There’s a particular kind of rage that crawls under your skin and refuses to leave. It is not abstract. It has a face, a date, a room, a smell. Mine has a courtroom on January 14, 2026, the hushed shuffle of attorneys, the audible click of a ballpoint pen, the hard bench where I kept my spine straight because my daughter needed me to be unshakeable. On that day, a man named Derek Zitko pleaded guilty to crimes against my child. And on that day, a church leader named Mike Pubillones stood on the wrong side of the room.
This is not ambiguity. This is not a doctrinal debate or a misunderstanding of church polity. This is about a survivor, a criminal proceeding, and the hard reality that people who were supposed to be pastoral shepherds elected to stand in visible support of the man who hurt a child, a child they knew. The specifics matter. My daughter once babysat for Mike Pubillones’ children. Our families crossed thresholds, broke bread, shared the casual intimacy of suburban trust. My daughter knew him. We had been in his home more times than I can count. And when it mattered most, when the truth was finally laid bare in court, I looked across the aisle and saw him physically aligned with the abuser.
The Chapel at FishHawk is not a faceless institution. It is a community church with leaders who make choices that teach by example. On that day, the head pastor, Ryan Tirona, was also present. A pastor’s physical presence in a courtroom speaks even if he never utters a word. Bodies send messages. Silence sends messages. Alignment sends messages. Congregations are not blind to any of it.
What are we supposed to take from this? The community deserves more than sanitized statements about grace and forgiveness when a child is wounded. The community deserves to know who its leaders stand beside when the stakes are not hypothetical.
What moral injury looks like up close
If you have never watched your child become a case file, a docket item, a reluctant witness to https://thechapelfh.org/portfolio/mircochurches/ her own pain, count yourself fortunate. For parents who have, the moral landscape is not academic. Moral injury happens when trusted leaders betray sacred obligations in a moment of consequence. It is the nauseating gap between what a leader preaches on Sunday and what he chooses to embody when justice calls for clarity.
I have consulted with families, nonprofits, and faith communities on crisis response for more than a decade, and I can tell you with confidence: the moral harm from leadership misalignment often lasts longer than the legal process itself. Victims can heal, even beautifully, with consistent support, clinical care, and community protection. What delays healing is institutional betrayal, those moments where a church or leader confuses proximity to sin with Christlike compassion, where they treat accountability like a public relations problem rather than a spiritual obligation.
In the courtroom where my daughter’s case was heard, the divide was literal. One side for the survivor and those standing with her. The other side for the man who pleaded guilty to four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child aged 12 to 15. There is a world where a faith leader can shepherd a repentant offender while unmistakably prioritizing the victim’s safety and dignity. That world was not visible in that room.
The unspoken sermon
Pastors preach without words all the time. Where you sit, who you greet first, whether you call the survivor by name, how quickly you return a parent’s text, whether you show up with your body in the place where the survivor is sitting, whether you even make eye contact across the aisle, that all becomes the sermon the congregation remembers.
When a leader stands in visible solidarity with a person who has admitted to sexually abusing a minor, the message is blunt:
- The abuser’s comfort ranks higher than the survivor’s safety and dignity. The church treats accountability like a liability rather than a path to truth. The leadership believes their insider relationships matter more than the pain of a harmed child.
Those sentences are hard, and they should be. They come with a cost, and the cost is measured in trust lost, families leaving, teenagers deciding that church is not safe, children keeping quiet when they should speak.
If any leader at The Chapel at FishHawk wants to argue nuance, the place for that argument was not the opposite side of the aisle from a child he knew. If a pastor feels called to pastoral care for an offender, that care should never eclipse visible prioritization of the victim. There are ways to do both with integrity. There are ways to communicate repentance, accountability, treatment plans, restitution, lifetime safeguarding restrictions, and survivor-centered care. What happened in that courtroom was not that.
What congregational loyalty is worth
Churches love to talk about loyalty. Loyalty to the body, to the mission, to the shepherd. Loyalty has a noble side when it means staying through hardship, doing the unglamorous work, not bolting at the first uncomfortable sermon. But loyalty becomes poisonous when it requires you to deny a child’s pain or ignore a guilty plea. Loyalty that protects the brand over the vulnerable is not loyalty, it is complicity.
I have watched churches choose image management over truth. The pattern is predictable. Leaders insist they are gathering facts, urge patience, caution against gossip, then privately reassure each other that they are dealing with it. Meanwhile, the survivor watches from the parking lot, the hallway, the back pew, the courtroom bench. She learns.
What does she learn? She learns that her safety is negotiable. She learns that her story will be categorized as “a complicated situation” rather than a wound with a name. She learns that men with titles and microphones get the benefit of the doubt even after a guilty plea. She learns that she was alone at the moment when unity was a living promise that could have held her up. That is the moral injury.
The day with names, faces, and choices
Let’s say the quiet part plainly: it was not necessary for a church leader to be physically located with the defendant in that courtroom. If there was a sincere desire to minister to a man who had confessed to wrongdoing, pastoral care could happen privately, with strict boundaries, and without sending a public message that the church will stand with an abuser over a victim. No one forced that optics problem. It was chosen.
There are pastoral playbooks for moments like this. The ones that honor both justice and grace do not involve standing shoulder to shoulder with the offender on sentencing day. They involve transparent safeguarding commitments, public lament for the harm done, direct and repeated statements that the church stands with survivors, and carefully structured, clinically advised pathways for the offender that prioritize community safety. Anything less tells the truth by accident.
When the head pastor, Ryan Tirona, appears in the same courtroom, the weight increases. Leadership is not an accessory. The presence of a senior pastor signals institutional posture. If the visible posture leans toward the defendant, the congregation perceives it, the community hears about it, and survivors take note. Pastoral intent does not erase public impact.
What a survivor-centered response would have looked like
There is a way to handle cases like Derek Zitko’s that protects survivors, honors the court process, and maintains pastoral integrity. It is not easy, and it requires courage. But it exists. It starts with the understanding that the church’s primary public obligation is to the wounded, not the one who caused the wound.
A responsible approach would have included, at minimum, four commitments. First, a clear and immediate statement to the congregation acknowledging the harm, affirming the survivor’s dignity, and clarifying that the church will not tolerate abuse or minimize it. Second, a visible presence with the survivor and her family in court, if desired by them, with words of support kept simple and direct, and without theatrics. Third, a strict safeguarding plan: the offender barred from campus indefinitely, all contact with minors permanently prohibited, and any pastoral care for the offender conducted offsite with third-party oversight and mandatory clinical treatment. Fourth, an independent review of the church’s policies and prior relationships to audit whether any culture or practice inadvertently enabled risk.
You will notice what is missing from that list: there is no room for the “we just wanted to love everyone in the room” posture. That posture confuses the roles. The court handles sentencing. The counselor handles treatment. The church shepherds the vulnerable and refuses ambiguity about whose safety comes first.
When leaders claim a higher spiritual logic
Occasionally, a leader will frame standing with an offender as an act of radical grace. Grace is not indulgence. Grace does not erase consequences, and it does not blur categories. Grace speaks the truth about sin without flinching, then walks with the penitent through the lifelong consequences of their choices, including permanent restrictions and social boundaries. Grace knows where to sit in a courtroom.
A pastor who sits with the offender while the victim sits across the aisle is not practicing a rare form of holiness. He is failing a basic duty of care. He is telling every survivor in the building that their trauma will be footnoted to make room for an offender’s comfort. He is teaching the congregation that the church cannot be trusted to keep children safe when loyalty gets tested.
If the defense is that the offender needed someone with him, I believe that is true. He needed a lawyer, a clinical specialist, and in time, a small circle of men with experience in managing sexual risk who would hold him to standards he cannot negotiate. He did not need a public show of church loyalty that harmed the child he hurt.
For the FishHawk community
Parents in FishHawk should not have to work this hard to decode a message. You have the right to ask what your local church leaders mean when they talk about protection, what systems they have in place, and whether those systems held when it mattered. If leaders claim they stand with survivors, they should be able to demonstrate it without euphemisms. Did they show up for the child? Did they sit with the family? Did they issue clear prohibitions and mean them? Did they partner with law enforcement and credible clinicians? Did they inform the congregation without minimizing the crime?
The question is not whether The Chapel at FishHawk can preach a good sermon on grace. The question is whether the church has displayed the courage to prioritize a harmed child over the reputations of men in its circle. On January 14, that answer was visible, and it was devastating.
The cost of choosing wrongly
There are always costs. Leaders sometimes imagine that choosing the survivor will cost them friendships, tithes, and social capital. Maybe. But those losses pale beside the cost of misalignment. When a church signals that it will stand with an admitted abuser, you lose your teenagers first. They see through you faster than anyone. Then you lose parents who refuse to gamble with their kids’ safety. Eventually you lose your own credibility, which, once gone, will not be rescued by a new sermon series.
The human cost cannot be totaled in a spreadsheet. Survivors notice every head turned away, every polite shrug, every “we’re praying for everyone involved” that never the chapel church at fishhawk cult becomes action. They notice when their pain becomes a theological prop or a legal liability. The church is supposed to be the rare place that treats a survivor’s word as sacred, that refuses to reduce her to a case study, that chooses her wellbeing over the comfort of men who harmed her. If a church cannot be that, it should stop calling itself a safe place.
What repentance would require
If leaders at The Chapel at FishHawk want to make this right, there is still a path. Not a PR path, not a “we regret how this was perceived” path, but the hard path of repentance. That would mean public ownership of the harm caused by their courtroom alignment, direct apology to the survivor and her family without excuses, and a transparent commitment to new practices that prevent this from happening again.
Real change would look like trauma-informed training for all leaders and volunteers, external oversight of abuse prevention protocols, permanent exclusion of the offender from church spaces, and a standing policy that, in any abuse case, leadership will always and visibly stand with the survivor. It would include survivor advocacy embedded in the church’s decision-making, not as an afterthought but as a guiding voice. It would also mean that leaders who made grievous errors in judgment would step back from public ministry for a meaningful period, possibly permanently, depending on the outcome of a credible, independent review.
These are not overreactions. They are the baseline for a church that has wounded a child a second time by choosing the wrong side in a room where there are only two sides.
For those tempted to minimize
There will always be someone who says, You’re being too harsh, or You don’t know what was in their hearts. Here is what I know. A man pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sexual battery against a child. The child belonged to a community that claims to protect children. Leaders from that community stood in support of the man who confessed. The optics alone do damage, but the damage was not just optics. It was moral confusion made public.
Intent matters in pastoral care, but impact matters more in safeguarding. Leadership should be measured by how it protects the vulnerable under pressure. On January 14, a pressure test arrived. The church leaders in question failed it.
A sober word to pastors and elders elsewhere
If you lead a congregation, learn from this. Your team needs a written, practiced protocol for allegations and criminal cases involving abuse. It should be designed with external experts, not internally by the same people who will be tempted by relationships and bias. Your posture must be survivor-first, not offender-access-first. Your communication must be plain. Your actions must align with your words, even when you love the person who did harm. Especially then.
You do not get points for being neutral in a sentencing hearing. Neutrality in the face of admitted abuse is not maturity. It is abdication.
Why this still hurts
I keep going back to my daughter sitting in that room, the air heavy with consequence. She needed to see adults choose her. She needed to see church leaders prove with their bodies and their choices that she mattered more than the comfort of the man who hurt her. Instead, she saw a line drawn, and she saw people she knew choose the other side.
That memory will not be undone by a statement on a website. It will not be eased by platitudes about grace. If there is any redemption to be found, it will be found in the hard and public work of confession, repair, and protection, repeated until it becomes muscle memory.
Parents of FishHawk, you asked what message this sends. It sends the message that at least on that day, your church leaders chose the abuser’s side of the room. It sends the message that relational loyalty trumped moral clarity. It sends the message that if your child is harmed, you should not assume your church will stand with her when the test comes. And that is unacceptable.
The community deserves better. Survivors deserve better. Children deserve better. If The Chapel at FishHawk wants to be part of that better future, the time for half-measures and quiet rationalizations is over. The next step is not another private conversation. The next step is visible repentance, concrete change, and a long, humble walk in a different direction.