How the Chi Alpha college ministry failed to stop a sex offender from abusing students in Texas

This article is part of “Pastors and Prey,” a series investigating sex abuse allegations in the Assemblies of God.

HOUSTON — Daniel Savala leans back in a cloth armchair, raises his right hand and swears before God that what he’s about to say is the truth.

Looking into the camera, the Pentecostal missionary speaks in slow, measured sentences, describing how, for decades, he gained the trust of college students who came to his ivy-draped bungalow in search of spiritual guidance. Using scripture, he convinced them they could open up about uncomfortable topics like pornography and masturbation. Then he would strike, touching their penises and pressuring them to touch his, all under the guise of bringing them closer to Jesus.

“I knew that I was wrong,” Savala says in the video, filmed by a lawyer in 2023. “But I did it anyway.”

Religion, he says, was the tool of his deception. “People can just see that spiritual part of your life without seeing the whole of who you are.”

And the person he truly was?

“Manipulative,” he says matter-of-factly. “Cunning.” “Sinister.”

In the two years since Savala recorded that confession at his home in Houston, lawyers, activists and whistleblowers have worked to untangle how a convicted sex offender with an eighth-grade education managed to convince scores of pastors and young Christians to put their faith in him — and why church officials repeatedly failed to stop him.

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In police reports, lawsuits, online forums and interviews with NBC News, dozens of boys and young men have described how Savala spun his own twisted version of the gospel. He taught them that seeing each other naked in his backyard sauna was essential to becoming true brothers in Christ — or, as he put it, “nudity is unity.” For those struggling with lustful temptation, he offered a counterintuitive solution: group masturbation, sometimes while listening to Christian worship music. He pushed some of his disciples further; in lawsuits, signed statements and criminal filings, at least 10 have accused him of sexually abusing them.

“He would say things like, ‘Hey, you know it’s OK to masturbate,’” said Joseph Cleveland, who says Savala groomed and sexually abused him for a decade beginning in 2004, when he was 15. “‘Because we’re brothers, we can do it together.’”

The pastors who shepherded hundreds of high school and college students to Savala’s home were part of Chi Alpha, a Christian ministry that evangelizes on university campuses. Students seek out Chi Alpha to connect with God and each other, through small Bible studies and rollicking worship services — and, for more than 30 years, through Savala. Generations of Chi Alpha leaders hailed him as a spiritual savant who could answer life’s deepest mysteries.

The boys and young men who devoted themselves to Savala called him “Papa Daniel,” “God’s vagabond” and “the holiest man alive.” At his direction, teams of students built the backyard sauna that became the site of his alleged crimes. So wrapped up in his teachings, his followers often didn’t see themselves as victims until years or decades later. At least one of the college students Savala sexually exploited later became a pastor and brought his own boys to learn from his master inside his darkened sauna.

The reward for that minister’s devotion: Like Savala, he now faces the possibility of life in prison.

Savala’s ministry collapsed in early 2023 when several men came forward, some anonymously, to accuse him and some of his protégés of sexual abuse and exploitation, triggering a wave of criminal charges, lawsuits and pastor dismissals. Savala was arrested, and at least six Chi Alpha pastors, leaders and students who studied under him were charged with sexual abuse.

The revelations rocked Chi Alpha and the Pentecostal denomination that runs it, the Assemblies of God, which has nearly 3 million members at 13,000 churches across the U.S. As Savala, 69, awaits trial in Waco, Texas, Assemblies of God leaders have sought to distance themselves from the lay minister, repeatedly asserting that Savala was not employed by Chi Alpha and has never been credentialed to preach in the denomination.

But an NBC News investigation, based on interviews and a review of emails, court records, photographs and social media posts, shows that Savala was deeply entrenched in Chi Alpha, with some leaders crediting him for the ministry’s rapid growth in recent decades. The reporting reveals that Assemblies of God leaders — all the way up to the denomination’s national superintendent — were warned repeatedly about Savala’s troubling history but did not cut off his influence. These failures allowed more children and young men to be abused, the reporting shows.

It wasn’t the first time officials with the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination, have been accused of mishandling sex abuse allegations. In May, an NBC News investigation revealed how church leaders dismissed repeated abuse allegations against a charismatic children’s pastor named Joe Campbell in the 1980s, allowing him to remain in ministry for years as more alleged victims came forward.

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Chi Alpha had a clear opportunity to break ties with Savala in 2012, when authorities in Alaska charged him with sexually abusing boys as a youth minister in the 1990s. Instead, ministry leaders in Texas rallied to his defense, sending a staff member to Alaska to pay his bail and — after Savala pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of a minor — organizing a letter-writing campaign to ask the judge for leniency. After a stint in jail, Savala went right back to hosting Chi Alpha students at his home in Houston.

In the decade that followed, at least half a dozen people contacted Assemblies of God officials in Texas and at the denomination’s national headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, alerting them that Chi Alpha was exposing students to a sex offender. These whistleblowers wrote emails, made phone calls and spoke up at internal meetings. Again and again, they were dismissed or ignored, NBC News found.

“Hiddenness is the ally of abuse,” said Anthony Scoma, a pastor who resigned an Assemblies of God leadership position in Texas after he said senior denomination officials failed to act on his warnings about Savala in 2023. “The Bible talks about shining light into dark places. But leadership in the Assemblies of God says, ‘Oh, don’t shine light into our dark places.’”

Rather than reckon with how church leaders welcomed a sex offender into the fold, Savala’s accusers say the Assemblies of God has taken a defensive stance, refusing to release an internal investigation and relying on nondisclosure agreements to keep the story from spreading.

Critics, including several current and former Assemblies of God pastors, say this response exposes a church leadership culture that’s more concerned with avoiding legal liability than protecting the vulnerable. They’re calling on the Assemblies of God to commission an independent review of its handling of sex abuse allegations nationwide to ensure nothing like this happens again.

In a statement to NBC News, the Assemblies of God said it directed Chi Alpha leaders to stay away from Savala after receiving a report about him in 2018. Five years later, after receiving “reports of sexual abuse,” the denomination said it “took appropriate actions,” leading to the dismissal of more than a half dozen ministers with ties to Savala.

“We have been heartbroken to hear allegations related to Daniel Savala and the pain his reported actions caused,” the statement said. “The Assemblies of God stands in strong opposition to the teachings and practices he followed.”

Denomination leaders declined interview requests and did not answer detailed questions.

Savala has not entered a plea on his charges in Texas, and he and his lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. But in April 2023, as the accusations mounted, he recorded the confession in his living room; it’s unclear what led him to do so. The grainy homemade video later circulated among Savala’s accusers and was shared with NBC News.

Contemplating how he managed to conceal his misdeeds for so long, Savala’s eyes shift momentarily, then his gaze returns to the camera.

“I had them all very well under my spell.”