On the evening of October 4, 2020, Nomdo Schuitema stood in front of his congregation at The Door in Zwolle. He called the Reformatorisch Dagblad’s reporting on his predecessor “clickbait and the lowest form of journalism.” In the same address, he confirmed something the paper had not yet reported. A second woman, previously unknown to the church board, had come forward days earlier with her own account of Evert Valk. A transcript of that meeting survives. It is Schuitema’s own account, in his own words, of two years he spent managing what his church calls “moral failure.”
A second woman, one week before he spoke
Schuitema had already told the congregation something once. The previous Sunday, September 27, he announced during the service that Valk had to leave permanently. Multiple sources confirmed the statement to the RD that week. What Schuitema did not explain then, he laid out a week later. On a Thursday evening, he said, he received a phone call from a woman the church had never heard from. She described an incident with Valk from years earlier, one he “partially confessed” to when confronted. That was enough. The church removed him again the following Saturday, and this time, in Schuitema’s words, “he cannot come back.”
Read against the RD’s own timeline, the sequence is telling. The paper’s exposé on Valk’s decades of conduct in Zwolle ran the week before, on September 25, as the first installment of an eight-part series. It named a woman the paper called Niene, detailed her account of a pastoral relationship that turned sexual, and set her story inside a wider pattern the paper had spent months documenting. A cult specialist the RD consulted, Bram Krol, told the paper the full picture was worse than he had assumed going in. Then, four days into the series, the new accusation surfaced. Still, Schuitema never draws that connection out loud in his address. Instead, he treats the second woman’s call as a fresh, unrelated matter rather than a foreseeable consequence of two decades spent minimizing the first one.
The story Schuitema chose to tell
To explain the permanent removal, Schuitema walked the congregation back to April 2018. Several people had gone to the church council that month. They reported that Valk was asking women to help film videos for a teen camp, built around Proverbs 7’s warning against the seductress who leads a young man to his death.
Proverbs 7:22-23 (KJV) describes the young man following her “as an ox goeth to the slaughter,” until a dart strikes through his liver, “as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life.” That is the passage Valk chose as his visual theme. Some women read it aloud on camera. Others were asked to slaughter a live fish while he filmed. The council called it strange and told him to stop, delete the footage, and apologize. He agreed, and Schuitema said the board took him at his word.
Two months later, in June 2018, a couple approached the council with a different report: sexual contact between Valk and a woman in the congregation. The board confronted him that Sunday afternoon and removed him as pastor immediately. But removal did not mean exile. Instead, Valk went under six months of internal “discipline,” then returned to Zwolle as an ordinary member, still living in the city, still connected to the church he had led for twenty years. Schuitema became his successor. By his own account, he informed The Fellowship’s Dutch pastors only that Valk had left over unspecified “moral failure,” a phrase vague enough to protect a friend while satisfying the minimum expectation of disclosure.
What he admitted, and what he minimized
Schuitema did not deny the fish ritual. He confirmed it happened to “some people,” alongside the Bible readings, and called it “bizarre.” But he drew a hard line between that pattern and the sexual misconduct, telling the congregation there had been “no more incidents with physical contact” tied to it. The RD’s own reporting complicates that framing. Journalists there documented that the woman at the center of the case had independently gathered the names of roughly a dozen women and girls who had performed the ritual. Some were as young as twelve. Schuitema’s account to his own members was narrower than the picture reporters were assembling at the same time.
He was more direct about the standing rule Valk had broken. Every pastor in The Fellowship, he told the congregation, is taught never to be alone with a woman who is not his wife, without a third person present. Valk ignored that instruction for the better part of two decades in Zwolle. Schuitema called it “a very serious violation of our Fellowship policy,” a rare moment in the address where he named the failure as structural rather than personal.
Calling the reporting “clickbait”
What Schuitema did not treat as structural was the newspaper series itself. He dismissed the RD’s eight-part investigation, built on named survivors, internal church knowledge, and a cult specialist’s independent review, as “clickbait and the lowest form of journalism.” That line came at the very end of his address, after he had spent nearly an hour walking members through two years of failures. It is the same instinct documented elsewhere inside Christian Fellowship Ministries: criticism of a pastor is rarely engaged on its merits. Instead, it gets recast as an attack on the church itself. Reporters asking questions become the threat. Meanwhile, the record of abuse they uncovered becomes secondary to the offense of having uncovered it at all.
This is not unique to Schuitema. The pattern traces back to founder Wayman Mitchell, who built a fellowship where a pastor’s authority is treated as functionally unquestionable. Schuitema’s own language in the meeting reflects that inheritance. He reminded members that pastors can be approached with questions, but the framing throughout was pastoral care extended downward, not accountability owed upward. Nowhere in the transcript does he ask why a system built on that model let one man operate unsupervised with women and girls for over twenty years.
A structure built to protect the office, not the flock
Scripture The Fellowship claims to honor says something different about pastoral authority. Peter told elders to shepherd the flock “not as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3, KJV). That standard assumes a pastor is answerable, watched, and correctable, not a figure whose missteps get managed quietly to protect the pulpit.
Valk’s two decades in Zwolle ran on the opposite premise. So did the six months of “discipline” that returned him to ordinary membership instead of removing him from the community entirely. So did a new pastor’s decision to frame a newspaper’s confirmed reporting as the real offense rather than the record it forced into the open. Each of these choices protected continuity for the office and the network ahead of protection for the women involved.
Two women, years apart, are the reason Valk finally left Zwolle for good. Neither the church council in 2018 nor Schuitema in his first Sunday statement got there on their own. It took outside reporting to force a permanent decision the internal process had already had two years to make. Yet Schuitema closed his address by telling members to come to him with their questions, framing accessibility as the fix. The harder question, the one the transcript never answers, is why a structure this closed needed two newspapers and two women’s testimony before it acted at all. A pastor who is truly accountable, in the sense Peter described, should not require outside journalism to enforce the rules his own church already claims to teach.
What the transcript could not settle
Schuitema framed the October 4 meeting as the moment the church closed the matter. It was not. The woman who reported the June 2018 relationship filed a police report that November, and the case eventually reached the Zwolle district court. There, prosecutors sought a contact ban and community service, arguing Valk had abused a position of pastoral trust. Valk did not deny the sexual contact. He called it consensual. In the end, the court acquitted him of the specific charge, ruling that prosecutors had not proven the formal authority the law required, even though it found the sexual contact itself had occurred. That outcome is covered in more detail separately.
