Survivor Stories: Pastor Ben Porter uses past experience of abuse as motivation to help others heal

Pastor Ben Porter was born in Jersey City, N.J., the fourth of six children, when his mother was 18 years old. He never knew his biological father, and his stepfather regularly beat him and his older brother, to the point where police were called.

Porter’s stepfather also beat his mother in front of the children; his mother decided to save her sons’ lives and sent Porter and his brother to Arkansas to live with their grandparents.

They were there for three years, where they witnessed more dysfunction in the actions of their extended family. Although Porter says their grandfather was “a good guy,” their grandmother did not express love well; after their grandfather died, she no longer wanted Porter and his brother to live with her. Their mother still felt afraid for them to live with her, so she sent them to live with one of her sisters in Cape Girardeau.

Here, Porter and his brother lived with his aunt in a house with many scrupulous restrictions for two months before being put into foster care. Porter’s brother, whose trauma presented externally through behaviors such as violence, anger and aggression, got sent away from this foster home — which was also scrupulous and abusive — and put into a different foster home in South Cape. Porter says his brother was “his heart” and his protection; this was the first time Porter was ever alone. He was 11 years old.

“I was scared and I was unhappy and I [had] PTSD, you know, all of that stuff,” Porter says. “So, [my brother] went external and he wanted to fight, and I went internal. I just was a shell. Couldn’t get two words out of me. From anybody.”

After the foster couple Porter lived with retired, he was reunited with his brother in the foster home of Ms. Evelyn Porter, who had always wanted a son. Although Porter estimates Evelyn fostered approximately 100 foster children, it didn’t work out for her to adopt until she met Porter. Approximately six months after coming to her home when he was 12 years old, Eve- lyn adopted Porter.

“When I got adopted, it was the first time that I had normalcy,” Porter says. “I was stable, I wasn’t going anywhere else, there was somebody here that loved me.”

After graduating from high school, Porter went to Southeast Missouri State University for a year before joining the military. While living in Tampa, Fla., at age 21, he found out his brother had been killed by a policeman after breaking into the house of a woman whom Porter’s brother had hoped to marry and finding another man there with her. Porter says the night he found out, he was angry, and then he cried without being able to move for three days, his heart broken for his brother because he knew all he had gone through in life, and feeling sadness for the police officer, too.

Porter says it is important to consider people’s stories and backgrounds that motivate their actions.

“People don’t know what people go through. When you’re born into a certain family and you’re getting treated like that from day one and you have no affection, we had no love, we had no embrace, we had no esteem, we had none of that. ... You gotta know how [my brother] was beat and how he was mistreated and how we were abused,” Porter says. “And even that, I think of my stepfather. He obviously had some history of pain. … Usually, there’s some trauma that has occurred that causes people to be and do what they do.”

While working at a hospital in Tampa, an older female coworker who reminded Porter of his mother invited him and his now-wife Rose — who is from Sikeston, Mo. — to church one Sunday. There, Porter found the healing he had been searching for; the following Sunday at another church service, he and his wife committed their lives to Jesus at ages 23 and 21 and got married a few months later.

Porter earned a degree in computer science, and for two decades, he and Rose lived in Washington D.C., where Porter worked for the government, gaining high-level clearance to manage contracts, projects, and programs for generals all over the world. In 2008, he graduated from seminary at Victory Bible College, a degree he earned for his own personal benefit.

In 2015, while preparing to move to Orlando, Fla., to launch a professional speaking business, Porter felt God gave him a vision during a church service to start a church and be a preacher. In the same church service, Rose felt God told her to move back to Cape Girardeau. For the next seven months, the two continued to pray about this decision, asking for more confirmation, which Porter says God provided in many ways. Finally, after talking with their pastors about it, they made the decision to move back to Cape Girardeau. They were ordained in 2016 and founded Gateway Church in downtown Cape.

Porter says their goal is to help people gain wisdom and to “know who they are.” He recalls the ways receiving Jesus into his life helped heal his pain, and he wants to provide opportunity for that healing to take place in others’ lives, too.

“I’m still motivated by that pain,” Porter says of his past. “We’re looking to get people strong and understand what the Word means and understand Jesus loves them and understand how to tell other people that, too.”

Porter says forgiveness is easy because it is selfish in the sense that it helps release the person who is “tormented” by another’s wrongdoing from bitterness.

“I don’t think [forgiveness is] possible within yourself. You have to have Jesus, you have to have the Holy Spirit,” Porter says. “I look at what I’ve been through, and I really wanted somebody to care. I really wanted somebody to look past whatever it is that I felt like I was being mistreated for and love me for real. So, I had this sympathy and empathy because of what I went through. … When your heart is changed and you learn that people are reacting is really what’s going on, [it helps give you understanding]. … They’re moving from this pain, people are moving from this trauma, people are moving from this hurt. Hurt people hurt people.”

Porter encourages others to believe God can transform their pain and use it for good, too.

“I’m an … abused, traumatized orphan that was rejected, unloved, low self-esteem, trauma that overcame all of that when I got saved,” Porter says. “I started to learn human nature and how powerful the Spirit can be, how powerful Jesus can be in your spirit to overcome any and all. And it can turn you into a beautiful person that can be beneficial to the community, no question about it.”