Greater Grace World Outreach should fire four top pastors and distance itself from controversial founder Carl Stevens, according to an explosive report issued by an independent faith-based organization that was hired to conduct an investigation of the church.

The 172-page report, the culmination of a 14-month investigation by Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or GRACE, is strongly critical of the response of Greater Grace leaders to allegations of abuse within the Evangelical megachurch, which is headquartered in East Baltimore.

“Current senior leaders have demonstrated a deep-seated resistance to accountability, transparency, and change,” the investigators wrote. “It is GRACE’s firm conclusion that lasting, meaningful change at an institutional level cannot be achieved under the current leadership.”

Senior pastor Thomas Schaller, director of missions Steven Scibelli, youth pastor John Love and youth ministry director Pete Westera should be removed from “positions of authority and influence within the church,” they wrote.

Greater Grace leaders hired GRACE in 2024 to conduct an outside investigation of the church following the publication of a series of articles in The Baltimore Banner examining long-standing allegations of sexual abuse by pastors and other high-ranking church members.

The church, which has more than 100 offshoots around the world, paid the organization $100,000 to conduct the investigation, which began in September 2024.

Read the full report below

The Banner’s investigation of Greater Grace focused on the work of The Millstones, a group of former church members who uncovered decades of allegations of child sexual abuse and cover-ups within the organization. Each one of them had a friend or relative who survived abuse.

The Millstones spoke to 32 people who said they had been sexually abused by men of the church, in many cases pastors or prominent volunteers. They also heard 18 additional secondhand allegations of abuse.

In the 18 months since The Banner’s investigation was published, civil lawsuits have piled up that accuse church leaders of failing to protect former members from sexual abuse they say they suffered as children. Church leaders also expelled two pastors accused of sexual misconduct. Both are named in the report.

In August, former Greater Grace pastor Eric Anderson, 80, was arrested in Florida, four months after a Massachusetts grand jury indicted him for child sexual abuse. The crime is alleged to have occurred in 1980, when Anderson lived in and worked at the church’s former headquarters in western Massachusetts.

Before being apprehended in Florida on a fugitive from justice charge, Anderson had been living in rural Virginia with his son Jesse Anderson, who was convicted of molesting a boy in the church but did not serve prison time for his felony offenses. Another son, Jonathan Anderson, has also been accused of abuse, though he has not been charged with a crime. The Anderson family’s extensive alleged misconduct — and church leaders’ inaction — was a focus of The Banner’s series.

The GRACE report includes new and previously undisclosed accounts of abuse known within church leadership, with the church providing investigators access to its internal files. Several pages of the report concern the son of a pastor who was accused of abusing an 8-year-old as a teen and later became an ordained pastor.

The report said that his ordination was revoked, but the church’s overall “watered-down response was a disservice not only to the victim but to [the alleged abuser] and the rest of the church and left the door open for potential further abuse.”

Messages sent to pastor Peter Taggart, a church spokesperson, and Schaller were not immediately returned late Thursday night.

In a statement posted to its website Thursday night, church elders said they “find the report sobering and our hearts are heavy as we process the facts that anyone under the spiritual care of influence of GGWO was ever abused. Period.”

“We ask the church to give us some time to fully digest the report and to respond thoroughly and appropriately,” the elders wrote, adding that they would provide a more comprehensive response within the next month and would give “careful consideration to all the recommendations” and be “transparent and accountable as to how we will proceed.”

“May the Lord help us,” the statement concluded.