Rapha International Quits Missions Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, After Niños de Mexico Workshop Is Canceled

Rapha International, a Joplin, Missouri-based organization that fights human trafficking, planned to cite the now-defunct Niños de Mexico orphan care ministry as a warning for attendees at this year’s International Conference on Missions (ICOM) in St. Louis. Aryn Tanksley, Rapha’s chief development officer, said that being able to say “honestly and transparently, this happened in one of our own ministries” would create urgency around the issue.

When ICOM’s leadership learned of the planned workshop, they canceled it. Tanksley told The Roys Report (RR) that ICOM leaders cited a civil lawsuit filed in September by a Niños victim. ICOM did not return RR’s calls requesting comment.

The lawsuit was filed by a Mexican woman identified as Jane Doe against six former Niños leaders. She alleges that the leaders negligently oversaw a house parent who sexually abused her when she was a teen. She is one of 80 victims whose allegations against 20 former missionaries and staff were described in a 256-page report by Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), released in November 2025. Her case is a reminder to protect those who cannot protect themselves (Proverbs 31:8-9).

Tanksley told RR that there is no legal problem with discussing and learning from the GRACE report. Rapha had exhibited at ICOM for 23 years before it withdrew from the conference last month in protest. “We just felt that it didn’t align with our values to be in a place where we were told that this could not be discussed,” Tanksley said.

In a statement, Rapha said, “We believe that the ministry community grows safer when it examines hard cases openly, especially when an organization has commissioned an independent investigation and made the findings public. Silence and avoidance are among the conditions that foster a culture of abuse.”

The missions conference, which draws thousands, also serves as the annual convention for the Restoration Movement, of which Niños de Mexico was a prominent member. According to 2020 figures from the Association of Religion Data Archives, the movement includes almost 20,000 churches with about 3.2 million followers. The Restoration Movement, also called the Stone-Campbell Movement, began in the 1800s in Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

The movement is not a denomination and has no formal authority structure for victims to escalate abuse allegations, said Doug Lay, a Restoration pastor and abuse advocate based in St. Louis. Lay told RR that this lack of structure means abuse cases are not usually well documented and are typically handled internally. He said Niños de Mexico is a flagship ministry of the movement, and that many churches in the network donated funds to it or sent members to volunteer. “We like to help each other and encourage each other and talk about our successes,” Lay said. “But, we do not want to publicly critique ourselves.”

Niños was founded in 1967. Shortly afterward, its leaders, houseparents and staff were accused of abusing children, but investigators later found that leaders had managed to squelch decades-long attempts to expose the abuses. In 2022, Javier Colosia, a former houseparent, was arrested for abusing children at Niños. Mexican news outlet RCG Media reported the arrest, which brought the subject of abuse at the ministry into public view. A few months later, former Niños intern Eric Miller wrote to the Niños board calling for a third-party investigation into the allegations.

Lay told RR that he began working with Miller and former Niños staffer-turned-whistleblower Olivia Paola Cueva in January 2023. They pressed the Niños board to commission GRACE to investigate. That step came after a year of letters to the board, social media posts, multiple media reports and a petition signed by almost 16,000 people.

Source: Read the original report