A series of proposed workshops that referenced reports of sexual abuse at an orphanage run by a Missouri charity have been canceled by the International Conference on Missions.
ICOM's decision came as thousands of attendees headed to its annual convention this week in St. Louis. The cancellation was met with outrage from activists and former supporters of the Niños de México orphanage, which closed last year after an independent report alleged decades of abuse by the orphanage's staff, volunteers and founders.
In response, Rapha International, a Joplin-based anti-trafficking group that had first proposed the workshops to ICOM this summer, announced that its staff would not attend the convention, saying that "silence and avoidance are among the conditions that foster a culture of abuse."
Aryn Tanksley, Rapha's chief development officer, said that ICOM had responded to the group's workshop proposal with a counter-offer to do the workshop but not mention: Ninos de Mexico. "We declined to do that," she said.
ICOM's leadership did not respond to St. Louis Public Radio's request for comment for this story.
A draft of the proposed workshops published Wednesday by Ray Report included six lessons from the findings and recommendations of a 256-page report released on November 12, 2025, by the nonprofit Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment. The organization had been commissioned by Niños in 2024 to investigate the abuse allegations swirling around the orphanage. The resulting GRACE report documented numerous cases of sexual abuse of children at Ninos. The report also alleged the orphanage's on-site staff and Missouri-based leadership were aware of the abuse but ignored or covered it up.
Once a mainstay of the convention, Niños stopped showing up to ICOM in 2023, when abuse allegations began gaining steam through reporting in Mexico and in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Later that year, a former Niños staff member, Javier Colosia Lopez, was convicted of rape in Mexico.
Tanksley said that Rapha wanted to use the workshops at ICOM this year to share the lessons from the collapse of the longrunning orphanage. She said Rapha is committed to developing educational material based on the GRACE report and that the group hopes to return to ICOM in the future.
"Our hope is to use this opportunity to bring learning and deepen understanding of child protection practices, policies and systems for ourselves and other organizations," Tanksley told St. Louis Public Radio. "Our hope for what comes next is to help people learn from this tragedy and help us all to protect kids better."
The GRACE report did not mention ICOM by name. But the talks between Rapha and ICOM eventually broke down over abuse described in its pages.
In an Oct. 26 statement obtained by STLPR, ICOM confirmed the cancellations of the Niños-related workshops while acknowledging that "many of its members financially supported the orphanage."
ICOM defended its members' previous support of Niños: "They did this, unaware of the abuse, believing they were supporting a faithful work of the Lord. It is important for victims of abuse to know that organizations like ICOM stand behind them. The leadership of ICOM feels it is important it makes its position very clear: abuse is never acceptable."
Yet the statement also suggested that the facts of the abuse are in dispute, saying ICOM canceled the workshops because of ongoing but unspecified litigation.
"ICOM did not cancel these workshops out of avoidance," the statement continued. "Rather, the legal processes for the victims involved have not reached their end. Victims deserve their justice without conferences prematurely dissecting their experience. And the leadership of ICOM did not feel that the canceled workshops could do enough to protect the conference and participants from being drug into future defamation claims, as many of the facts have yet to be fully litigated."
The downfall of Niños and the exposure of its alleged history of abuse has led to at least one lawsuit.
In September, a 23-year-old woman in Mexico, identified only as Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit against Niños' former Missouri executive directors and other leaders. Her attorney, Chandler Gregg, said the lawsuit has nothing to do with ICOM or defamation.
Gregg said he would encourage ICOM to hold the workshops.
"Anything that would shed light on abuse, and what the holes [are] in an institution that would allow abuse to go on, is a good thing," he said. "There's nothing about [the workshops] that we would discourage. I mean, in fact, having workshops to ensure that churches or Christian organizations take steps to protect kids is a good thing, and is directly in line with the purpose of this lawsuit as well."
Previous ICOM conventions have reported as many as 8,000 attendees. Eric Miller began attending the conventions as a teenager. A former Niños volunteer, Miller later turned whistleblower after he said he was rebuffed by the orphanage's executive director Steve Ross. Miller has spent the last several years speaking publicly about the orphanage's failures to stop the abuse within its walls.
In previous years, Miller said, Niños handed out promotional materials and were "definitely a mainstay at the conference."
Miller said the ICOM's community of supporters and churches are still grappling with what happened at Niños for so many years.
"If we as a community platformed an organization like that," he said, "I believe it's also our responsibility now to name the evil that was going on among us and ask, 'What can we do better?'"
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