Earlier today I ran a post on the tax advantages that the US government gives to churches and pastors. It results in a subsidizing of these religious institutions. Where is the outcry? Have you even heard any politicians mention this? Aside from Senator Grassley , I haven't.
Bishop Eddie Long has recently been in the news regarding the allegation of sexual abuse. While all the current focus is on these allegations, someone needs to look into his financial empire. It turns out that Bishop Long has an empire that is much bigger than just his church of 25,000 members. He also has an organization called, The Father's House, in which churches and pastors agree to submit to his authority and pay him their tithes.
Rachel Tabachnick recently wrote: Long claims spiritual authority over more than his New Birth mega-church in Lithonia, Georgia. He is the 'apostolic authority' over churches in The Father's House network, including 79 churches in Georgia alone and a total of approximately 275 in 38 states.
According to the The Father's House website: The Father's House is a ministry that is intended for Senior Pastors who are led to submit themselves under the spiritual covering and apostolic authority of Bishop Eddie L. Long.
Tabachnick explains: This model requires tithing (payment of ten percent) into the leader's network. The website for Long's The Father's House network list the benefits and responsibilities of "covering" provided by Long.
Long is something of a Pope over these churches. Notice the outfits used when he recently ordained another Bishop in his organization.
What Long has going here is something of a pyramid scheme. Churches tithe up the ladder. Apostle John Kelly explains the principle in the book The New Apostolic Churches (ed. Peter Wagner):
If they [Pastors] tithe to their local church, they are tithing back into their own paychecks...
...Many pastors will declare they have a covering, but the question is, do they tithe to that covering? By tracking the tithe, we can literally track the order in the house of God.
Our local churches also tithe, but they tithe for a different purpose. Instead of tithing to their spiritual covering, they tithe to the network for global impact and a global harvest.
works to prepare for the 'great wealth transfer' prophesied by the movement and to aid in the "advancement of the Kingdom of God on earth." This is not redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Dominionists are diehard free marketers who rave against the country's supposed decline into Marxism. Wishful progressives have described the charitable and faith-based work of some dominionists as a return of the social gospel, but these dominionist forcefully reject any association with the social gospel, describing it as socialism. The wealth redistribution that they are referring to is a future windfall that will go from the ungodly to the godly, a belief that the New Apostolics share with many prosperity doctrine or Word of Faith preachers.
When will people wake up and demand that these religious institutions pay taxes!
With all the reports about clergy sex abuse in the news, it seem we live in the era of Clergy Gone Wild. The Roman Catholic Church scandals have been dominating the news but its not only the RCC that has a problem keeping its clergy under control. Protestant clergy, including Evangelical Preachers, seem to be trying their best to keep up with the Catholics.
Valerie Tarico, a former evangelical Christian, and a licensed psychologist, has an excellent piece on ExChristian.net entitled: "The Protestant Clergy Sex Abuse Pattern." She begins:
One of the most striking aspects of the Protestant clergy sex abuse pattern is that most people don’t realize it is a pattern. The Catholic Church has taken a well deserved beating in the courts and in the court of public opinion as former altar boys, orphans and ordinary parishioners have come forward with appalling stories of sex abuse. Yet equally egregious violations by Protestant clergy have failed to generate the same level of outrage. Why?
She gives four reasons:
The Catholic Church is easier to think of as a monolithic entity. That means it is easier for the press to cohere the abuse incidents into a single story and our brains to grock it. The idea of one big conspiracy appeals to us: “The Church” did it and then covered it up.
The centralized hierarchy of Catholicism makes Catholic offenders easier to sue and guarantees deep pockets. The lawsuits in turn both generate their own news cycle and bring victims out of the closet.
Since most Americans are Protestants, the Catholic Sex Abuse scandal is a story about “them.” Protestant Pedophilia is a story about “us,” which makes it less gratifying and more uncomfortable.
Most Americans find the idea of celibacy peculiar at best. It makes for a more interesting narrative than a generic story about abuse of authority.
The truth is, though, that Protestants, including Evangelicals, have a big problem in this area too.
Here are some websites that document these abuses:
WSB Radio has learned another Atlanta minister with a sordid sexual past mentored Bishop Eddie Long as a young preacher. Ole Anthony of the Trinity Foundation, a watchdog organization which monitors clergymen like Long, says the late Bishop Earl Paulk mentored Long as a young pastor. ... Paulk, who died last year, was an evangelical mega church leader accused of having sex with many women in his congregation including his brother's wife and his own granddaughter. Anthony compared Long's "Spiritual Sons" program in which his three young accusers were members with Paulk's "Kingdom Relationships," saying both were really designed to sexually gratify the clergymen.
Paulk's church, Chapel Hill Harvester Church, once had 15,000 members but after a paternity suit which revealed that the assistant Pastor, D. E. Paulk, was really Paulk's son and not his nephew as everyone thought, attendance declined.
The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother's wife and fathered a child by her.
Members of Archbishop Earl Paulk's family stood at the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church a few Sundays ago and revealed the secret exposed by a recent court-ordered paternity test.("Megachurch leader in mega-sized sex scandal," MSNBC [11/19/2007]).
The revelation came out as a result of a civil lawsuit filed by a former church employee, Mona Brewer who says Earl Paulk manipulated her into an affair from 1989 to 2003 by telling her it was her only path to salvation. Earl Paulk admitted to the affair in front of the church last January.
Under oath in a deposition, Earl Paulk claimed that Brewer was the only woman besides his wife that he had slept with. The paternity suit proved otherwise. Paulk died in 2009 before he could face trial for perjury. His once great mega church property was sold and the few members left moved and changed their name. Is this going to be the future of Eddie Long's empire?
If I were accused of such things and I was innocent, I would say as loudly as I could--"I did not commit these acts of which I have been accused." The fact that Long does not deny the allegations but only says "I am not perfect" and "I will fight this" makes one think he is guilty.
According to Bishop Eddie Long, Pastor of the Atlanta megachurch, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, the job of the preacher is to "bring fresh sperm" to his congregation. See below:
If you can handle it, there is a longer version of the Bishop's speech (complete with romantic music) available here.
If the allegations leveled against Bishop Long yesterday by two members of his congregation are correct, I guess the Bishop has been taking his job seriously and literally.
I have recently reported on a case of a 15 year old girl being raped in New Hampshire by a Baptist church leader and the alleged cover-up of that crime by the church and its Pastor.
The sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are well-known but what is not as well known is the problem among Baptist churches. In 2007, ABC's 20/20 did an investigative report called" Preacher Predators." They detailed the problem among Baptists and pointed out how that Baptists, as opposed to Catholics, do not even have a central database where a potential Pastor or church leader could be checked out. While in the ABC report, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Frank Page, said that they were looking into developing such a database, the decision was made in 2008 not to create one. The reason cited was that in Baptist doctrine each local church is autonomous. Time magazine listed this as one of the top 10 underreported stories of 2008.
Why do I keep discussing this subject on my blog? Because I believe that Baptists are no better than Catholics or any other religious or non-religious group with regard to this problem. BUT THEY OUGHT TO BE IF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY IS TRUE. I know how Baptist evangelicals think since I used to be one. They will decry the Catholic priests who molest children and say that it proves that the Roman church is corrupt and false but when the problem is in their own church, they make excuses and say that it has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of their beliefs. While I admit that these problems do not prove evangelical Christianity to be false, I do think they show that evangelical Christian leaders are no more spiritual or godly than leaders from other religious or non-religious groups that they would claim to be false.
The "Preacher Predators" three part report is below:
In two prior posts (see here and here), I have written about the rape of a 15 year old girl by a church leader at Trinity Baptist Church of Concord, NH. A couple of my former colleagues have written me in private emails criticizing me for posting this information. I have been told that I am "petty" and that I am taking "glee" in reporting this incident. Why am I posting this information on my blog?
1) I believe that the Bible teaches that women have an inferior status to men. In the OT, women were seen as the property of either their husband or their father. I have two posts on the OT God condoning rape (see here and here).
2) I believe that fundamentalist evangelicals, people who believe the Bible is inspired and inerrant, still cling to this idea of women being inferior in status to men. I realize that they would vehemently deny this to be the case but I think it is evident in many of their teachings such as the notion that women are to be submissive to their husbands, women are not to have leadership positions in the church, and so on. And I think that the way the victim was treated in this particular case also illustrates my point.
3) I am particularly interested in this case because it involves persons and institutions that were part of my orbit when I was a believer.
4) I would like to see justice done and the victim's honor restored. I think she is owed an apology by several of the players in this tragic incident.
So, I will continue to report on this case until it is resolved.
It appears that the Pastor of the Church, Chuck Phelps (later the President of Maranatha Baptist College) and Matt Olson (now the President of Northland Baptist College) conspired together to ship the girl from New Hampshire to Colorado. Phelps claims that the police never asked him where the girl was and thus charges were never brought against the rapist, Ernie Willis. Willis continued on in the Trinity Baptist Church for years after this crime. Phelps and Olson claim they did nothing wrong. I think they were negligent in not seeing to it that Willis was prosecuted. This was not just a "church matter," it was a crime. While Phelps and Olson probably did nothing legally wrong; I fail to see how one can conclude that they didn't do something that was morally wrong. Phelps had the victim stand up in front of the church and apologize for her action. Once the victim was moved to Colorado, Olson had the victim write a letter to the rapist's wife apologizing for "violating her trust." Neither man saw to it that Willis was prosecuted.
The current pastor of the church in Colorado where the victim was sent, Tri-City Baptist Church in Westminster, Will Senn (I am not making his name up), has issued a letter trying to clear the name of his church in this fiasco. You can read it here. Here are the comments that one blogger made about Pastor Senn's letter:
1) He never says that Willis raped Tina. A reading of this letter would cause the reader to assume, which is also what Phelps engineered the church at that time to assume, that 15 year old Tina had engaged in consensual sex.
2) He never allows that Tina had no say in giving up her baby. She was allowed to select which of the final three candidate couples should have her baby, but there was no other decision given to her.
3) He declares that Tina was not being hidden in Colorado, yet Tina and her brother both say that she was being hidden.
4) He directly says, ” Dr. Chuck Phelps does not believe that Tina was responsible for being allegedly raped.” But the Concord Monitor says, “Phelps said he told her to “be responsible, don’t allow yourself to be around a person you know to be dangerous. She knew this person was dangerous after the first time, but she continued to be around him….She needed to be responsible.”
5) He directly says, “In addition, Dr. Chuck Phelps urged Tina and her mother to talk with the police, but they would not.” Tina was actually instructed to never tell anybody about what happened. And if Phelps was so determined that they should talk to the police, why did he not wield the sword of church discipline at them? After all, he had already made Tina take responsibility for being raped. Surely he could have made her responsible to go to the police.
6) He refers to the “media attack on Dr. Chuck Phelps, Dr. Matt Olson or Tri-City Baptist Church.” Actually, the news media is reporting the story, and Phelps has been given ample opportunity to give his side. The fact that he just keeps digging himself deeper every time he talks is not an attack from the media.
The current Pastor of the Trinity Baptist Church in Concord, NH, Brian Fuller, is to be commended for now taking a different approach on this matter.
Fuller's 38-minute sermon is devoted mostly to explaining the need for the church to face the harsh criticism from this scandal without lashing back, take a hard look at themselves and what was done in 1997 and what it says about them now, and see what restitution needs to be made and what change needs to occur at their church.(source)
A statement on the Trinity Baptist church's website says the following:
In reviewing the events of October 1997, the present leadership is seeking answers for the victim, our congregation, as well as our entire Concord community. The prayers of our entire church are for justice to be served to the alleged perpetrator, and that mercy and care will be extended to the victim.
Below is a video clip from "The Young Turks" on the situation:
On May 26th, I did a post about the rape of a 15 year old girl in 1997 in New Hampshire by a leader in her Church, Trinity Baptist Church of Concord, NH. The girl was raped twice by the man and became pregnant. The pastor of the Church at that time was Chuck Phelps (now the Pastor of Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis). According to the rape victim, Tina Anderson (she has made her name public), the Pastor of the church told her that even though the man was to blame, she bore at least some responsiblity, even if only 1%. Since it was going to become obvious that she was pregnant, Pastor Phelps had her stand before the church congregation and read a letter. She did not mention that she had been raped and did not identify who the father was but merely asked for forgiveness for the sin of fornication. The culprit, Ernie Willis, was also made to stand before the church and admit that he had been "unfaithful" to his wife and ask for forgiveness. The church was never told that Willis "unfaithfulness" was with a 15 year old member of the church who was now pregnant.
Since a pregnant girl is not allowed to continue in the Christian school operated by Trinity Baptist Church and since her mother did not want her to go to public school, the mother and the Pastor agreed that she should be sent out of state where she could be home-schooled by a Christian family. Within 2 weeks of her "confession" before the church, she was shipped to Denver, Colorado and put under the care of a Christian family and Phelp's Pastor friend, Matt Olson. One of the things that Olson had her do was to write a letter of apology to the rapist's wife for violating her trust (Tina was a babysitter for the Willis family).
Phelps says that he reported this crime to the local police and to the Department of Child Services in New Hampshire but that the police never followed up. He said he would have told them whatever they wanted to know if they had followed up. He essentially says that he did all that was legally required of him.
Last month, Tina Anderson, now 28, decided to come forward. Ernie Willis was arrested and charged with statutory rape. Willis was allowed to continue in a leadership role in the New Hampshire church for years after the incident. He left the church a few years ago after another act of "unfaithfulness" and his wife's divorce of him.
What has piqued my interest in this case is that the Pastor's and churches involved are all within the orbit of Baptist fundamentalism that I used to be a part of. Both Phelps and Olson are graduates of my alma mater, Bob Jones University and both went on after these events in 1997 to lead Baptist colleges that were sister colleges to the one where I used to teach. Phelps was the President of Marantha Baptist College in Wisconsin from 2006 to 2008. Olson is currently the President of Northland Baptist College also in Wisconsin. As a matter of fact, the connection gets even closer because Tina Anderson taught at my former employer, International Baptist College in Arizona, up until she went public on this rape case last month. She resigned from IBC, the day before Willis was arrested. No one has said yet why she resigned. I wonder, but it is only speculation, if the administration at IBC did not want her to go public about a case that happened 13 years ago and involved Pastors who have an association with the fellowhip that IBC belongs to, The Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International. I am not accusing anyone but it will be interesting to find out why she resigned from IBC. The chairman of the board of IBC is Mike Sproul, who is also on the board of directors of the FBFI. Phelps is the Vice Chairman for the FBFI. Sproul also attended Bob Jones University, although he did not graduate from the school. All three, Sproul, Phelps, and Olson are closely connected and share the same basic ideology.
Interestingly enough, the annual meeting of the FBFI will be taking place next week in the Denver area church, Tri-City Baptist, where Anderson was shipped back in 1997 to get away from New Hampshire. One of the speakers is Les Heinze who recently had his own scandal to deal with. The principal of his Christian school, Daniel Brock (who is the brother of the President of IBC, David Brock) was charged with sexual assault involving male students in his high school. A jury acquited him of all charges in February of this year and shortly thereafter one of the alleged victims committed suicide. The jury was not told that gay pornography was found on the Principal's computer. I guess one of the topics at this year's FBF meeting will be how to do damage control when sex scandals hit your church.
There seems to be a pattern among conservative Christians to blame the woman when something like this happens. It may be because of the low view of women that is found in the Bible. I did a two part series a few days ago about how the OT condones rape. What is clear is that many of these scandals are "hushed up" because of the fear of what the revelations would do to the "cause of Christ." As with the Roman Catholic scandals, there seems to be more concern for the reputation of the church than for the well-being of the victims.
More on this story and the connections will definitely be coming out and I will be watching with interest.
Here are some TV and radio reports related to the incident involving the Anderson rape case.
There has been a lot of discussion on the blogosphere about this case. On the fundamental Baptist website, SharperIron.org, many of the commenters were sympathetic to Phelps at first but as more information has come out, most seem to be distancing themselves from him.
Two women, Jeri Massi and Christa Brown, who run websites exposing Baptist predators have multiple posts on the subject. Another website called, StuffFundiesLike, has also discussed the case.
I really don't want to turn this blog into a gossip column but it seems that every day I hear about another scandal among evangelical Christian leaders. (Hat Tip to Jerri Massi). I realize that no one is perfect, but my god, shouldn't we expect a little more from Christian leaders?
Chuck Phelps was formerly the President of Maranatha Baptist College and Seminary in Watertown, Wisconsin. In my former fundamentalist/evangelical circles, this was a highly respected institution. Before Phelps came to Maranatha, he was the Pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Concord, New Hampshire. In 1997, when Phelps was the Pastor at Trinity, a 15 year old girl was raped twice by one of the church leaders, Ernest Willis, who is now 51. The Concord Monitor ran an article yesterday on the subject. It reads in part:
After being raped and impregnated by a fellow churchgoer more than twice her age, a 15-year-old Concord girl was forced by Trinity Baptist Church leaders to stand before the congregation to apologize before they helped whisk her out of state, according to the police.
While her pastor, Chuck Phelps, reported the alleged rape in 1997 to state youth officials, Concord police detectives were never able to find the victim. The victim said she was sent to another church member's home in Colorado, where she was home-schooled and not allowed to have contact with others her age. It wasn't until this past February that the victim, who is now 28, decided to come forward after reading about other similar cases, realizing for the first time it wasn't her fault that she had been raped, she told the police.
The poor girl became pregnant and Willis offered to pay for an out-of-state abortion or to hit the girl in the stomach to cause a miscarriage.
When the girl's mother reported the situation to Pastor Phelps, he called the girl in front of the church to apologize.
Again the newspaper reported:
The victim said Phelps told her she would be put up for "church discipline," where parishioners go before the congregation to apologize for their sins.
She asked why. "Pastor Phelps then said that (Willis) may have been 99 percent responsible, but I needed to confess my 1 percent guilt in the situation," the victim told the police.
"He told me that I should be happy that I didn't live in Old Testament times because I would have been stoned."
Phelps, who is now a pastor in Indianapolis, said Tuesday he reported what the teen told him to police and child welfare officials within 24 hours. Phelps would not comment when asked about his role in relocating the teen to a pastor's home in Colorado.
"I called in a report," Phelps said. "I think I've said what I need to say."
Not only is Phelps currently the Pastor of a large Baptist church but he is also currently the Vice Chairman of the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship, one the largest groups of independent Baptist churches in the US.
The mistreatment and abuse of children is appalling but even more so when it is covered up by Christian leaders.
Ergun Caner is President of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. It is part of Liberty University, the fundamentalist school founded by the late Jerry Falwell.
On May 5th, the Seminary announced on its website that Liberty University Provost Dr. Ron Godwin is forming a committee to investigate a series of accusations against Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. The Evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, has run a couple of articles on the situation (see here and here).
In an article published May 17th, the local Lynchburg newspaper, The News and Advance, stated:
When Liberty University begins the investigation it announced last week into the background of Ergun Caner, president of its seminary, the panel doing the work could explore several questions.
Where did Caner grow up — in Ohio or in Turkey?
When did he come to the United States — as a teenager as he has said, or at age 4 as his parents’ divorce documents indicate?
Did Caner have a nominal Muslim upbringing, or was he raised in Islamic jihad, “trained to do that which was done on 11 September” as he told an audience in Jacksonville, Fla., in November 2001?
Did he formally debate scholars of other faiths, including Islam, as his online biography once claimed?
Is Caner’s middle name Mehmet, as it’s shown on the cover of books he’s written — or is it Michael, as it’s listed on the concealed-weapons permit he got last year in Lynchburg?
It appears that shortly after 9/11, Caner decided to embellish his Muslim background. The News and Advance article continues:
Ergun Caner gave vivid accounts of his Muslim upbringing to church audiences in Florida and Texas shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“I was raised as a Sunni Muslim” in Europe, Caner said at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., according to a recording of his talk there on Nov. 20, 2001.
“I was the son of the muezzin, the one who does the call to prayer at the top of the minaret,” Caner said, describing himself as being similar to a “preacher’s kid.”
“May I submit to you, until I was 15 years old I was in the Islamic youth jihad. And so until I came to America; until I found Jesus Christ as Lord, I was trained to do that which was done on 11 September. As were thousands of youth,” Caner said on the recording.
That same month, at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, Caner gave this description of his Islamic background:
“And coming to America I had lived under the misconception that you hated me, as a Muslim,” Caner said in remarks that were rebroadcast by Focus on the Family in April.
“That really affected a lot of what I did in my younger years,” Caner told the Texas audience.
“I’m not really proud of the fact that I am part of, was part of, Islamic Jihad. I’m not proud of the fact that it actually was my people who were involved in what took place, the horror,” he said, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The committee's report is due on June 30th. It will be interesting to see the results. I hope, for his own sake, that Caner doesn't take the line that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal recently took when he was caught lying about serving in Vietnam. Blumenthal said he "misspoke." As Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said, Blumenthal made matters even worse by downplaying his lies as a "mistake": "The only worse thing, I think, is then coming on and saying, 'Oh, I misspoke,' after you've been caught red-handed," Cornyn said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "It's as if he shot himself in one foot, then reloaded and shot himself in the other."
Just as Blumenthal knew whether or not he served in Vietnam, that is not the kind of thing you would make a mistake about, Caner knows whether or not he was reared as a Muslim in Europe.
Unless you have been in a hole the last couple of weeks, you are aware of the sex scandal that has hit the Roman Catholic Church again. This time it seems that the Pope himself may be guilty of covering-up these atrocities and providing safe-haven for child-molesters. See this story .
In a recent interview with Bill Maher, noted atheist Christopher Hitchens discusses the allegations. One very important point, I think, he makes in the interview is that the Catholic leadership including the Pope seem to have been more concerned about the well-being of the church than about the well-being of the children. This is to me inexcusable for anyone but especially the one who is supposedly the vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.
(For a number of different views on how the pope is/is not handling this abuse problem, see the On Faith discussion at the Washington Post.)
Since my blog has to do with why I rejected evangelical Christianity, one might wonder what relevance this sex scandal within the Catholic Church might have to evangelicalism. The relevance is that evangelical churches have done precisely the same thing the Vatican has done, namely, cover-up the abuse and relocate the offending parties to new congregations. As David Gushee, distinguished professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, said in an article comparing the Catholic scandal to Baptist scandals: The Baptist situation may be no better than the Catholic, only shielded more deeply from view .
I am personally aware of the case of Bob Gray, Pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Jacksonsville, FL for 30 years and President of Trinity Baptist College. Pastor Gray was a leader in Baptist fundamentalism from the 1960's through the 1990's. He was not only the Pastor of a megachurch but also a very popular conference speaker around the world. I remember in particular hearing him in the late 1970's at the Southwide Baptist Fellowship meeting in which several thousand were in attendance. He preached a fiery sermon as usual and the altar was flooded with hundreds of pastors and other Christians at the end of the sermon asking God to fill them with the Holy Spirit and bless their ministries as God had blessed Pastor Gray's. I remember a conference speaker the next day comparing what had happened at the end of Pastor Gray's sermon with what happened on the day of Pentecost (minus the tongues-speaking). He said he had never before seen such an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
What was not known by very many people at the time was that Pastor Gray liked to invite elementary children (and he had his own private school at his church) into his office for private sessions. These sessions involved Pastor Gray sexually molesting these children, both male and female.
The really sad thing is that this went on in his church for decades and when things finally began to come out in the early 1990's, Gray resigned the church and his hand-picked successor, Rev. Tom Messer, had the church pay for Pastor Gray and his wife to go to Germany as "missionaries." The story given was that Pastor Gray had long wanted to go to Germany and minister to the US servicemen and their families there. Nothing was said publically at all about the allegations of child abuse. Only the new Pastor, the deacon board, and those who had alleged the abuse, were aware of why he was actually going to Germany.
In May 2006, when Gray returned to Jacksonville, he was arrested. Gray initially denied any wrongdoing but later admitted he had "french-kissed" some little girls while they were sitting on his lap. Gray died in November 2007 just days before his trial was to begin. By that time more than 20 women and one man had come forward alleging sexual abuse at the hands of Pastor Gray. Currently there are at least 7 civil lawsuits against Trinity Baptist Church seeking millions of dollars in damages for their cover-up. To my knowledge, no criminal prosecution has been brought against any church leaders for their involvement in the cover-up. Amazingly enough, Tom Messer is still the Pastor and the church is still quite large although not as large as it once was. Its also interesting that even though the Church was founded by Bob Gray and pastored by him for over 3 decades, his name has been removed from the website. There is no mention of him or the history of the church at all on the webpage.
The excuse commonly given to those who wondered why the church leadership covered-up the actions of Pastor Gray was that they did not want to do damage to the "cause of Christ." Just as the current Pope, apparently was and is more concerned about the well-being of the church than he is the well-being of the children, these evangelical leaders were only concerned about their "ministry." This in spite of the fact that the Scriptures, which they claim to believe are the inspired Word of God, say concerning pastors: Those who sin are to be rebuked publicly, so that the others may take warning (1 Timothy 5:20). And Jesus himself is reported to have said: But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and [that] he were drowned in the depth of the sea (Matthew 18:6).
I know it must have hurt to see that front page story in the New York Times. And such ugly documents! Those pieces of paper sure came back to bite you, didn’t they?
That’s why I’m writing. If you want to better protect your image, I figure you could learn a thing or two from Baptist officials.
For starters, take a lesson from the Baptists and quit keeping so many records on your clergy. I know you’ve got that pesky little problem of Catholic canon law, which requires record-keeping. But since you’re the top-dog, why don’t you just issue some sort of edict?
You could just say, “No more record-keeping.”
That’s how it works in Baptistland. No records -- no trace -- no trouble.
It doesn’t work out so well for the kids, of course, but it works out great for the high honchos. You might want to give it a try.
In fact, I’d guess that a whole lot of those troubling priest-abuse lawsuits might have never even been filed if you guys weren’t so big on record-keeping. And they sure wouldn’t have brought in the big dollars that some of them did.
The records are the root of your problem. Lawyers know that, with a lawsuit, they’ll be able to force the disclosure of documents, and then it’s what’s in those documents that drives up the dollar cost of the lawsuits, isn’t it?
So just say "no" to record-keeping. That’s the Baptist way and it makes things so much easier. Well … easier for church leaders and denominational top-dogs, but no one seems to have any problem putting on blinders about the kids.
And then there’s the problem of that office you used to head up -- the office that decides whether accused priests should be given ecclesiastical trials and defrocked. It’s the office you call the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
I like the catchy name, but that office has really caused you a lot of trouble.
A Baptist guy once proposed that Baptists establish something called an “Office of Ministerial Accountability and Integrity.” He had in mind an office that would do things similar to what it sounds like your office did -- look into reports about clergy sex abuse -- but since he’s Baptist, he never even considered the possibility of an office that would actually “defrock” ministers. He just thought it might be helpful to have a denominational office where trained people would look into clergy abuse reports and then inform people in the pews about their determinations. But of course, this guy was just dreaming pie in the sky. Baptists don’t have anything even resembling such an office.
You see, once again, that’s where you Catholics messed up. You never should have had such an office to begin with.
If you never had such an office, then no one would have even known where to report all this stuff. And no one would be pointing fingers at you, as the former head of the office, for what you did or didn’t do. And you wouldn’t have all those file cabinets filled with things you guys are probably still hoping no one will see.
Just say “not my problem.” Put up a big, bold-face, all-caps, red-letter disclaimer saying “We don’t endorse any priests.”
Just shrug and say “We leave it totally up to law enforcement.” That’s the Baptist way.
The side benefit is that, if you did like Baptists and waited for the law to throw a priest in prison, then you wouldn’t have such a shortage of priests. Virtually all experts recognize that the vast majority of cases cannot be criminally prosecuted, and so about 95 percent of those hundreds of priests who have been removed from active ministry could be put back into churches. It’s because of your own ecclesiastical processes that they’re gone.
I know it’s hard to imagine, but you might want to think about it. The Baptist system of denominational do-nothingness works out really well for the honchos.
