Content note: this story contains references to domestic violence, abuse, and murder.
Adrianna Trujillo was a spark of life. That’s how her family and the friends she made at Charis Bible College remember her: as someone full of love, who brought that love with her wherever she went. “She was always happy and always speaking to people,” her mother, Lynette, told me. “She just loved people.”
“Everybody she met was her friend, and they all loved her,” Adam Trujillo, Adrianna’s older brother told me.
In 29 years of life, she left a mark. “She was a cheerleader. She was homecoming queen. She was student body vice president,” Lynette said. She was a dancer. She was a writer. She was even the manager for her high school’s baseball team.
In 2021, with her two children from a previous relationship, Adrianna left her home in Rio Rancho, New Mexico for a new chapter in life: attending bible college in the Colorado mountains. “She really just wanted to serve God and try to be a good role model for her kids,” Adam told me.
From the point she left home, Lynette said, “Everything happened so fast.”
Adrianna fell in love with a fellow student at Charis, Sean Mills. By early 2022, the couple was married and Adrianna was pregnant with their first child together. But the relationship was tumultuous. Sean was paranoid and erratic, and becoming increasingly aggressive. With a child on the way, though, Adrianna was eager to make things work. While working and studying at Charis and Andrew Wommack Ministries (AWMI) through the week, the couple attended various local churches on the weekend, and spent time as congregants at Legacy Church in Green Mountain Falls under Wommack-affiliated pastor Jeremy Pearsons. Pearsons is the grandson of famous televangelist Kenneth Copeland, who once personally anointed Wommack as a prophet.
An early incident of physical escalation around Memorial Day 2022 shook Adrianna’s resolve to make the relationship work. “He pushed her – she was pregnant – and stole her car keys,” Lynette told me. Adrianna called her mom and asked if she could come home.
“I told her, ‘I will come get you right now,’” Lynette said. “She was able to get away and she came home, here, to New Mexico, and stayed about five days.” With her job, her school, and her husband — flawed but still the father of her unborn child — in Colorado, though, Adrianna eventually decided to return.
“She went back,” Lynette told me, tears straining her voice. Back to Charis. “It kills us every day that we didn’t make her stay.”
“That was the last time I saw her,” Adam told me. “Ever.”
Abuse is everywhere at Charis,” Lucy told me, opening up about a topic which many of the men I interviewed were largely unaware of, but which the women of Charis are painfully familiar with: what sources describe as a culture in which domestic violence often proceeds unchecked.
Like Hannah, in part one of this series, Lucy lived through that culture of abuse – not just emotional and spiritual abuse, but physical abuse. And, like Hannah, she asked not to be identified by her real name in order to speak candidly, without fear of repercussions, about what she and many women see as the Charis-AWMI community’s greatest failing.
During her decade in the community, first as a Charis student and then as a long-time employee of AWMI, Lucy lived through an abusive marriage, and had multiple friends in the community suffering through their own abusive marriages.
Like Adrianna, Lucy rapidly fell in love and got married within the confines of Charis. Within ten months of starting at the school in 2012, she had married a fellow student. “That’s not in any way uncommon at Charis,” she told me of marrying quickly. “We’re encouraged to do that.”
Lucy’s happy marriage didn’t last. Even before she became pregnant with her first child, her husband had become abusive. He never hit her, she said, but he became violent nonetheless. “I’d have finger marks on my arm going into work,” from being forcefully restrained, she told me. “He would destroy things around me.”
Even though she did not understand it as abuse at the time, she knew something was wrong. “For some reason, in my mind, it was only abuse if you’re being struck.”
When she was 38 weeks pregnant with their child, her husband announced that he would be leaving her after the baby was born, and swore her to secrecy about his impending departure. “He told me I couldn’t tell anyone or else I wouldn’t be honoring my husband,” she told me. “So that’s what I did.”
Her husband was in and out of Lucy’s life – and in and out of jail – over the next year. At one point, she told me, “He took all of the guns and said he would be coming back” for their child. She was terrified.
When she turned to the ministry for help, for guidance, for wisdom, her concerns were not validated. She was repeatedly encouraged to stay in the marriage.
“Nobody there tells you to get help. Nobody tells you when something is an abusive relationship,” she told me. “In fact, they tell you to stay.”
“The focus was never on what he needed to do differently,” Lucy said of the counseling she sought within the school and ministry to deal with her abusive marriage. “It was all about how I could react to things better. And that’s because their focus is typically on women. There’s no responsibility put on the man.”
She was not the only struggling wife given that advice, Lucy told me.
“The idea is, if you have faith for it, God will get you through it,” she told me, applying the same Word of Faith movement rationale behind the ministry’s healing claims to the issue of spousal abuse, making it the battered wives’ duty to “love them through it, like God loves us through things,” Lucy said.
“All the pressure was put on the wives to fix things if things weren’t right,” she said. “If the husband is doing something wrong, it’s the wife’s job to love him out of it. But if the wife is doing something wrong? She’s going to get humbled.”
Despite the ministry encouraging her to stick with it, Lucy knew she couldn’t. With her one-year-old on her hip, she went to the courthouse to file divorce paperwork. When she did, she was approached by a volunteer with TESSA, an organization that advocates for victims of domestic violence.
“She had me take this questionnaire and I filled it out with the things that had happened in my home,” Lucy told me. It was the first time she was certain – despite what she had been told at the ministry, despite what she had convinced herself of – that she had been abused. “I marked eight out of ten abuse indicators.”
After her divorce, Lucy continued working for the ministry. She had a child to support, and she was working remotely by that point, which allowed her to keep a paycheck rolling in without needing to expose herself to the culture on campus, or to the judging eyes of the people who believed she should have stayed with her husband. Many in the community supported her decision, she told me, “But there were always the loudest ones who were saying, ‘You should have prayed harder,’ and ‘If you prayed harder, he wouldn’t have been like that,’ and all this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”
Over the next few years, quietly working from home, Lucy met a man and eventually remarried. They built a life together, had a child together. Eventually, though, in late 2022, Lucy reached the tipping point where she knew she could no longer remain blind to what the ministry had become, or to how it was treating women in the same situation she had been in. And she reached that tipping point all at once.
“It was the murder-suicide and how they handled it,” she told me. “That was the last straw for me.”
While Lucy and other sources allege that domestic violence is a problem in Andrew Wommack’s community, they portray the emergence of that problem as a recent phenomenon, only rearing its head in the last few years. But the seeds of that problem have been present since the beginning. Wommack’s teachings on marriage have been criticized for encouraging women to stay in abusive marriages. Spousal abuse has also impacted Wommack’s own family: both of his sons have been arrested for domestic violence.
According to an audio recording provided to me by a former student, Andrew Wommack acknowledges that his teachings have been interpreted as telling women to stay in abusive marriages. Despite the criticism, he has continued sharing those teachings. In the recording, Wommack can be heard telling a story about spousal abuse to a class of first- and second-year Charis students. The story, which Wommack implies on the audio he has told many times, is about “a lady who worked for me, the very first person I ever hired to run my ministry.” They lived in the same apartment complex, and the woman was in an abusive marriage.
“He took a butcher knife to her, and he threatened to kill her two children by a previous marriage,” he told the students. Wommack says he met the woman when he was asked by the apartment manager to speak to her and “tell this woman she doesn’t have to live with this kind of abuse.” Instead, Wommack says he told the women that “It’s just the devil in him that makes him the way he is.”
“And I said, ‘You are now born again, you can overcome all of that.’” He told her, he says, that she could leave her husband but that the greater act of faith would be to stay.
For the students in the audience, Wommack spelled out another lesson from his teachings on marriage: that the woman shared some of the blame, too. “I guarantee you this guy was a problem, it’s not like she was all of the problem,” he told the students. “But she did respond negatively to him. She had hatred for this guy.”
Wommack did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
In the recording, Wommack says that a host once threw him off of a radio program for telling the story. “He says, ‘You’re encouraging people to stay in abusive relationships.’ And I said, no, I’m not. The scripture says if your mate is pleased to dwell with you, then don’t depart. This guy wasn’t pleased to dwell with her and so she was free to depart,” he relayed. “But it didn’t say you have to depart.” The takeaway was the same: she would be justified in leaving her violent husband, but staying would be the greater act of faith.
Both of Wommack’s sons have faced domestic violence arrests. Wommack’s older son, Joshua, was arrested on domestic violence charges in both March and November of 2002, and arrested again in July 2003 for assault.
In 2007, Wommack’s younger son Jonathan Peter was arrested and ultimately sentenced to prison for viciously beating his then-wife. According to the affidavit of probable cause submitted by the Colorado Springs Police Department in the case, the younger Wommack punched, strangled, and bit the woman, yelling, “I’ll be so happy when you die,” in the process. The affidavit cites the physician who attended to the woman after the incident as saying that the savage attack left the victim at “substantial risk of serious permanent disfigurement.”
I have chosen not to identify Jonathan Peter Wommack’s ex-wife here, but she has identified herself in a handful of blog comments in past years. In 2015, a woman credibly claiming to be the ex-wife sent a letter about her experience to Exposing Scoundrels, a Christian blog which exists “to expose false prophets.” Biographical details in the letter align with details of the younger Wommack’s ex-wife, and her description of details of the younger Wommack’s criminal record, trial, and sentencing align with what I have received via public records requests.
In the letter, the woman says she experienced the older Wommack’s victim-blaming – or at least blame-sharing – teachings firsthand. “[Throughout] my marriage into that family, I confessed to not only Andrew but Jamie about the physical abuse,” she wrote. “Instead of showing God’s unconditional love to me, they blamed me for his actions.”
In December 2007, as Jonathan Peter’s case was winding its way towards trial, Wommack sent a ministry newsletter which, without mentioning his son’s situation, delivered a message much like one the women I spoke to for this story have heard from Charis time and again.
“Most of the time broken relationships are the fault of both people involved,” Wommack wrote, warning against “pointing fingers.”
“You can develop a victim mentality. You believe that the reason you act the way you do is because of what other people have done to you,” he wrote. “You don’t believe it is ever your fault. Always begin by looking at yourself first.”
After briefly fleeing to her family home in Rio Rancho, NM over Memorial Day weekend, Adrianna Trujillo – who had become Adrianna Mills by that point – returned to Colorado to make her marriage work. That fall, she gave birth to a son. She named him Zion.
Some time around 1 a.m. on November 13, 2022, Adrianna’s husband killed her, then killed himself. Zion was six weeks old.
“He was in her arms,” Lynette told me, still grieving. “Zion was in her arms, and he had to have been crying. My other grandchildren didn’t wake up until 7am.” Zion’s oldest sibling, his 7 year-old sister, awoke to the horrible scene and called the police.
The Trujillos believe that Charis and AWMI played a role in Adrianna’s death.
“I definitely hold some responsibility towards the school,” Adam told me. “I think they need to be held accountable.”
The school and ministry dominated Adrianna and Sean’s lives, Adam said. How could it not influence Sean’s actions? “They were just so affiliated. They were there for work, there for school, like they basically lived there. So whatever they were feeding their minds has to come into play in their daily lives, their actions.”
“I think they’re a huge reason for what happened,” he told me.
“Seeking outside help was not – they didn’t like that,” Lynette told me, referring to Charis. “They’d say, if you have the Holy Spirit, if you have enough faith, that’s what will fix things.”
Shawn Savage, a Navy veteran and Charis graduate who knew Sean Mills during his marriage to Adrianna, also believes that the school’s teachings played a role. “I believe that Charis’ theology led to what happened. I think that’s part of it.”
“I think Sean was just hiding and bottling, because that’s what most Charis people do. They hide and bottle and say, ‘I’m not a sinner, I’m a saint,’ even though they don’t feel like a saint. They feel like a sinner,” letting the pressure build up with no release, Shawn told me.
The emotional repression and false gaiety Shawn describes let every tragedy hit the community as a surprise, former student Hudson Smith told me. Like Shawn, Hudson knew Sean Mills at school. “When those things do pop up, like the murder-suicide, it comes as a genuine shock to the community because ‘everyone’s fine,’” he told me. “So how could something like that ever happen?”
Other details from the night Adrianna was murdered remain unknown: the local sheriff has not closed the case, and cannot be compelled to release public records until he does so. The Trujillos have been critical of the investigation, not least because of Sheriff Jason Mikesell’s close relationship with Andrew Wommack.
With the case still open, Adrianna’s phone and personal belongings have not been returned to her mother. “I feel like there’s something going on, that they haven’t released anything to me,” Lynette told me. “Why do they want her journals? They don’t want me to see them, because I have been very vocal with them.”
“It’s like the plot of a movie,” Adam said. In late June, 20 months after the murder, the Teller County Sheriff’s Department finally surrendered Adrianna’s personal journals to her mother. The case remains open, preventing any public records from being accessed. The Sheriff’s office would not provide me with an estimate on when they expect the case to be closed.
Reeling from their loss and already skeptical of Wommack’s organizations, the Trujillos’ became even more suspicious when the ministry approached them with a payment.
“They tried to pay off my family,” Adam told me, “But they never said sorry or anything like that.”
“They gave me a $10,000 check,” Lynette said, noting that she took the money but did not sign any documents which would require her silence. “I didn’t sign anything that said I can’t bring this up.”
Adam knows that Charis and AWMI are not legally culpable for what happened to Adrianna. “I talked to a couple of lawyers and they basically said that if [Charis] didn’t put the gun in his hand, they can’t be held responsible,” he told me. “Them feeding his mind and leading him to do what he did is not illegal, I guess.”
He still wants justice for his sister, but Adam knows he’s up against a behemoth: one family demanding justice from an organization which reportedly brings in $100 million per year.
“With the big money machine that the organization is, I’m sure they’re going to do what they’ve gotta do to keep their pockets fed,” he told me. “And I don’t know if we’re a big enough voice to do anything about it.”
“I don’t know what’s going on inside of that place.”
Logging into work on Monday, November 14, Lucy learned what had happened to Adrianna. Her stomach turned. She knew who Adrianna was, knew that she had recently given birth. Lucy, who had been in an abusive marriage while pregnant and who was about to go on maternity leave again, was badly shaken. She saw the parallels. She knew she was the lucky one.
“From my perspective, having gotten out of an abusive marriage, this same situation had happened with me,” Lucy said, “Except it didn’t go as horribly, horribly far as it did for her.” She knew that Adrianna had been reaching out for help, and believes Adrianna was told what the other wives of abusive husbands had been told.
“She’d been reaching out to people and was being told, from my understanding, to stay with him,” she told me. “And we know what happened after that.”
For a brief moment that morning, Lucy thought Adrianna’s murder would be a wake-up call for the ministry, that it might help other women get out of harm’s way. “I really hoped it would be a catalyst for positive change,” Lucy said. “I had been talking about this with friends of mine who had similar stories for years. Years,” she told me.
“I really expected change. But that’s not what happened at all.”
The team meeting that morning was the first sign Lucy saw that nothing was going to change. “The prayer was all about, ‘Thank you that we are above and not beneath, thank you that we are the head and not the tail,’” she told me, echoing common refrains in charismatic Christian circles. “The focus was just on hyping us up for the rest of the workday.”
“The tone of the meeting was, ‘If anybody needs to talk, only reach out to your direct supervisor,’” she told me. “But everyone knows not to do that, Logan. If you call your manager, you have to be doing better by the end of that call. Because if you’re not, you’re marked. If you’re not doing well, mental health-wise, you’re not going to be with the ministry much longer.”
The follow-up email to employees from Senior VP Andrew Wertz did not help. “The email said that this whole situation is an attack of the enemy on our company-wide morale,” Lucy told me, saying that the underlying message was clear: stop talking about it. “It was basically saying that we need to drop it now, and if you don’t drop it now, talk to your immediate supervisor about it and they will work with you. Which basically meant they will shut you up. Because, if you don’t shut up, you’re not going to be working here much longer.”
But it was the staff meeting hosted by Wommack himself which brought Lucy’s faith in the ministry’s leader to a shuddering halt. “He told us that he knew she had reached out to people at the ministry about her marriage, and that it was nobody’s fault because what happened was always going to happen.” Again, the focus was on protecting the ministry, never on protecting the women inside it.
“I just thought, wow, are you even hearing what’s happening?” she told me. “This is not how a company, let alone a ministry, could or should handle this. A regular corporation would not handle this as badly as this.”
After ten years with Charis and AWMI, after maintaining her faith in Wommack’s vision even when the ministry let her down personally, Lucy was done.
She had a loving husband, two beautiful children with a third on the way. She didn’t need to cling to a ministry that appeared to have lost its moral compass. “I just said screw it,” she told me.
She went on maternity leave. When it ended, she quit. She left Charis with her life — a chance she knows Adrianna never got.
Is Andrew Wommack responsible for what his empire has become? In the six months since I started investigating Charis and AWMI, since I set out to learn what life is like within the cloistered confines of the secretive bible college, I have listened to source after source wrestle with that question. At one point, each of them admired him. To this day, each still credits him with any good that Charis or AWMI have produced in the world. And yet each of them came forward to blow the whistle on what has become of his life’s work.
Lucy has wrestled with the question of Wommack’s culpability more than most. “What you see is what you get with Andrew,” she told me. “He has no fake bones in his body.” Yes, he let her down with his inability or unwillingness to see and address the rot creeping through the organization’s structural beams. But he also took care of her when she needed it the most: when Lucy left her abusive husband, Andrew had an envelope delivered to her. Inside, she found thousands of dollars and a personal note.
“It said, ‘None of this is your fault. Start your new life. God is for you – and don’t listen to anybody who says that any of this is about you,’” she told me, still moved by his grace and generosity in that moment.
Lucy believes that Wommack was sidelined or relegated to figurehead status by the corporate reorg of the late twenty-teens, and that the corruption within the organization has been driven by senior leaders in Wommack’s absence. “My personal experience with the upper management of [AWMI] has been so completely different from my personal experience with Andrew Wommack.”
“At the overhaul a few years ago, it was made really clear that all of the decisions will be made by the board,” she told me, “And that Andrew will just kind of put a seal of approval on everything. That he’ll bring the vision, if you will, and the board will decide how that happens.”
But John Leong, who became Wommack’s COO shortly before the reorg and remained with the ministry through the shuffling, does not buy it.
“I don’t believe it for one second,” he told me, saying that the board is composed of yes-men. “I’ve been in those meetings. They don’t hold him to account. It’s not what a traditional board does. They just rubber stamp it.” If he had not risen to the executive level in the ministry, though, he knows he may have felt more like Lucy does.
“I was initially under the impression that all the bad decisions Andrew made were because he was getting bad advice,” John said. “He’s not a particularly great manager, and he’s quite simple in his thinking.” Working atop the ministry’s food chain, though, John saw the reality of the situation. “Andrew has the final say on everything. Even down to a $5,000 expense, he has to okay everything.”
Most of the former insiders I spoke to believe that Wommack’s pursuit of fame, legacy, and political influence over the past eight years has fundamentally changed him, and that the change in the leader is what set off the chain reaction of negative changes throughout his empire.
“I think it could be a very simple, very disappointing kind of ‘power corrupts’ situation,” Tim McDermott, who studied and taught at Charis, told me. “He suddenly realized that he has a voice, that people listen to him. Up until that point, he was still small-fry. He wasn’t Kenneth Copeland, you know? He didn’t have that kind of national voice.”
“The move into the political side was something that we would never have dreamt of him doing ten years ago,” Christopher McDermott, Tim’s father, told me. “He wasn’t interested in that kind of world or making those kinds of statements or allying with the people he’s now allied with.”
“I’ve wondered whether what’s happened politically is a manifestation of the cultural change that’s happened inside of him and has also happened inside the organization,” Christopher said. “And I think some of that comes from money and power.”
“He’s created an environment around himself with people like [Senior VP] Andy Wertz, who worship the ground he walks on, which cannot be good for one’s ego,” Tim said. “And he’s become more and more surrounded by that environment and less and less associated with the normal people who attend Charis and the normal lives of those normal people.”
Hudson Smith agrees that Wommack has become separated from normal human experience. “Everyone praises him constantly,” he said. “Every student would immediately follow him to battle.”
But is he to blame? For what sources describe as the culture of emotional and spiritual abuse, the financial machinations and fluffed-up healing journeys, and the domestic violence some say is endemic to the community. Charis graduate CJ believes he is.
“His own teaching of seed time and harvest, of sowing and reaping, has backfired on him,” he told me. “He’s lost sight of the ground he’s been sowing into, these bad actors,” CJ said, referring to members of leadership. “And now he’s reaping the negative harvest from those associations.”
“Ultimately,” CJ told me, “I think Andrew is responsible for what is happening in his ministry, and I think he needs to be held accountable for it.”
Deborah McDermott has also concluded that Wommack bears ultimate responsibility.
Having once authored a book about her healing journey, with a foreword by Wommack, Deborah understands the impulse to exempt him from blame. “We fell into the same place as a lot of people because we thought, oh, it’s not Andrew, so it must be the people in the corporate structure.” In the last year, Deborah has un-published her own book in order to avoid promoting Wommack.
“Andrew is surrounded by so many sycophants that I believe he has gotten to a point where he has no tolerance for any sort of criticism of himself or his ministry because his ministry and the people in it are a reflection of himself,” Deborah told me. “He will brook no criticism, because the end justifies the means.”
“I do not believe that he is the guileless head of a naughty monster that is going on behind his back while he innocently does God’s work,” she said. “He has no justifiable excuse for tolerating what he tolerates. The corruption is right from the top, Andrew is just as corrupt as every member of his staff.”
Deborah also understands why many of Wommack’s followers are reluctant to believe their own eyes: fear.
“This is a man who Kenneth Copeland has called a prophet. This is a man who some people have called an apostle. This is a worker of miracles – though not quite as many as they seem to claim, but nevertheless,” she said. “And you think to yourself, ‘Do I dare? Would I be spitting in the face of God,’” by criticizing him. “I have been horrified and appalled and wanting to jump up and down and shout for a long time. The one thing that has held me back is the fear of God.”
Like many sources, CJ wants to believe that Charis can heal, that it can return to being the loving and nurturing community it was created to be. “Can Charis become something good again? Deep down, I think it can. And I want it to.” But, he told me, that’s not the trajectory the school is on. “To do that, to become a truly wonderful place of Christian exploration and discovery, they would have to turn 180 degrees from the direction they are heading.”
For better and worse, Andrew Wommack has touched thousands of lives. He has brought followers into the fold, and driven others out of it. He has built a community where many have renewed their faith and redoubled their commitment to God; a community where others endured abuse they still have not healed from. Abuse some of them will never heal from. He has gone from pastoring small churches and broadcasting a meager radio show across the rural Texas airwaves, to sitting atop a multi-hundred-acre campus – a graven image of his own legacy – and spreading his message on the largest religious television network in the world. After decades of climbing the ladder, Andrew Wommack has arrived at the top. The only question his former followers have is whether he lost his way in the process.
At least one believes he did.
“I have come to the conclusion,” Deborah told me, “that this man no longer represents the God that I believe in.”
Back home in Rio Rancho, Adrianna’s former high school volunteered their gymnasium as a space for her memorial service. A community came together to mourn her death, and to celebrate her life.
“There were 1,100 people at Adrianna’s service,” Lynette, her mother, told me. “It was standing room only. We were so lucky to have so much support. She was so loved,” she said, weeping for the daughter who had been taken from her.
Adam Trujillo never visited Woodland Park before his sister was killed. When he did afterwards, he wanted to lay eyes on Charis, the place where his sister had spent the last year and a half of her life. “I drove by it when I was out there just to see what it was like,” he told me. “And it was very weird. There’s security, and you have to drive up the mountain. It’s hidden back there.”
“It had very culty vibes for me.”
When Adrianna decided to attend Charis, the Trujillos did not know their lives were going to change forever. Now, in Adrianna’s absence, they are doing what they can to pick up the pieces of the lives they thought they’d have with her and reassemble them into something which honors her memory.
Adrianna wrote a book, a poetry collection, and was in the process of self-publishing it before she passed. After her death, her family paid to finish publishing the book. Today, Sincerely Yours, by Adrianna Trujillo is available on Amazon. “She never got to see it herself,” her brother lamented.
When Adam drove past campus, he was in town to deal with the mundanity of tragedy, the endless paperwork and bureaucracy spun-off whenever a soul departs the world. But it was not all drudgery: he was also in town to finish sorting out custody of the three parts of herself that his sister left behind, the bright sparks she cast into the world before her husband so cruelly removed her from it.
Today, all three of Adrianna’s children are with her family. Her two children from a previous relationship are with Lynette, growing up in New Mexico like their mother did, surrounded by her family. Zion is there too, being raised in a loving home by Adrianna’s cousin and his wife. “Adrianna was very close to my nephew,” Lynette told me. “He and his wife had been trying to have a baby and were not successful.” Now they are raising Zion. “We get to see him as much as we want.”
Zion will never remember his mother, but he will know her from pictures and, from time to time, he will see her reflected in the faces of the family members who love him: a cheekbone, a chin. He will see parts of her reflected in his own mirror, always alive through him.
Diligently picking up the pieces, the Trujillos know that their old normal is gone for good, that it walked out the door after Memorial Day 2022 when Adrianna returned to Charis and never made it home again. Adam wishes the ministry on the mountain had never entered their lives in the first place. “It’s not even really a ministry,” he told me. “It’s all just business and money.”
But Charis did enter their lives, and it left a permanent mark; a mark which no amount of reform within Andrew Wommack’s organizations will erase. For the Trujillos, the worst has already happened; now they are left to live with it.
“She was a great mother and she didn’t get to enjoy her baby,” Lynette told me.
“She loved her kids more than anything in the whole entire world,” Adam said. “It’s going to be so hard to watch them grow up without her. They’re the ones who really have to pay for this.”
“She’s not around,” he told me, “And we have to live with that every day.”
❖
