Preachers accused of sins and crimes
ABC News Investigation Uncovers Predators in Protestant Churches
By JIM
Note ***Blue*** text are our comments, Red and Black text are all part of the original
article
God continues
to expose pedophiles and sexual predators within “bible believing churches” –
Their presence in these churches is succinctly stated in this article as “Being a (bible)
teacher, (Youth director, Song leader)
and minister is the perfect job(s) for a child molester, because
it puts the molester in direct contact with young people. But
more so, there is the implicit trust,
the children are completely unsupervised in this atmosphere, and when these sex
offenders are caught by a congregation they are not prosecuted but turned free
and allowed to move on to the next church to continue in their sins many times
receiving “The churches I was with, and
they would have praised me. They would not have said, 'Don't hire this guy, he
likes kids.”
The perpetuation
of this has to do a lot with the atmosphere or culture of sin and abuse that
has been created and allowed to grow within bible believing churches across the
nation.
Congregations
that love their false doctrines and traditions to the hurt and destruction of
those with in their churches, whom their lift not a finger to help – who in
many cases they will say this thing befell the sheep because of personal sin or
that they were just not believing right.
Congregations that
they hold these false doctrines and traditions as equal or above the bible, and
even the words of Christ and the Apostles, which puts them at complete variance
with God regardless of what they preach, how they pray or how they worship.
We are speaking
here expressly about false doctrines and traditions that have allowed every
kind of wolf from both within and without to rape and pillage those their
flocks – rather than obey the first commandment of Christ concerning those who
would be overseers of the flock of God that they are to defend the flock of God
with everything that is in them, even to the loss of their own lives, and this
entails a crying out in alarm, and a speaking out in judgment a against the
evil deeds of these wolves, naming the names of the corrupt, and naming corrupt
religious ministries as Christ and the apostles plainly did.
However what
instead has been taught is that those who are taken advantage of by these
wolves calling themselves ministers of Christ they are to be blind, deaf, and
dumb to these wolves because they are not allowed to judge any “believer”
especially a preacher or minister, no matter how grievously their sin.
Such activities
are therefore protected by those who have been charged with the duty of
protecting the flock of God from these wolves within and wolves without – and
these congregations add sin to sin by knowingly letting these evil and perverse
preachers and ministers travel to other flocks and continue working as
pedophiles and sexual predators. And
therefore the Lord as in the book of Revelation is against these congregations
and denominations and will breath on them and cause them to blow as chaff in
the wind.
April 13, 2007 — Sanctuaries are designed to make us feel safe. They provide
us peace and a place to pray. Bells call the good to worship and warn the evil
to stay away.
This
is the kind of American church that a young Christa Brown was drawn to. As a
teenager in the 1960s, Brown learned to love music and her God. She grew up in
the church, sang in the choir and played the piano.
But
as Brown would find out, churches don't always protect the innocent. Sometimes
these sanctuaries shield the guilty and even lure predators to a place where
young people gather.
The
Catholic Church has been widely criticized for how it handled instances of
priests sexually abusing young people. And a six-month investigation by
"20/20" found Protestant ministers, supposed men of God from every
denomination, sexually abusing the children who trusted them. The investigation
uncovered "preacher predators" in every corner of the country.
'Nobody Saw
It Coming'
The Southern Baptist Convention is the
largest Protestant organization in the
Shawn Davies was a youth minister at one of
those Baptist churches in the suburbs of Kansas City, Mo. Davies was close to
his teen followers, and the members of his church soon found out that he was a
little too close. In January of this year, Davies began a 20-year sentence for
multiple counts of sexual abuse in
One
member of the
Davies
seduced teenage boys by acting like one of the gang. He talked about girls and
sex with the teenagers. He took them on trips, invited them into his office,
and showed them pornography. And he took them downstairs or behind the
sanctuary to sexually assault them.
Church
deacon Greg Arbuckle said, "The viewing of pornography happened before
Shawn would come out and lead the choir. Immediately after worship he would go
do that, and that to me, taints the entire service."
Eight
boys were sexually abused at the
A History of
Abuse
A young man in
After
four years, the man finally told his father, who then went to the police.
The
family is now suing the
Davies ended up in Missouri in 2003; church
leaders there wish the Kentucky church had tracked them down, especially after
an indictment was filed.
Church
leaders worry that there is no system in place within the Southern Baptist
Convention to stop people like Davies. Each church is, for the most part,
autonomous, so there is no tight connection with the other churches.
StopBaptistPredators.org
Brown,
abused herself when she was 16, went on to form an organization called Stop Baptist Predators, because in her search for justice, she
found that the Southern Baptist Convention had no central office, no readily
available list of preachers under investigation or even convicted, and no one
to help investigate allegations like hers.
Brown
said this system allows preacher predators to move from church to church,
seduce the devout and the young, and often get away with it.
Ken Ward is a Southern Baptist pastor and
teacher in East Texas, who has admitted to molesting more than 40 boys. He said that being a teacher and minister is the
perfect job for a child molester, because it puts the molester in direct
contact with young people.
"I [was] attracted to a certain child, and in my case, it was primarily
prepubescent boys," he said.
Ward
is now under house arrest, after serving five years in state prison. He wears a
GPS monitor so that he can be tracked by the sheriff's department, and he cannot
be around children anywhere, even in public.
Ward
agreed to talk to "20/20" to give insight to parents on how to spot a
predator. He said that parents aren't worrying about the right things.
"The idea of a guy in the park with a trench coat on or driving by slowly
trying to get a child … I've never even dreamed of doing that. … I've never
touched a stranger," he said.
'It's God's
Little Secret'
Ward
preyed on children for decades. One of his victims, Tommy Lee Burt, came
forward about the abuse as an adult. He believes that Ward damaged him for
life, and used his God to abuse him. "You're struggling as a kid and you
want to get up and he is telling you, 'No.' When I would try to leave, he would
tell me it's God's little secret," Burt said.
Burt
added that he never really recovered, and last year he, himself, was arrested
for solicitation of a minor and pleaded guilty to sending obscene material to a
police officer posing as a 14-year-old.
There
is no way of knowing how many Ken Wards are out there. The Southern Baptist
Convention does not keep records, and local churches often seem to be in denial
— such as one church in
Church
members responded by throwing the minister a retirement party and raised
$50,000 as a "love offering." To this day, he has a church building
named after him.
The
Southern Baptist Convention said the problem is neither widespread nor
systemic, despite a recent rash of cases. But just last week, a pastor of a
The Local
Level
Frank
Page is president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a minister himself. He
told "20/20" that independent congregations present a challenge when
it comes to tracking preacher predators. The organization has yet to create a
national database of preacher predators. "We have no such database and
again, we encourage churches to investigate. … They have to do background
checks," he said.
But
this approach puts a lot of pressure on the individual church, and a lot of
faith in the ministers who were predators to come forward and tell the truth
about their past.
And
the autonomy of each Baptist church does not stop them from creating other
kinds of databases, from Baptism lists to lists of ordained ministers.
Some Baptist church leaders are concerned
that even if a Baptist preacher is convicted of sex crimes, the national
organization has no authority to act.
The Southern Baptist Convention said the
biblical and best way to handle these terrible cases is by the local church,
which should call the police. But former minister and sex offender Ken Ward
stayed under the local radar and moved from church to church for years, and he said the church can't do it alone.
"Anybody
could have talked to the churches I was with, and they would have praised me.
They would not have said, 'Don't hire this guy, he likes kids.' Never, never,
and I suspect that has not changed."