The congregation recently released a special statement highlighting its troubled history and explaining why the church changed its name to “Redeeming Grace Church.” The statement also explained why the congregation left the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America denomination. One factor in such a separation is that it would allow the church to welcome back some of the former leaders sanctioned for their roles in the abuse case.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A West Lafayette church at the center of “minor-on-minor abuse” allegations opted to change its name to put the “painful chapter in our story” behind them.
A December 2021 Indy Star investigation found Immanuel Reformed Presbyterian Church Pastor Jared Olivetti and elders Keith Magill, Ben Larson and David Carr failed to act with urgency in responding to inappropriate behavior and sexual offenses by a boy at the church.
In January of 2022, the national governing body of the Reformed Presbyterian Church announced that Olivetti must refrain from exercising his duties as pastor pending the result of his ecclesiastical trial, which resulted in his defrocking.
The congregation recently released a special statement highlighting its troubled history and explaining why the church changed its name to “Redeeming Grace Church.” The statement also explained why the congregation left the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America denomination. One factor in such a separation is that it would allow the church to welcome back some of the former leaders sanctioned for their roles in the abuse case.
“If you do know us by the name ‘Immanuel,’ it’s likely you know something of the negative publicity and very hard years recently suffered by our congregation,” the statement reads.
“Those years began with the revelation of minor-on-minor abuse in and around the congregation. As we worked through that painful chapter in our story, our former elders worked to follow the pertinent laws, to believe and support the victims, and to honor Christ.”
The IndyStar investigation revealed that leaders at the West Lafayette church were informed that children from multiple families had been abused and harassed by another minor within the congregation, according to internal church documents obtained by IndyStar.
The ecclesiastic trial revoked Olivetti’s ordination and status as an elder, the IndyStar reported, forbidding him practicing in any capacity within the denomination. He has also been suspended from participating in sacraments such as communion.
Olivetti and his fellow elders were found to have kept the abuse from church members for more than four months, even as they learned of additional transgressions.
The perpetrator, a teenage boy, was a relative of the pastor. Rather than immediately recuse himself, Olivetti continued to shape the church’s response, taking advantage of his position as a leader to interfere with the investigation, according to the IndyStar reporting.
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Like many Americans, Latinos find themselves seeking stability in an uncertain time. Growing numbers are leaving the Catholicism in which they were raised—and they face unique cultural challenges and have distinct cultural affinities that make Islam attractive. Hispanic women in particular find themselves drawn to Islam. 

In 2014, the PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly visited the Islamic Center of Greater Miami in Miami Gardens, Florida, to cover a growing phenomenon: Latino converts to Islam. Many were raised Catholic, but felt more at home in their new faith. “The Trinity was very confusing to me,” one woman said. “I didn’t understand how God was a man or how a man could become a god.”
The report said that around 50% of the converts of Hispanic origin at the time were women, and many were choosing to wear head coverings. “The reason I wear the scarf is because I expect to be respected by the opposite gender,” said another Latina convert. “I don’t want to be catcalled and I don’t want to be judged by my appearance. In fact, I want to be judged by my intellect.”
In the past decade, the number of Latino converts to Islam has grown—and so has the proportion of those converts who are women.
Today, in Miami, as in the United States at large, a substantial number of converts to Islam are Latino—about 9% nationwide according to a 2020 survey, an increase from 5% in 2017. Estimates of the Latino Muslim population in the United States range from 50,000 to 70,000. Many are of either Mexican or Puerto Rican descent, but conversion to Islam is a phenomenon across Latin America, where multigenerational Lebanese and Palestinian migrant communities have settled. This phenomenon reflects shifting U.S. Latino attitudes toward religion, culture, and gender roles in the 2020s.
Like many Americans, Latinos find themselves seeking stability in an uncertain time. Growing numbers are leaving the Catholicism in which they were raised—and they face unique cultural challenges and have distinct cultural affinities that make Islam attractive. Hispanic women in particular find themselves drawn to Islam. Anecdotally, and according to reports from Islamic centers around the country, Latinas today constitute the clear majority of converts in the U.S. According to the findings of the Latino Muslim Survey published in 2017, the overwhelming majority (73%) of 560 Latino Muslims across 33 states who responded were women.
Those women, said author Ken Chitwood, who has written about and researched the Latino Muslim community extensively, “are right at the forefront and often, you might say, pioneras—they’re pioneers in that community.”
The golden-colored domes of the Islamic Center of Greater Miami shone in the afternoon sun on a recent Friday, crowning the horizon of a landscape that is clustered with apartment complexes and strip malls. The mosque itself is surrounded by tall, lush privacy hedges and palm trees. When I arrived after Friday prayers, except for the imam’s used 2017 Hyundai, the parking lot had mostly cleared out. Crossing the welcoming courtyard with a graceful murmuring fountain at its center, I was greeted by two older men who had stuck around to chat under the shade of a colonnade.
Abdul Rashid and Ifran Khan are both grandfathers, who beamingly showed me pictures of their grandchildren on their phones. Rashid, 72, is originally from Pakistan, and has lived in the U.S. for 50 years. In that time, he has picked up Spanish and become an unofficial translator at the mosque. He told me that because he spoke Spanish, he was the first contact for a Cuban man when he arrived at the mosque 15 years ago, a man who he said has since “reverted” to Islam. (Muslims speak not of conversion but “reversion”—humanity is born Muslim, and when a person chooses Islam, they are returning to their original state.) Both men assured me that there is a substantial Latino revert population at the Islamic Center of Greater Miami, most of whom are not recent immigrants but longtime U.S. residents. And it’s not just Latinos, the men told me, saying that there is a reversion almost weekly. A man converted earlier that very day by publicly reciting the Shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, in Arabic and English: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is his last messenger.” This kind of output, however, is not the result of a grand missionary project. “We’re not really doing any work,” Rashid said. “It’s God.”
“My family was very devout Catholic,” said Latina Muslim convert Monica Traverzo in a November 2020 episode of the podcast Mommying While Muslim. But in her recollection, this devoutly Catholic family didn’t attend church often. “My family was still very rooted in their Catholicism, but it was more of like an agnostic approach.”
Traverzo tried out different Christian denominations before converting to Islam in college. “It was just attractive to me to live a God-conscious lifestyle,” she said. While she said her family was “taken aback” when she began wearing hijab, in other respects they were very pleased with the positive changes they saw taking root in her life. Culturally, she saw a lot of overlap that she thinks helps explain the number of Latinas coming over to Islam. “I feel like Islam has this sense of family that Latinos really admire because Islam teaches us about having these healthy, nurturing family life environments,” she said. “That’s also part of Hispanic culture.”
A March 2020 episode of the podcast Me & My Muslim Friends featured two Latina converts, Kathia Guerrero and Shirley Puente. Puente comes from a Peruvian background and converted in 2011. She describes her religious upbringing as culturally Catholic. “I wouldn’t say that we were super religious,” she said. “We weren’t the type that went to church every Sunday.”
Like Traverzo, Puente experimented with different religions before converting to Islam after befriending a Muslim girl in college. Seeing her friend moved to tears when speaking about her faith, Traverzo was intrigued. “I was like, you know what?” she said. “I kind of want that type of spiritual connection. Like, I don’t have it. I don’t feel any type of, I guess, emotion when I talk about Christianity like that.”
Guerrero is a single mother who converted in 2015. Her family came to the United States from Mexico when she was 10 years old. Guerrero’s father was a Christian pastor, and her family was very religious growing up. Music, pants, makeup, jewelry were all forbidden. She said that after her father left the family when she was 13, “my family just kind of fell apart completely,” once her mom went to work full time. She began engaging in risky behaviors.
“The time that I decided to convert was in a time when I was down. I was very depressed. At that time, I was not practicing anything,” she said. Guerrero came to Islam through independent study, watching Muslim prayers on YouTube, and practicing Ramadan on her own. “I fasted and it gave me the peace that I was looking for,” she said. “And a month later I converted.”
When I described these women’s stories to Rashid, he was unsurprised. The converts who come to his mosque are affected by the same institutional decline as everyone else. “When the marital institution fails, the society fails, and that is the fortress for the child,” he said. The materialistic culture of instant gratification are not American values, he said, but “Satanic values.” His daughter, he said, is a counselor for lower-income families, many of whom are Latino. He said she regularly encounters families dealing with domestic abuse and the consequences of absentee fathers.
Rashid’s theory is that wider cultural forces are bringing people in. He likens the wider cultural forces—of materialism, instant gratification, failing institutions, and the deterioration of the traditional family—to a hurricane. “A hurricane affects everybody,” he said. “We are all in the same boat.” And although even Muslim youth are not immune to these pressures, Rashid said, Islam still has what he calls “social pressures” that provide social structure and expectations to ground its adherents.
He suspects that the emphasis on religion and family in Islam is what attracts Latinos and Latinas, who may have been raised in large, religious families. They are searching for strong religious and family networks of the kind they enjoyed growing up, but which they now find falling away for various reasons. “There is an emptiness,” Rashid said, and they are “not getting the answer at church.” In Catholicism, the faith in which the majority of Latinos are raised, believers go through priests for sacraments—baptism, confession, communion. By contrast, Rashid said, he observes that Latinos are attracted to the direct connection to the Creator they find that Islam offers (prayer—a direct relationship between the believer and God—is one of the five pillars of Islam, along with a profession of faith, fasting, almsgiving, and the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca).
The sermon that Rashid and Khan had just heard that Friday was on the importance of reading in the Islamic tradition. The affable, youthful preacher, originally from Yemen, conducted his sermon in English. “A brother asked me the other day about how to handle the problems in the Muslim community with the youth,” he said. “Issues like mental health, issues like identity challenges, [in] the Muslim American space, people who are born and raised here.” He responded with four characteristics of a successful community: a strong family, next, a strong faith community with shared norms and values, then investment in education, and finally, an understanding of the law and of dominant culture, which he defined as “a way and style of life.”
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When Dr. Warfield left teaching at Western seminary it was to return to Princeton Theological Seminary as a professor beginning in the fall semester of 1887. He succeeded Archibald Alexander Hodge as the Charles Hodge Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology. His inaugural address titled, “The Idea of Systematic Theology Considered as a Science,” was delivered the following May. As he taught theology, he did so using Hodge’s Systematic Theology continuing the tradition at Princeton. Annie lived a homebound life limiting her primarily to the Princeton campus where Benjamin was never too far from home. The Warfields lived in the same campus house occupied by the Charles and Archibald Alexander Hodge families during their years at the seminary. 

As a boy, the interests of B. B. Warfield were aimed at a different vocational target than theology and ministry. Following his birth on November 5, 1851 to William and Mary Cabell Breckinridge Warfield, Benjamin grew up on the family farm named “Grasmere” near Lexington, Kentucky, where his father was a cattle breeder. In 1889, William would publish The Theory and Practice of Cattle Breeding after having experimented in and written about the subject for years in periodicals. William Warfield was a leader in the cattle industry and he had a particular interest in the shorthorn variety. Thus, like many sons who are influenced by their fathers, Benjamin learned from his father’s work as he developed his own interests. Young Benjamin was educated privately by Lewis G. Barbour and James K. Patterson. Barbour wrote some articles for the Southern Presbyterian Review on science and his tutoring Benjamin would have also encouraged the boy in a scientific direction. Ethelbert D. Warfield, Benjamin’s brother, has commented that,
His early tastes were strongly scientific. He collected birds’ eggs, butterflies and moths, and geological specimens; studied the fauna and flora of his neighborhood; read Darwin’s newly published books with enthusiasm; and counted Audubon’s works on American birds and mammals his chief treasure. He was so certain that he was to follow a scientific career that he strenuously objected to studying Greek (vi).
Following the years of private tutorial instruction, Benjamin entered the sophomore class of the Princeton University where he graduated in 1871 with highest honors at only nineteen years of age. He then traveled in Europe beginning in February 1872. After spending some time in Edinburgh and then Heidelberg, he wrote home in mid-summer announcing his intent to enter the ministry. This change in interests and vocational direction came as a surprise to his family. He returned to Kentucky sometime in 1873 and was for a short time the livestock editor of the Farmer’s Home Journal.
Benjamin began preparing for the ministry when he entered Princeton Theological Seminary in the fall of 1873. He was licensed to preach the gospel by Ebenezer Presbytery on May 8, 1875. Following licensure, he briefly tested his ministerial abilities that summer by supplying the Concord Presbyterian Church in Kentucky. Following the completion of his divinity degree in 1876, he supplied the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church of Dayton, Ohio. At the time of his pulpit supply he married Annie Pearce Kinkead, also from Kentucky, on August 3, 1876. Soon after the wedding, the couple set sail on an extended honeymoon trip to Europe which included studies at Leipzig for the newly-wed husband. While enjoying a walk through the Harz Mountains in northern Germany a severe thunderstorm arose frightening Annie greatly and she never recovered from the trauma. Warfield cared for her for the rest of her life. In 1877, according to Ethelbert Warfield, Benjamin was offered the opportunity to teach Old Testament at Western Seminary, but he turned the offer down because he had turned his study emphasis to the New Testament despite his early aversion to Greek (vii). In November 1877, he began his supply ministry at the First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore, where he continued until the following March.In September of 1878, Benjamin began his career as a theological educator when he became an instructor in New Testament Literature and Exegesis at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh. Western Seminary had been formed by the merger of existing seminaries that included Danville Seminary, which R. J. Breckinridge, Benjamin’s grandfather, had been involved with in its earlier years. The following year he was made professor of the same subject and he continued in that position until 1887. In his inaugural address for Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Literature, April 20, 1880, he set the theme for many of his writing efforts in the succeeding years by defending historic Christianity. The purpose of his lecture was to answer the question, “Is the Church Doctrine of the Plenary Inspiration of the New Testament Endangered by the Assured Results of Modern Biblical Criticism.” Professor Warfield affirmed the inspiration, authority, and reliability of God’s Word in opposition to the critics of his era. He quickly established his academic reputation for thoroughness and defense of the Bible. Many heard of his academic acumen and he was rewarded by eastern academia when his alma mater, Princeton University, honored him with the Doctor of Divinity in 1880.
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