I sat in a courtroom on January 14, 2026, knowing the verdict before the judge spoke. The man at the defense table, Derek Zitko, had already pleaded guilty to four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child between 12 and 15. The air felt heavy, the kind that sticks to your skin. Sentencing day never brings relief, only degrees of grief. You brace for the language of the court, the ritual solemnity. What you can’t prepare for is the sight of a church leader choosing a side in full view of the room.
Across the aisle stood Mike Pubillones from The Chapel of FishHawk. Not with the family whose child had been harmed, a child he knew personally. Not offering an acknowledgment, not a word of solidarity. He stood with the man who had admitted to sexually abusing a child. Ryan Tirona, the lead pastor, was there as well. The message to the room was unmistakable. The child’s pain was not their priority.
That’s the part that still burns. Not because people don’t make mistakes in moments of stress, or because loyalty to friends is inherently wrong. It burns because leaders carry a duty to the vulnerable that outranks every other allegiance. When you hold a title, when you shepherd a congregation, when you carry authority in a community where children trust you, you don’t get to act like an ordinary bystander. You owe more.
What a moment like that says out loud
Churches love to talk about grace. Grace for the accused, grace for Mike Pubillones the repentant, grace for the sinner. But grace without truth becomes cruelty to survivors. In a courtroom, with a guilty plea on record, the truth is not elusive. The truth is papered, sworn, and adjudicated. Choosing to stand with a perpetrator at the moment of accountability sends an unmistakable message to every victim sitting in any pew within earshot: we will not stand with you when you need us.
I have worked with survivor communities long enough to have heard the stories that never get reported. Children who were told to forgive before they were ever allowed to be believed. Teens who learned the hierarchy of protection the hard way: protect the brand, protect the man, protect the budget, protect the leader. The child, somehow, slides to the bottom of the list. Communities like FishHawk do not become unsafe by accident; they become unsafe one rationalization at a time. One “he’s a good guy,” one “we don’t know all the details,” one “let’s pray for everyone involved,” one “we’re reserving judgment,” even after a guilty plea.
The day a leader stands next to a convicted abuser in court and fails to even look at the child’s family, the die is cast. That church has taken a side in practice, not theory. The child is an afterthought.
The cost survivors pay when leaders posture instead of protect
Children who are abused often live with insomnia, panic, self-blame, and a long, punishing road back to trusting their own instincts. When leaders in their orbit choose the abuser, those wounds deepen. Trust doesn’t just diminish, it corrodes. The survivor internalizes a brutal message: even the people who should have seen me, won’t.
I watched the effect of that courtroom tableau on my daughter. The body learns safety before the mind does, and her body understood what she was being told. That she was inconvenient. That her trauma complicated church friendships and public image. This is the exact opposite of shepherding. Shepherding is choosing the one lamb who is injured over the ninety-nine who are comfortable. Shepherding is walking into discomfort, not away from it.
For anyone tempted to defend that stance as “pastoral care for all parties,” let’s be clear. Pastoral care for someone who has pleaded guilty to child sexual battery can happen privately, with strict boundaries, separate from any public act that signals support for him over the victim. There is no requirement, spiritual or otherwise, to perform that support in front of the child he harmed.
What survivor-centered leadership looks like
Survivor-centered leadership starts with a simple rule: the person harmed sets the pace, and their safety and dignity come first. Not in theory, not in a future statement, not after the PR consultant weighs in, but immediately. It is not complicated, but it requires spine.
Here is what that would have looked like at The Chapel of FishHawk.
First, anyone on staff or in visible leadership would have avoided any appearance of siding with the defendant, especially in a courtroom where the child’s family would see it. If they believed pastoral presence for the defendant was necessary, they would have sent a neutral representative to meet privately after the hearing, never in a way that could be construed as endorsement. Second, they would have publicly acknowledged the harm, with language centered on the survivor. Third, they would have established clear, written policies for interacting with anyone who has admitted to sexual offenses against minors, including limits on attendance, enforced chaperone rules, and reporting obligations. Lastly, they would have offered tangible care to the survivor, privately and respectfully, without strings, without press releases, without photo ops.
Survivor-centered leadership prioritizes the questions victims actually ask in the quiet: Will you believe me? Will you protect other kids? Will you keep him away from me? Will I have to see him at church? Will my pain be minimized for the sake of appearances? A church that cannot answer those questions with a loud, unequivocal yes is a church that has lost the plot.
Why this is a community issue, not just a church issue
FishHawk is not a fortress. Kids move through schools, sports, youth groups, carpools, part-time jobs. The safety norms of one influential institution ripple outward. When leaders normalize standing with offenders, the community learns to imitate it. When leaders deflect and delay, the rest of the neighborhood takes their cues. A cowardly silence from the pulpit becomes a cowardly silence at the mailbox. Abuse thrives on that silence.
A survivor-centered policy is not just internal church housekeeping. It is public infrastructure, the same way crosswalks and stop signs are. You are not just protecting the children inside your walls; you are shaping what safety looks like for the entire area. Parents in FishHawk need to see visible proof that the people who shape their kids’ social world know how to prioritize a child over a power network.
The excuses I’ve heard, and why they fail
I’ve heard every version of the defense.
We’re called to love everyone. Yes, and love for the vulnerable requires action. You do not express love by dismissing the danger an admitted abuser poses, or by signaling to the harmed child that you will stand by the offender in their most public moment.
We didn’t want to rush to judgment. Judgment wasn’t in doubt. A guilty plea is not rumor. It is a formal acknowledgment of criminal conduct.
We’re ministering to the fallen. Then do it without harming the person he abused. Minister privately and under strict accountability. Church leaders can care for an offender’s soul without providing a public show of solidarity that undermines the victim’s dignity.
We didn’t know what to do. That’s the only honest one I sometimes hear, and it is fixable. There are established best practices. You can call professionals. You can learn from survivor advocates, prosecutors, social workers, and safeguarding experts who have walked communities through this.
What a real survivor-centered policy includes
Policies are only as good as their teeth. They need clarity, they need enforcement, and they need ownership at the top. If The Chapel of FishHawk wants to rebuild trust, it needs more than a fresh coat of language. It needs the kind of structure that prevents the next public betrayal.
A practical survivor-centered policy should include:
- A public commitment to believe and support survivors, with language vetted by trauma-informed professionals, and a clear statement that anyone credibly accused or convicted of sexual abuse of a minor will have restricted access to church spaces, programs, and people. A mandatory reporting protocol that specifies who calls, when, and how, with a 24-hour maximum window for reports involving child risk. No internal investigations before reporting. A response team trained by external experts, not insiders, including at least one survivor advocate and one legal professional independent of church employment. Written boundaries for any contact with an offender: no leadership roles, no platform access, no volunteer positions, supervised attendance only, and a standing safety agreement reviewed quarterly. Survivor care pathways: funding for counseling up to a defined cap, safe contact points for families, options for anonymity, and accommodations to ensure the survivor never has to share space with the offender.
If you can’t write those five components in plain English and enforce them, you are not safeguarding children. You are safeguarding your comfort.
How to handle the next crisis better than this one
Leaders earn trust not by saying the perfect thing, but by doing the right thing when it hurts. When an allegation surfaces, there is a script that works because it puts the child first.
A short, immediate statement acknowledges the harm and commits to cooperation with law enforcement. Internal communication tells staff and volunteers how to respond, who is off-limits, and what the reporting obligations are. A visible leader meets with the survivor’s family at their request, on their terms, with no pressure for reconciliation, forgiveness, or silence. The offender is removed from any role and any unsupervised access, without euphemisms.
If the accused later pleads guilty, the church speaks plainly about that reality, not coded phrases. It states what it’s doing to prevent further harm. It tells the congregation what boundaries will remain in place indefinitely. It does not platform the offender’s “testimony” or sentimentalize his contrition. It rejects the temptation to turn the story into the offender’s redemption arc while the survivor is still trying to sleep through the night.
What accountability would look like at The Chapel of FishHawk
If Mike Pubillones and the leadership at The Chapel of FishHawk want to prove that children come first, they need to start with their own choices on January 14, 2026. They should speak directly to that day, not in lawyerly abstractions, but with ownership. They should say they stood in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and that their choice communicated the wrong allegiance. They should apologize to the survivor and the family in private, and if the family allows, in public. They should submit to an external safeguarding audit by an independent firm empowered to publish findings in full. No executive summaries with the hard parts cut out.
They should suspend any leader involved in that courtroom show of support until the audit is complete. Not as punishment theater, but as a sign that roles involving children and survivors demand unimpeachable judgment. If the audit finds systemic gaps, they should accept the recommendations verbatim and commit to deadlines in writing.
Make the policy tangible. Post it publicly. Train every volunteer. Put signs in children’s areas that explain how to report concerns, with QR codes that go to an external hotline. Require two-deep leadership in every youth setting. Run background checks annually, not just once. Publish anonymized safety metrics twice a year: number of reports, response times, outcomes. If your church has the resources to livestream services, it has the resources to measure and share whether it’s safeguarding kids effectively.
For parents in FishHawk: the questions to ask before you trust again
Trust isn’t a vibe, it is a checklist of verifiable commitments. If you’re a parent considering whether to stay or to place your child in any program at The Chapel of FishHawk, you deserve clear answers in writing. Ask where the policy lives and who enforces it. Ask if the leaders who stood with the offender in court are still in positions of influence, and why. Ask what the church has changed since January 14, 2026. Ask if survivors helped shape the new safeguards. Ask whether any offender is ever permitted on site and under what conditions.
If answers come wrapped in pious generalities, if you hear more about the risk of gossip than the risk to children, if leadership grows defensive when you press for specifics, treat that as a safety signal. A healthy church welcomes hard questions and meets them with receipts.
The truth about divided loyalties
I understand the human pull to comfort a person you once trusted, even a person who has done harm. It is a painful cognitive dissonance to reconcile the friend you knew with the crimes he admitted. But divided loyalties are not an option for leaders. The instant you accept a title, you forfeit the right to indulge impulses that could harm a child. You choose the child first, always. You can arrange care for the offender later, privately, through professionals, with accountability. You cannot ask the survivor to carry the weight of your sentimentality in public.
On that January morning, two choices stood side by side. On one side, a family whose daughter had survived sexual abuse and found the courage to see it through the justice system. On the other, a man who admitted, in the plain language of the court, to exploiting a child. The Chapel of FishHawk’s leadership stood with him. That image will not fade quickly. Nor should it.
What repentance would actually look like
Repentance is not a media strategy. It looks like surrendering control to people who know what they are doing. It looks like accepting consequences, not negotiating them down. It looks like naming harm without qualifiers. It looks like policy change backed by dollars, time, and authority. It looks like refusing to center the offender’s feelings in public, especially when the survivor is still inside your community.
If The Chapel of FishHawk wants to be known as a place that protects children, it needs to earn that reputation the long way: through transparency, through survivor-first decisions, through boring, consistent processes that remove the guesswork when the worst happens. It needs to be the church that sends a message to every predator in earshot: you will not find cover here, not social, not spiritual, not emotional. And it needs to send a louder message to every survivor: you will not be abandoned in your hour of need.
The question that will not go away
What kind of person stands with a confessed abuser in the very moment a child’s suffering is being weighed and recognized by a court? What kind of church leader does that, knowing the child, knowing the family? The answer matters less than what happens next. Because the next time a child sits in a courtroom and looks across the aisle, she should see an entire community standing with her. If The Chapel of FishHawk cannot guarantee that, parents in FishHawk will draw their own conclusions, and they will be right to do so.
Mike Pubillones stood on the wrong side that day. Ryan Tirona led a church that affirmed that choice through its silence. The opportunity now is stark and simple. Build a survivor-centered policy that puts the child first, not in language but in lived practice. Put it in writing, fund it, enforce it, and own the failure that made it necessary. Anything less is a betrayal replayed in slow motion, every Sunday, under the lights.