If churches won't get serious about sexual abuse, insurance companies should make them do so
How do we get the church's collective head out of its collective butt on how it responds to sexual assault? It turns out insurance companies have the power to make them do so.
This country is long overdue for a national conversation on how it responds to sexual assault. That was true long before Donald Trump was able to back into the presidency despite proof not just beyond reasonable doubt, but all doubt, that he is a sexual predator. No fewer than 25 women have accused him of sexual misconduct, and he was caught on tape reveling in degrading women. In recent years, it’s been clear that one big reason this country hasn’t gotten with the program on this issue is that significant elements of the church haven’t gotten with the program.
According to author Dianna Anderson, it’s largely because in much of the evangelical world, the concepts of sexual assault and sexual abuse don’t even exist. As she put it in an article for DAME Magazine written during the furor over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, “the language of consent is not a language that evangelicals or their heroes speak.” Later, Anderson told Mother Jones that while researching their book on evangelical purity culture, Damaged Goods, they noticed that a number of evangelicals believed sexual assault could never happen “if somebody was quote-unquote following God’s plan for sexuality.” Such a mentality, Anderson added, leaves many evangelicals inclined to “disbelieve women” who come forward, and treat assault merely as a sin to be forgiven, rather than criminal conduct.
Two high-profile cases of churches utterly mishandling sexual assault, as well as a case very close to me, prove that beyond all doubt. In June, Gateway Church, a charismatic multi-site church in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex best known for its worship ministry, was rocked by reports its founding pastor, Robert Morris, had groomed and sexually assaulted a girl in Oklahoma for almost five years. At the time the abuse began, the victim, Cindy Clemishire, was 12, while Morris was a 21-year-old evangelist under the auspices of Shady Grove Church, a then-prominent charismatic church in the Metroplex that is now a Gateway campus.
Clemishire had tried to speak out numerous times since 2005, only to be rebuffed each time. When she finally found someone willing to listen, Morris and the Gateway elders initially claimed he’d been fully restored to ministry after having “moral failure” with a “young lady.” However, in the face of vehement criticism from all sides, Morris resigned.
Since then, it has emerged that Morris’ depravities are the tip of the iceberg. In April, Gateway settled a lawsuit by a former member who alleged the church covered up the sexual assault of his daughter at the hands of a Gateway youth pastor. And in July, the head of Gateway’s prison ministry was exposed as a child sex offender—and Gateway has been evasive at best on whether its members knew.
Later in July, another high-profile Metroplex church had its time in the barrel—The Village Church, a multi-site Southern Baptist church based in Flower Mound, north of Dallas. According to a stomach-churning report on Bodies Behind the Bus, a podcast giving voice to survivors of spiritual abuse, Steve Chandler, the father of longtime pastor Matt Chandler, was allowed to work as a janitor at the satellite campus in Denton even though Steve was a confessed child sex offender. At least some church staffers weren’t aware of Steve’s past from his hiring in 2007 until all staffers were told about it in 2009. Incredibly, the elders at the Denton campus decided to keep Steve on the payroll with unfettered access to the Denton grounds. He was supposedly on a “care plan,” the details of which are unknown to this day.
According to blogger and abuse advocate No Eden Elsewhere, it is inconceivable that Matt Chandler didn’t know about this. I would add that even if he didn’t know, as senior/lead pastor, he bloody well should have made it his business to know. It’s why the Village Church’s response is insultingly inadequate—a stew of platitudes and wooden language about how it “cares deeply about protecting children and the most vulnerable about us,” as well as all the measures it takes to do so.
But believe it or not, Chandler’s behavior looks minor league compared to the behavior of what passes for leadership at a church closer to me, Eternal Church in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In late May, longtime victim advocate Dee Parsons revealed that Eternal Church’s longtime pastor, Don Logan, was a convicted child sex offender. He’d been arrested in 1997 for molesting a 14-year-old girl in Indiana, and served three years in prison. It turned out that when Logan took over the pulpit at Eternal Church in 2015, the true nature of his crimes had been hidden even from some of the elders. The ones who did know, like executive pastor Chad Hollowell, did not believe that a crime of this nature was disqualifying, and claimed Logan was still “above reproach.”
On July 7, the elders announced Logan would go on sabbatical until September 1. As Only four days later, the elders announced they had “released” (read: fired) Logan after realizing how much his conviction had affected “him, his family, the victim, members, attenders, and most importantly the church’s witness within the community.” However, in an extensive article about why child sexual abuse permanently disqualifies someone from being a pastor, Parsons suggests it was simpler than that. She believes the elders did what they should have done when they hired Logan in 2015—get the actual court documents from the 1997 case. Those documents revealed multiple girls had come forward with complaints about him, and they realized it would be untenable to keep him on.
So in the wake of these churches showing complete, total, wanton, and reckless disregard for the safety of their members and the larger community, what is to be done without raising First Amendment issues? The answer seems to come from north of the border. Specifically, The Meeting House, a multi-site Anabaptist church based in Oakville, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. For 25 years, it was pastored by Bruxy Cavey, a longhaired, jewelry-laden man who was, by all accounts, the Canadian version of Bill Hybels or Steven Furtick. In March 2022, Cavey was forced to resign after an independent investigation substantiated allegations that he had maintained an inappropriate sexual relationship with a woman that began as a “clergy-counselor relationship.” According to the church’s overseers, Cavey “abused his power and authority” as a pastor. Cavey was subsequently arrested and charged with sexual assault in 2022; his trial is pending.
It turned out to be the tip of a very large iceberg. By June, the church had received 38 reports of sexual misconduct and sexual abuse against Cavey and other former pastors. By August 2022, further investigation had substantiated three more accusations against Cavey, one of which involved a minor. Church officials finally admitted that the incident that forced him out amounted to clergy sexual abuse, not merely an abuse of power.
Apparently two years of effort to reform itself weren’t enough. It was already hemorrhaging members due to the pandemic; it is down from 20 sites in 2022 to 13 sites today. However, an even harder blow came in late June, when The Meeting House paused all public ministry through at least the end of July after losing a critical portion of its insurance coverage. Specifically, it had lost coverage for losses related to physical and/or sexual abuse, as well as coverage for losses related to violations of employee rights. Charlie Cutler of ChurchWest Insurance Services, which insures several ministries based in Canada, told Christianity Today that it was likely due to concern about whether The Meeting House could be trusted to be a good steward. He said that churches with “a pattern of abuse, a pattern of bad governance in the ministry” find it difficult to get coverage.
The Meeting House remains paused as of this writing; its leadership has held out the prospect that it may not return. Perhaps insurers were spooked by a 2023 report in Toronto Life that detailed a church “plagued by abuse and infidelity.” Whatever the case, it’s clear that The Meeting House’s insurers have forced church leadership to ask a question more fundamental than whether and how to reform themselves. Now they’re asking whether they should even exist.
It’s not the first time that an insurance company has forced a church to rethink its behavior. During the worst of the spring/summer 2020 COVID surge, Rodney Howard-Browne, pastor of The River of Tampa Bay in Tampa, came under fire for keeping his church open in defiance of a stay-at-home order in Hillsborough County, home to Tampa. That order was effectively rescinded when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order—one that deemed churches an “essential activity” with no capacity limits. Moreover, DeSantis’ order superseded all local COVID safety measures, barring local governments from imposing stricter measures.
However, I noticed that on April 5, the first Sunday after DeSantis’ order took effect, most decent-sized churches in Florida were still in virtual mode. A likely explanation came from Howard-Browne’s lawyer, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel. Staver took to Facebook to claim that The River had been dropped by its insurance company due to Howard-Browne’s “unbelievable and outrageous arrest.”
What was “unbelievable and outrageous” was the number of churches that thought they could stay open during the worst of the pandemic, even in the face of numerous outbreaks that could be traced to the doors of churches. My guess is that a lot of these churches got calls or emails from their insurers warning them to stay virtual or face being dropped.
It’s one thing for an insurer to effectively tell a church that meeting in person is an unacceptable risk. It’s quite another for an insurer to say that a church’s existence in its present form is an unacceptable risk. I have to wonder—would Gateway have deceived its members for over 20 years if it had to worry about losing its insurance? One would think covering for a pedophile pastor would be the definition of an unacceptable risk. And would Chandler have even thought about hiring his father if said hiring would have put his insurance at risk? And would the elders of Eternal Church even considered deceiving their members and the community about Logan if they knew they could lose their insurance? The answer to all three questions isn’t just “no,” but “hell no.”
The more I think about it, it’s long past time for insurance companies on this side of the border grew a set in the way that The Meeting House’s insurers did. It would go a long way towards getting the church’s collective head out of its collective ass on how it responds to sexual assault.
Agreed!!!