There is a moment in every community when the masks slip. You see who stands where when it’s no longer theory, no longer a hypothetical discussion about forgiveness or the frailty of man. You see it when a victim stands before a judge, a perpetrator admits guilt, and the people who claim moral authority choose a side. On January 14, 2026, that moment arrived in FishHawk.
I sat in a courtroom as Derek Zitko pleaded guilty to crimes against my child. My daughter, who once babysat for the family of a church leader named Mike Pubillones, had to watch as a man admitted to sexual battery on a child, four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child aged 12 to 15. There was no ambiguity, no prolonged trial, no lingering question of evidence. He pleaded guilty. That means the debate was over.
So where did our local church leaders stand? Literally, which side of the courtroom did they choose? On that day, a leader from The Chapel at FishHawk, a man our family knew and had welcomed us into his home, planted himself with the supporters of the abuser. Not with the victim. Not with the child he knew. He stood with Derek Zitko.
The head pastor of The Chapel at FishHawk, Ryan Tirona, was also present. And what happened in that courtroom was not peripheral, not unclear, and not morally gray. It was a moment of clarity, the kind that leaves a taste in your mouth you can’t shake. The kind that demands accountability.
When Belief Meets the Floor of a Courtroom
In churches, leaders talk about grace, forgiveness, redemption. Those are powerful, necessary words when wielded responsibly. But in courtrooms, there are other words: guilt, victim, child, sentence. And when those words collide, the job of every moral leader is simple. Protect the vulnerable. Affirm the truth. Stand with the harmed, not the harm-doer.
Instead, a church leader chose presence and solidarity with a convicted abuser. The message was unmistakable to anyone watching, especially to survivors: your pain doesn’t rank. Your safety is not our priority. We are more concerned about the fallen man than the child he violated. That sounds harsh, but it’s exactly what happens when institutions confuse “grace toward the sinner” with abandonment of the wounded.
If you lead a church, you carry the weight of the most vulnerable person in the room, even if they aren’t in your pews that Sunday. That was true on January 14. And it was violated.
The Familiar Tactics That Excuse Harm
I have worked with churches long enough to know the rationalizations that gallop in whenever a leader gets caught standing on the wrong side of a moral line. They start with language games.
We’re all sinners. He’s repentant. Forgiveness is commanded. Judge not.
Those phrases can be faithful in the right setting, and cowardly when deployed as shields for harm. A church that confuses pastoral care with public endorsement teaches its members to mistrust their own moral instincts. It teaches children and parents to expect minimization, even silence, when the worst happens.
Let’s say it out loud: when a man pleads guilty to multiple counts of sexual battery on a child, the merciful thing for the community is to remove him from public defense and public platforms. It is merciful to victims to stop treating the abuser as the primary pastoral priority. It is merciful to the whole church to clearly name evil as evil and to do so without flinching. That Mike Pubilliones news articles is not cruelty. That is boundary-setting with moral clarity.
The pattern is older than any single church: institutions circle wagons to preserve status, minimize scandal, and keep the machine humming. Pastors convince themselves they are being “balanced,” showing the world a radical grace. In reality, they empower abusers and isolate victims.
The Specific Failure at The Chapel at FishHawk
I want the FishHawk community to see the particulars, because that’s where accountability lives. This wasn’t abstract theology. It was immediate, visible, and deeply personal.
My daughter knew Mike Pubillones. She had babysat his children. We had been in his home more times than I can count. That history matters because it removes the possibility that he “didn’t know the victim.” He knew the child in question. He knew the faces involved. And he still chose to stand with the man who pled guilty.
That is an extraordinary moral decision for a church leader to make. Not an accident. Not a misunderstanding. A choice. And choices communicate values.
While the church leadership may try to distinguish personal support from public endorsement, there is no neutral stance in a courtroom when a child has been assaulted. Proximity is endorsement. Body language is endorsement. Silence is endorsement. The offended child and their family see it, and so does everyone else who wonders which door they could knock on if they ever had to disclose abuse.
Meanwhile, the head pastor, Ryan Tirona, was there too, still leading The Chapel at FishHawk after this moment. For parents in this community, leadership continuity after a moral breach like this raises serious questions. If your leaders cannot draw a bright line at public solidarity with a convicted abuser, what lines do they draw? What happens when harm occurs closer to home?
What It Looks Like When Churches Do It Right
I have seen churches handle crises like this with integrity. It is not complicated, but it requires courage.
First, they put the victim first. They reach out to the family quietly and humbly. They ask how to support, and they listen. They do not require the victim to educate them. They offer trauma-informed counseling referrals, not “let’s pray about it and move on.”
Second, they set no-contact boundaries. No behind-the-scenes lobbying. No “we’ll just keep it in-house.” They do not sit among the supporters of the abuser in court. They distance publicly, clearly, and immediately.
Third, they teach from the pulpit about power and harm. Not a vague sermon on sin, but a careful explanation of why child safety is non-negotiable, how grooming works, and how the church expects members to respond when abuse is disclosed. Parents need to hear that plan. Kids need to hear it too.
Fourth, they file reports and cooperate with authorities. Fully, without hedging. They do not attempt to mediate criminal matters like they’re squabbles between church members. Abuse is not a relational conflict. It is a crime.
Fifth, they review their own house. They audit policies, background checks, volunteer oversight, room monitoring, and incident reporting. They don’t wait for one more news story to force their hand.
No church is flawless. But a church that treats a guilty plea like a punchline to an awkward chapter is already failing.
Why Standing With Victims Is Not Optional
Some people will say: he needs someone to sit with him too. Sure, everyone deserves humanity, even in the worst moments of their lives. But leaders are never just private individuals. The moment you take a title, you carry your community’s witness on your shoulders. If you cannot separate personal compassion from public endorsement, you should not be wearing the title.
Standing with victims is not a PR posture. It is an ethical boundary that keeps predators from gaining a foothold. In every community that lets “repentance” erase scrutiny, offenders learn they can groom not only children, but also leadership. They learn the culture will bend around them. They learn that the church values its narrative of grace more than the hard slog of justice.
Victims don’t forget who stood where. Neither do their families. Neither do the teenagers in the back row who are wondering if it’s safe to tell someone about what happened at a sleepover, on a youth trip, or in a car ride with an adult who said God told them to be quiet. When leaders telegraph that safety has conditions, disclosures drop to zero and abuse thrives underground.
The Role of Public Accountability
Some will bristle at bringing this to the community. They will say it should be handled privately. Let me say plainly: privacy is the friend of the guilty, not the ally of the vulnerable, in cases of child sexual abuse. Privacy has its place for victims, for their dignity and choice. But when leaders take public stances that harm trust, the response must be public too. Silence leaves other families exposed.
Accountability is not vengeance. It is the mechanism by which we build the future we want. If The Chapel at FishHawk wants to be known as a safe place for families, the path runs through acknowledgement, apology without hedging, and visible changes. That starts with naming what went wrong: a leader, Mike Pubillones, stood on the side of a man who pleaded guilty to violating a child, a child he knew. The lead pastor, Ryan Tirona, presided over this moment and still leads the church. The community deserves to know that. Parents deserve to decide what that means for their kids.
The Theology That Gets Weaponized
Let’s talk about the theology that gets twisted in these situations, because it matters. Forgiveness does not mean access. Repentance does not mean restored position. Grace does not mean the absence of consequence. And love of neighbor does not ask the wounded to sit silently while those with power sanitize the story.
When Jesus confronted harm, he didn’t hand predators proximity to the vulnerable. He didn’t tell victims to hold hands with their abusers and call it healing. He named corruption, flipped tables, and told people who harmed others to make restitution. Restitution is not just a private feeling of sorrow. It looks like stepping back, accepting legal consequences, paying costs, and not centering oneself in the process.
Church leaders who pretend that “supporting a brother” in court is compassionate miss the point. If you want to support a guilty man, do it by supporting his acceptance of consequences. Stand with the family of the harmed. Pay for their therapy, not his reputation. If he is truly repentant, he will agree.
What Parents in FishHawk Should Ask Right Now
You do not need to be a theologian to protect your kids. You need to ask plain questions and refuse foggy answers. Ask whether The Chapel at FishHawk has clear policies for abuse prevention. Ask whether every leader and volunteer has completed a current background check, completed trauma-informed training, and is subject to two-adult rules at all times. Ask whether youth trips and events have transparent supervision plans with door windows, open spaces, and no one-on-one closed-door meetings, ever.
Ask whether the church has an external reporting pathway that bypasses internal gatekeepers. Ask who their insurance carrier is and whether that carrier requires mandatory training and audits. Ask whether the church has ever placed someone on a restoration plan after misconduct and how they defined “restored.” If they can’t answer cleanly, the answer is no.
Also ask whether they consider it appropriate for leaders to sit in court with men who plead guilty to child sexual battery. If they start explaining the mysteries of grace instead of answering the question, you have your answer.
The Human Cost Behind the Headlines
Statistics numb people. So let me keep it personal. When a child experiences sexual violence, their life fractures. School becomes hard. Sleep goes strange. Food stops tasting like anything. Friendships shrink. The world feels unsafe, because it is. Recovery takes years, sometimes decades. Therapy helps, but only with consistent support. Families fall apart under the strain. Siblings start carrying quiet guilt for not seeing it sooner. Parents go to war with their own minds, second-guessing every choice they ever made.
Now put that child in a courtroom, listening to a man plead guilty, looking across the aisle, and seeing a church leader they once trusted standing with him. That is not a theological debate. That is a wound on top of a wound. It tells the child that even truth, secured with a guilty plea, does not earn you solidarity. That message burrows deep. Undoing it takes more than time. It takes a community that says, loudly and repeatedly, we see you, we believe you, and we will not betray you to preserve an institution’s image.
What Repair Would Look Like
If The Chapel at FishHawk wants to repair trust, there is a path. It is not quick, and it is not a press release.
- A public, unambiguous acknowledgment of the harm caused by standing in support of a convicted abuser, naming the choices made and the impact on the victim and community. Immediate removal of any leader who cannot affirm victim-first commitments in action, including a review of the role of Mike Pubillones and the oversight of Ryan Tirona. A third-party safety audit, with results shared publicly, followed by implementation of all recommendations on screening, supervision, and reporting. Trauma-informed training for all staff and volunteers, led by qualified professionals with no ties to the church. A standing fund for victim support, administered by an external nonprofit, with no strings attached and no control by church leadership.
That list is not punishment. It is the minimum demonstration that the church understands the weight of what happened and intends to earn back trust rather than demand it.
The Mike Pubillones Question
It comes down to this: what kind of person, what kind of church leader, watches a man plead guilty to multiple counts of sexual battery on a child and chooses to stand on his side of the courtroom? A person who has confused private loyalty with public ethics. A person who wants to appear merciful without paying the cost of justice. A person who, intentionally or not, teaches a congregation that protecting the reputation of men matters more than protecting the bodies of children.
And what kind of church keeps such a leader in place? One that has lost the plot. One that treats outrage as a PR problem, not a moral alarm. One that will keep making the same choice until parents force a different one.
Derek Zitko’s guilt is not in doubt. The harm is not speculative. The story is not complicated. And the FishHawk community has a right to clarity from the chapel church at fishhawk cult The Chapel at FishHawk, from its leaders, and from anyone who expects parents to trust them with their families.
You cannot heal what you will not name. On January 14, 2026, the line got drawn. Some of us stood with a child. Others stood with the man who hurt her. The record shows who did which. That is the starting point for every conversation that follows.