What has been publicly reported spells out an outrageously illegal situation in Southlake. Somebody in Texas needs to grow a set, follow Okl
Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:
On Sunday afternoon, Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, once one of the most influential churches in the country, announced it had found a successor to its disgraced founding pastor, Robert Morris. Namely, Daniel Floyd, founder and pastor of Lifepoint Church, a Southern Baptist multisite church based in Fredericksburg, Virginia with five locations in Richmond and the outer portion of Northern Virginia. A deep dive into Floyd’s background shows this announcement is the equivalent of a big, fat middle finger to Cindy Clemishire and anyone else Morris victimized over the years. Lest you think that’s hyperbole, if you seriously believe that Cindy was the only person molested and/or groomed by Morris over the years, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you. For starters, the SBC has shown beyond any doubt that it is not serious about addressing sexual abuse in its ranks. More seriously, Floyd is on the “lead team” of the Association of Related Churches, a network of churches that has been shot through with sexual abuse scandals over the years. Gateway has longstanding ties with the ARC; it has hosted several ARC gatherings in the past. All of this makes a statement Gateway elder Tra Willbanks delivered on the Sunday before Election Day ring extremely hollow. If you’ll remember, when Willbanks revealed a summary of an internal investigation into Morris’s misdeeds, he revealed that Gateway was cooperating with a criminal investigation—one that this writer exclusively revealed shortly afterward was being conducted by Oklahoma state attorney general Gentner Drummond.
While speaking to the congregation, Willbanks revealed that the internal investigation showed multiple Gateway elders and staffers knew that Cindy had not merely had “moral failure” with “a young lady,” in the words of the now-infamous press release Gateway initially cranked out when Cindy came forward last summer. Rather, they knew Morris had groomed and sexually assaulted a girl who was 12 years old. And yet, they did absolutely nothing—in flagrant disregard not only of common human decency, but Texas law dating back to the 1980s. Willbanks also revealed that several other elders and staffers knew enough that they should have asked more questions, and didn’t. I would add that based on this revelation, it’s a near-mathematical certainty that anyone responsible for drafting that press release reasonably should have known that they were complicit in victim-blaming and victim-shaming of the worst type. They also reasonably should have known that a 12-year-old girl is most assuredly not “a young lady,” but a child. Willbanks revealed that anyone who either knew Cindy wasn’t “a young lady” or who failed to dig deeper and who was still on Gateway’s payroll had been “removed” for behavior that was “fundamentally wrong and cannot and will not be tolerated” at Gateway. But then he helps greenlight the hiring of someone with close ties to a network with a long history of this very sort of behavior? Sorry, Tra, but your lofty announcement of November now sounds something like this. [...]
What happened to Cindy, though, is exactly why so many people—including more than a few of my friends—have been reluctant to go to church in person. One of the biggest reasons survivors of sexual assault don’t come forward for years, if at all, is that they often have doors kicked shut in their faces by the very people who occupied positions analogous to those who knew the true nature of Morris’s crimes and did nothing. The signal must go out that if you turn a blind eye to this sort of depravity, sweep it under the rug, you will answer for it in this world. And if you turn a blind eye to this depravity, you will bear the opprobrium of being a convicted felon. Put more succinctly, what happened to Cindy was so heinous that there is no such thing as overkill. No one should have to wait decades to get justice for being molested anywhere—and certainly not in church, one of the few places where one has the right to feel safe. Any inclination I might have had not to demand a prosecution went out the window when Gateway hired Floyd as pastor. Any church that sees fit to give a very large and very public finger to survivors in this way has forfeited its right to exist. To be sure, Gateway is already in a death spiral. By the end of the summer of 2024, attendance was down by 19 percent. Shortly after Willbanks announced the results of the investigation, victim advocate and Metroplex resident Amy “Watchkeep” Smith got her hands on a video message to Gateway staffers from Kenneth Fambro, one of only three elders left at Gateway after the church purged those whom it says either knew about Morris’s crimes or failed to ask questions they should have asked. Fambro revealed that tithes were down 35 to 40 percent, though Smith thinks that number was a lot closer to 50 percent. But if it finds it remotely acceptable to hire a pastor with ties to a network with a history of sexual abuse, it’s time to twist the knife. To be sure, Gateway is already facing a world of potential legal hurt. By admitting that a lot of people at Gateway knew for years that Cindy wasn’t a young lady, Willbanks crapped away all of Gateway’s legal capital in one stroke. If Cindy and her lawyer, Boz Tchividjian, are so inclined, they can take Gateway to the cleaners in a civil suit. After all, Willbanks admitted to a situation that is the very definition of fraudulent concealment, giving Cindy a chance to take a battering ram to the statute of limitations. For that reason, if Gateway’s lawyers have any sense, they’re in settlement talks with Cindy and Tchividjian right now. Otherwise, the only question would be how many zeroes are in the damage award.
Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas has picked a new pastor to replace the disgraced Robert Morris: Daniel Floyd, a pastor of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) church Lifepoint Church that is based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Floyd has served on the lead team of the Association of Related Churches (ARC), a group that Gateway Church belongs to.
Both the SBC and ARC have faced scrutiny for coverups of sexual abuse.
