunicated in 1996. That inference fails twice, and we decline to use it. First, the governing 1989 General Handbook of Instructions specified no minimum interval between excommunication and readmission (Source 6) — the one-year floor familiar to members today was not demonstrably operative then. Second, even granting a one-year norm, a 1997 rebaptism only bounds the excommunication at no later than roughly 1996 — which is consistent with 1996 and with 1993. Candidly, the process-timing consideration leans slightly toward the earlier date: under the eyewitness chronology, a man excommunicated for child sexual abuse was readmitted within months — permissible under the era’s handbook per Floodlit’s own research, but startling on its face; under the Church’s chronology the interval is a sober three to four years, and the spokesman’s phrase “following established disciplinary and confession processes” (Source 6) reads more naturally. The eyewitness case does not need the arithmetic and never claimed it; it rests on two independently anchored firsthand accounts. We state the tension because our readers will meet it, and an argument that hides its weakest flank has already lost.

A reconciliation hypothesis — labeled as hypothesis. A relative of one survivor reports that after Christofferson’s release from the bishopric around 1992, he “continued attending but didn’t take the sacrament” for some time (Source 6) — the visible signature of a formal disciplinary status. It is therefore possible that church records contain an earlier membership action circa 1992–93, in the era of the first reports to Bishop Donaldson, in addition to the late-1996 council the witnesses describe — and that the Church’s statements reference the earlier action while the witnesses describe the later one. Nothing published confirms this. We include it because it is the only account on which every piece of evidence — the Church’s dating, Nachel’s council, Mautz’s sequence, and the sacrament abstention — is simultaneously true, and readers deserve to know a reconciliation exists before assuming someone must be lying.

The Annotation, Under Every Chronology

Here is the branch analysis, done exhaustively, because this is where the case will actually be argued — and note before we begin that our conclusions are deliberately constructed so that no possible resolution of the date changes them.

Branch one: the excommunication predates 1995. Then it predates the annotation system entirely; no annotation was required or possible at the moment of discipline. Readmission, by the Church’s own published design, creates a new record with no trace of past discipline (Source 8) — so on this branch the clean record that followed the 1997 rebaptism required no one to scrub anything. It is the system’s default output. The residual question is retroactivity: the 1997 readmission itself occurred inside the annotation era, and the Church’s later-published description of the policy — annotations for members who “previously abused children” (Source 7) — expresses retroactive intent. But no one, critic or defender, has produced evidence of what 1997 operative procedure actually required for pre-policy cases, and we will not invent it in either direction. On this branch the failure is a retroactivity gap in a two-year-old system: no villain required, and a gap the Church’s subsequent policy evolution closed.

Branch two: the excommunication occurred in late 1996. Then it falls inside the annotation era, and exactly one of two things is true. Either an annotation was never placed — a placement failure in the system’s second year of operation — or it was placed and later removed, the claim one survivor attributes to a 2024 conversation with a stake president, dated by Floodlit to between roughly 1998 and 2006 (Source 6). That claim remains a single second-hand chain: uncorroborated, and to date neither confirmed nor denied publicly by the Church. If it is ever verified, it becomes the gravest institutional fact in this case, because under Church policy such a removal was possible only by First Presidency approval upon request of the stake president (Source 9) — and the Church would owe the Saints an accounting of who requested it, who approved it, and on what representations of repentance and risk. If it is never verified, this branch reduces to a placement failure. We will not pretend the removal claim is established, and we will not pretend it is refuted.

An internal check the critics’ case must pass. The removal claim and the early-date claim are in tension with each other. An annotation removed between 1998 and 2006 must have existed to survive the 1997 rebaptism — which presupposes it was placed, which presupposes the discipline (or at minimum the readmission processing) generated one inside the annotation era. A critic cannot simultaneously maximize “the Church excommunicated him way back in 1993, before its protective systems” and “the Church removed his protective annotation” — the second claim quietly requires the chronology that the first denies, unless the annotation was applied at the 1997 readmission, which is precisely the retroactivity question no one has evidenced. We point this out not to score points but because it demonstrates the state of the record: the strongest accusations do not yet cohere into a single account, which is what “unestablished” means.

What holds on every branch — the load-bearing conclusions. Three, and the reader should verify that none depends on resolving the date:

First: on no chronology consistent with the evidence does the public record establish intent. Every branch terminates in inadequacy — a retroactivity gap, a placement failure, or an unexplained administrative act whose authorization and rationale are unknown — and never in demonstrated, documented concealment directed by church leadership. Inadequacy in a system being built in real time is a fundamentally different moral fact than conspiracy, and the distinction between them is the difference between an institution that needs reform and one that deserves abandonment.

Second: on every chronology, the 1997 readmission of a man excommunicated for child sexual abuse was centrally processed during the annotation era — the handbook of that period required stake presidents to notify headquarters of both the excommunication and the rebaptism (Source 6). So the Church’s later public representation that readmitted abusers are “permanently marked” and precluded from ever again serving with children (Source 8) is contradicted by this case’s outcome on every branch, and members may fairly — faithfully — ask the institution to account for how, and to demonstrate that the gap this case reveals is closed.

Third: on every chronology, the man who abused children was excommunicated for it, decades before any court, reporter, or database forced the issue, by an institution that was among the only ones on earth formally disciplining lay members for abuse at all (Source 8). Critics must explain the discipline; defenders must explain the record. Honest readers will insist on both, and this article has tried to be an honest reader.

We do not know which chronology is true, and we decline to pretend otherwise. The publicly available record — as even the critics’ own sources lay it out — documents inadequacy, not conspiracy. The faithful commentary at Public Square Magazine reached the same conclusion reviewing the same reporting: the outline of the Church’s response “is not the outline of an established institutional cover-up” (Source 10).

Where the Criticism Is Fair — Because the Lord’s Standard Says So

An apologetic that concedes nothing convinces no one, and worse, it fails the standard the Lord sets for us. So let us say plainly what a faithful member can and should acknowledge:

The victims were failed. Kristin Dunbar Mautz reported her abuse to her bishop around 1991. Formal discipline did not come for roughly five years, during part of which the man she reported sat in the bishopric. Whatever the explanations, a child asked her shepherds for protection and watched her abuser on the stand. She has said she was made to feel she received “a punishment” instead of protection (Source 4). That she remains a committed Latter-day Saint seeking reform, rather than an enemy of the Church, is a grace the institution did not earn from her — and her call for better protection deserves to be heard from within the household of faith, not only from its critics.

The congregation was left unwarned. The adultery rumor of 1996–97, whatever its origin, meant families in Crystal Lake — and later Dublin — made decisions about their children without the one fact that mattered. Confidentiality in Church discipline serves real goods: it protects victims’ privacy, protects the repentance process, and reflected the policy and, per the Church’s statement, the Illinois law of that era (Source 4). But Ezekiel’s standard does not grade on procedure: “if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet… his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand” (Ezekiel 33:6). Jacob took the errors of his people upon his own head if he failed to teach with diligence (Jacob 1:19). The watchman standard is ours, chosen by covenant. We do not get to invoke a lower one when the trumpet stayed silent. This is still an issue today - annotations don't warn the congregation just the Bishop, yet the state register does. Which settles the question of whose responsibility the warning is — it is divided by design, the Church's watchman at the gates and the state's record over the pasture — and it is why the single act that connects the two halves, the lawful report to civil authority, carries more protective weight than any other decision a leader who knows can make. The trumpet of Ezekiel, in our day, is sometimes a phone call.

The system’s promise and this case’s outcome do not match. The Church publicly represents that readmitted abusers are permanently barred from serving with children. Wade Christofferson served in bishoprics for years. On every available chronology, that gap is real, and acknowledging it is not disloyalty — it is the precondition of fixing it. Members are entitled to ask, respectfully and persistently, that the Brethren account for how the annotation system performed here, and strengthen whatever failed. The Lord Himself rebukes covering of sins and unrighteous dominion among priesthood holders in the sharpest terms in scripture (D&C 121:37); a people who canonized that verse cannot object when it is applied.

Moses Struck the Rock — and the Water Still Came

Having conceded real failures, the faithful reader now faces the question underneath every question in this case: if the shepherds can fail this badly, what becomes of the flock’s faith? The Restoration has a doctrine for exactly this, and it is not a modern apologetic improvisation — it is as old as Sinai.

At Meribah, a weary Moses stood before a murmuring Israel and lost his composure: “Hear now, ye rebels,” he shouted, and struck the rock twice when the Lord had commanded him only to speak to it (Numbers 20:8–12). Mark what happened next, because both halves are doctrine. The water still came. God did not let the prophet’s error cost the people their water; the flock drank because the Lord’s covenant with the flock did not depend on the perfection of the man holding the staff. And Moses answered for it: “ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.” The greatest prophet of the old covenant, the man who spoke with God face to face, was corrected, held accountable, and barred from Canaan for a failure of exactness — and the work of Israel continued across the Jordan without missing a step, under Joshua, unhindered.

That is the pattern, and the Restoration canonized it about its own founder in real time. When Joseph Smith lost the 116 manuscript pages through misplaced trust in a man who begged him — note the shape of that error: charity and the fear of men overriding a clear boundary, the same shape as everything in this article — the Lord’s response held both truths in one revelation: “The works, and the designs, and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught… although a man may have many revelations, and have power to do many mighty works, yet if he boasts in his own strength, and sets at naught the counsels of God… he must fall” (D&C 3:1–10). Joseph was rebuked, chastened, temporarily stripped of his gift — and told he was “still chosen,” conditionally, if he repented. The Lord announced at the very door of this dispensation that He would do His work through men who would err: He called “the weak things of the world” and explained why the revelations come “unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language… and inasmuch as they erred it might be made known; and inasmuch as they sought wisdom they might be instructed” (D&C 1:24–28). Erring servants are not a defeater the critics discovered; they are a premise the Lord published in the preface.

Apply the pattern to this case and it holds at every joint. Bishops, a stake presidency, and a records system failed in the 1990s — and the water still came: the gospel preached in Crystal Lake was still true, the ordinances administered were still valid, and the covenant Kristin Dunbar Mautz kept as a wounded girl still bound heaven, which is surely part of why she is still keeping it. Leaders erred — and accountability is not optional: Moses did not enter Canaan, Joseph lost the pages and the gift for a season, and the men and systems that failed these children owe an accounting under the same standard, which this article has demanded rather than waived. And the work continued unhindered — not in the sense that no one was hurt, God forbid, but in the scriptural sense that the kingdom’s course does not depend on the flawlessness of its stewards: the stone cut out of the mountain without hands rolls forth until it fills the whole earth (Daniel 2:44–45; D&C 65:2), and it has rolled straight through Bennett’s betrayal, Kirtland’s collapse, Missouri’s failures, and every mortal weakness of every man who ever carried it.

The critic’s syllogism is: the leaders failed, therefore the Church is false. The scriptural record’s syllogism is: the leaders failed, the leaders answered for it, and the work rolled on — therefore the work was never resting on the leaders. A member who loses faith over the fallibility of stewards has accepted the critic’s premise that the Church was ever supposed to be a church of infallible men. It never claimed to be. It claims to be the kingdom of the God who gave water through a disobedient striking of the rock — and who then, because He is just, dealt with Moses.

What the Record Does Not Establish

Having conceded what honesty requires, we now refuse what honesty forbids:

It does not establish a cover-up directed by Church leadership. No document, witness, or record in the public domain shows any general authority ordering concealment, altering records, or protecting Wade Christofferson from law enforcement. The one leader whose conduct is documented — his brother — reported within hours when a child was at risk (Source 4). The claims of record-tampering remain a single uncorroborated hearsay chain (Source 6). They may yet be proven; they have not been.

It does not establish that the Church enabled the crimes he pleaded guilty to. The federal case concerns conduct that occurred off church property and outside church activity (Source 3). The Church’s severest available sanction had been imposed on him decades earlier, and the men who imposed it — per the high councilor who sat in the room — believed the matter had been dealt with. They were wrong about the man. Being wrong about a man’s repentance is a tragedy the Savior Himself warned would occur among the wheat; it is not the same as sponsoring the tares.

It does not establish that the doctrine is the disease. Every failure identifiable in this case is a failure to apply the tradition’s own teachings — the millstone, the watchman, the conditional “if he continue” — not a consequence of them. The critics ask you to conclude that a church which believes in redemption is therefore structurally unsafe for children. The Bennett episode, the 1995 reforms, and the Church’s own handbook refute the inference: the tradition contains, and has repeatedly acted on, exactly the corrective principles this case demands.

Conclusion: For the One and the Ninety-Nine

The Church of Jesus Christ is a hospital for sinners that is also, every Sunday, full of children. Those two facts create a tension that no policy fully dissolves and no honest member should deny. We are commanded to leave the ninety-nine for the one — and commanded to see that the one, restored, never again finds himself alone with the lambs. Wade Christofferson’s guilt is his own, and it is now confessed before God and the courts of the land. The failures around him were failures of mercy administered without its boundary — whether by good men or by a young system built to carry their mercy for them, the record does not yet say — the same failure, in either form, that Joseph’s generation made with Joseph’s friend, and repented of, and built better because of.

Our task now is the same as theirs: to grieve with and honor the survivors, foremost among them a faithful sister who reported as a child and stayed in the covenant anyway; to demand of our institution the full rigor of its own stated protections, and transparency about how they performed here; to refuse both the critic’s counsel of cynicism and the apologist’s counsel of silence; and to hold, in the same believing heart, the open hand and the millstone — because the Lord who commands the first is the Lord who pronounced the second, and He did not contradict Himself.

Everything argued above reduces to a single ruling. Here it is, without hedging.

The Verdict

Wade Christofferson alone bears the guilt for the crimes he has now confessed — hands-on abuse of two children under the age of ten. The Church excommunicated him for child abuse decades before any court, reporter, or database forced the issue, and — by its own account (Source 8) — was among the only religious institutions then disciplining lay members for abuse at all. On every chronology the public record supports, what it reveals is institutional inadequacy in a child-protection system being built in real time — a placement gap, a retroactivity gap, or an unexplained administrative act whose authorization is unknown — and never a leadership-directed cover-up.

Every failure identifiable here is a failure to apply the tradition’s own teachings — the millstone, the watchman, the conditional “if he continue” — not a consequence of them. Nor is it a defect in doctrine, though honesty requires drawing the line carefully: the doctrine of confession — sacred, and rightly confidential — is not the same thing as the pre-1995 administrative practice of leaving a disciplined predator’s record unmarked and his congregation unwarned. That silence, not the doctrine, was the danger; the confidential annotation introduced in 1995 is the tradition’s own remedy for it, and this case shows the remedy reached Wade Christofferson too late and, on the public record, imperfectly.

And now the final ruling, the one this case is actually being used to litigate. Was the gospel false when Peter denied Christ three times in a single night? When John C. Bennett taught “spiritual wifery” from the office of Assistant President of the Church? When Moses struck the rock in disobedience — and the water still came? The critic’s syllogism — the stewards failed, therefore the Church is false — proves too much: it would unmake every covenant people God has ever led through mortal hands, including the one that walked with Christ Himself. The truth of the Restoration has never rested on the flawlessness of the men carrying it; the Lord said so in the preface to the Doctrine and Covenants, in advance, about His own servants (D&C 1:24–28). So let the record resolve however it resolves. If an annotation was never placed, that is a failure requiring repair. If one was placed and removed, that is a failure requiring an accounting — of who requested it, who approved it, and on what representations — and this article has demanded that accounting rather than waived it. What no resolution of that question can do is falsify the Book of Mormon, revoke the priesthood, or unmake the Restoration, because the Church was never true on the theory that its stewards were incapable of failure. It is true, if it is true, on the same ground it has always claimed: that God restored His work through weak and erring men and commanded them — and us — to answer for the erring.

The ruling is therefore neither the critic’s (a Church rotten at the root) nor the complacent apologist’s (nothing to answer for): it is a Church whose doctrine held, whose confidentiality practice once outran its duty to protect, whose safeguards in this instance fell short — and whose truth was never on trial in this courtroom, though its duty to prove the gap is shut most certainly is.

Sources and Verification

Direct sources retrieved and relied on in this article. Readers are encouraged to verify every claim.

Chicago Sun-Times, “Questions cloud Mormon church handling of suburban congregation’s ex-leader accused of abusing minors,” Mar. 5, 2026 — includes the Church’s statement on President Christofferson and Ed Nachel’s account. Link
Chicago Sun-Times, “Accused of molesting kids, ex-Chicago area Mormon figure is ordered held as feds reveal more possible victims,” May 1, 2026. Link
Chicago Sun-Times, “Former Chicago-area Mormon figure pleads guilty to child sex crime, could face life in prison,” Jul. 9, 2026. Link
Salt Lake Tribune, “New accuser emerges in Wade Christofferson case. LDS Church addresses what his apostle brother knew,” Apr. 25, 2026 (paywalled) — Kristin Dunbar Mautz’s account; the Church’s statement including the “more than 30 years ago” characterization and reporting-within-hours. Link
Salt Lake Tribune, “Brother of LDS apostle D. Todd Christofferson pleads guilty to coercing and enticing a minor,” Jul. 9, 2026 (paywalled). Link
Floodlit.org, Wade S. Christofferson case file — an advocacy-oriented abuse database; used here for church records it reports obtaining (callings 2006–2025), survivor interviews, the disciplinary timeline, and its verbatim reproductions of church statements to media. Note: Floodlit reproduces material adverse to its own editorial thesis (e.g., church statements), a marker of fidelity, but its unverified claims are labeled as such in this article. Link
Church Newsroom, “How the Church Approaches Abuse” — help line (1995), annotation system, calling restrictions, facility design. Link
Church Newsroom (UK), “Effectiveness of Church Approach to Preventing Child Abuse” — excommunication of lay members for abuse; permanent annotation on readmission; new-record process. Link
General Handbook, ch. 38.6.2 (Abuse) and 32.14.5 (Annotations), churchofjesuschrist.org — membership council and annotation required for adult abuse of a child; annotation removal only with First Presidency approval. Link
Public Square Magazine, “Assignment Bias in the Wade Christofferson Case,” Mar. 31, 2026 — faithful analysis of the media framing; renders the Church’s statement as “mid-1990s” excommunication, 1997 readmission. Link
Gregory A. Prince research excerpts, 1989 General Handbook of Instructions summary of changes (Mormon Studies, University of Virginia) — first handbook treatment of abuse as a named category. Link
On John C. Bennett: Doctrine & Covenants 124:16–17; Times and Seasons (Nauvoo), June 1842 notices of Bennett’s standing; John C. Bennett, The History of the Saints (1842); see also Andrew F. Smith, The Saintly Scoundrel: The Life and Times of Dr. John Cook Bennett (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997). Primary documents at josephsmithpapers.org.
Mormon Stories Podcast, interview with former stake high councilor Ed Nachel, published Feb. 25, 2026 — firsthand account of the 1996 disciplinary council.
Church News, “Study help for President D. Todd Christofferson,” Nov. 2025 — confirms his call as a general authority in 1993 and setting apart as second counselor in the First Presidency on Oct. 14, 2025. Link
Associated Press (Michael Rezendes et al.), investigation into the Church’s abuse help line and the Paul Adams case, Bisbee, Arizona, Aug. 2022; and companion AP review, “33 states exempt clergy from mandatory reporting” (Sept. 2022) — the fifty-state survey of clergy-penitent exemptions and legislative history, including religious institutions’ lobbying to preserve the privilege.
Church Newsroom response to the Associated Press reporting, Aug. 2022 — the Church’s statement disputing the AP’s characterization of the help line’s function in the Adams case.
Utah HB432, “Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Amendments” (2024, Rep. Anthony Loubet) — permits clergy to report ongoing abuse or neglect learned through confession and extends civil and criminal liability protections to clergy who report; passed the House 64–0 and Senate 26–0. Text at le.utah.gov; coverage in Deseret News, Feb. 16, 2024.