Runaway teen who fears family after Christian conversion ordered to DCF custody [Florida]

A Muslim girl from Ohio, who turned 17 on Monday, is at the center of a custody dispute in Orlando, where she sought help from a family she barely knew -- a pastor and his wife willing to take in a teen who feared her own family's retribution because she converted to Christianity. She says she is afraid her father will kill her.

Her dispute with her family became news several weeks ago when the girl ran away from her home in Columbus, Ohio. She hitch-hiked to a Greyhound station and boarded a bus to Orlando. The State DCF is now holding her pending the her father's claims.

Once here, she borrowed a cell phone to call Beverly Lorenz, who with husband Blake Lorenz is a pastor of Global Revolution Church in Orlando. The Lorenzes met the girl through a prayer group on Facebook.

Although the girl was a stranger, Beverly Lorenz told her they would house her. The teen told the Lorenzes she feared her family would hurt her, kill her or send her back to Sri Lanka, Beverly Lorenz said.

Reached by a Sentinel reporter by phone, the girl's mother said little. "Yes, of course" her daughter would be safe should a judge eventually order her back there, she said.

And her father would not harm his daughter if she wanted to be a Christian, the woman said. She referred other questions to her husband. He did not answer his cell phone after the hearing.

The father should be sent back where he came from forthwith, and once the mother is safely an ocean away from him, let her decide if she wants to stay or go. The girl is 17 and should be declared an emancipated minor and given permanent residency.

BUT, the pastor is not helping things by taking this nubile young girl to court with bare shoulders, and putting his arm around her, having their phot taken with the scantily clad girl snuggled up to him. A pastor who is meeting minor females on the internet and offering them an opportunity to run away from home, to his home, is a bit suspect in the first place. If he can wear a collared shirt, tie, and long-sleeved suit jacket to court, then it’s not too hot for her to wear a reasonably conservative outfit that at least covers her shoulders and armpits.

If this girl was a convert to evangelical Christianity from say Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism, and claimed to be fleeing parents who were threatening physical abuse or imrprisonment due the religion issue, we’d look at this photo and be quickly inclined to side with the parents and assume that the accusations against them were exaggerated. When dealing with conflict, one must be above reproach, and this photo definitely raises questions about the pastor’s motives.

It's also odd that, per other reports, she was missing for at least two weeks before the pastor contacted Florida authorities to notify them that he was harboring a minor who reported fleeing her parents due to threats of physical harm. Think about it -- if a teenager you'd met on the internet showed up on your doorstep, saying she'd fled from her parents halfway across the country because she was afraid her father would kill her for her new religious beliefs, wouldn't you be inclined to call your local police pretty quickly? And may be check the internet for other info about the teen? There had been a missing child report posted on the Ohio Attorney General's website since very shortly after she went missing.

And then there's this info in the Sentinel article about her internet posting: On a baby sitter Web site, the girl described herself this way: "One of my favorite things to do in my spare time is cheerleading for my high school and of course tumbling as well.

If her father has been letting her participate in the high school cheerleading squad, baring every inch of her legs in straddle splits before crowds of unrelated men, it doesn't really sound like he's a crazed Muslim fanatic. I think there may be a bit more to the story here than meets the eye.

?? It may well be that neither the father nor the pastor are the altruistic guardians of the girl’s well-being that they’re presenting themselves as. Obviously *something* is wrong at home, or the girl wouldn’t have run off half way across the country to a stranger she met on the internet. But it doesn’t automatically follow from the fact that something is wrong at home, that the self-employed pastor she ran to is a paragon of virtue whose only motivation in roaming internet social networking sites is to bring troubled teenagers to Christ.

The initial reaction to this story is reminding me a bit of the initial reaction to the story of the killing of the Florida couple who adopted a boatload of special needs children. At first it was pure black and white: “How could these unspeakably evil people do something so horrible to these absolute saints!” Yes, the murderers are plenty evil, but there was something way off in the Billings home too. Not only did the couple have an inexplicable $100,000 cash in a home safe (”reserves for their financing business”, according to a lawyer for the family), but the father had attempted to copyright the names of all the adopted children, and sent bizarre letters to state officials in response to letters from them that referenced the children, demanding they pay him millions of dollars for their unauthorized use of the children’s names, and had run an “adult entertainment business” in the past, and had a past conviction for adoption fraud when he and a former wife of his bought a newborn baby and arranged for the forgery of its birth certificate to list him as the father.

I’m just pointing out that things that look black and white at first glance often aren’t. I was a bit startled when I went to the Sentinel link and saw the photo. Then I read on and saw more things that didn’t really make sense, and read a bit more from other sources.

Maybe the girl’s father has been sexually abusing her, and that’s why she ran away. Who knows? I just don’t see a lot of evidence that’s he’s a crazed Muslim out to kill his daughter to avenge his “honor” — if he was, the cheerleading would have triggered him a long time ago. And I see a lot of hints that Pastor Lorenz may be more of a self-promoting Jim Bakker type, than a humble religious man. I note that he couldn’t quite find room for any mention of “Jesus” or “Christ” on his church’s homepage, but did find room for a very large “Give Online” link. http://www.globalrevolutionchurch.org/ According to various news articles, the church actually meets in a movie theater in a shopping mall, but the church’s website, which gives no physical address for the church (despite posting an invitation to come worship with them on Sundays at 9:00AM) features a glitzy looking night-time photo of a fountain in downtown Orlando that could be mistaken for an expensive church building (with a sort of steeple-like shape at the top), posted above the church’s name and P.O. Box address. http://www.globalrevolutionchurch.org/index-6.html The photo is lifted from a senior travel website. http://seniortravel.about.com/od/seniortravelbargains/tp/TopBudgetDestUS.htm

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