If Texas isn't mounting criminal investigations into Gateway Church, it better be

What has been publicly reported spells out an outrageously illegal situation in Southlake. Somebody in Texas needs to grow a set, follow Oklahoma's example, and get to the bottom of it.

Robert Morris (screenshot via CBS News)

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.

As it stands now, there is only one meaningful way to ensure that there isn’t a next time for what happened to Cindy. Somebody in Texas needs to grow a set, follow Drummond’s example, and launch a criminal investigation.

When Willbanks made his announcement, I wondered why he was only referencing a “criminal investigation,” not multiple “criminal investigations.” Remember, friends, Willbanks had just admitted there were elders and staffers who knew long before 2024 that Cindy was 12 years old. It had been reported earlier that people at Gateway had known as early as 2005 that Cindy was a minor when Morris began grooming her.

Based on those revelations, a lot of people at Gateway better have lawyers on speed dial. That includes any elders and staffers at Gateway or Morris’ previous billet, Shady Grove Church (which merged with Gateway in 2013) who knew Cindy was not merely a “young lady” and didn’t report it. It also ought to include anyone who was involved in crafting the “young lady” press release and didn’t report it.

On paper, calls for a further investigation in Texas would seem like overkill. A good criminal investigation is intended to roll up every little fish one by one until you get to the big fish. The biggest fish of all was brought down in March, when Drummond won an indictment against Morris charging him with five counts of child sexual abuse. Drummond and his legal team reached deep into Oklahoma law books to do so, charging him under a longstanding law dating to territorial days that pauses the statute of limitations if a perp commits a crime and leaves the state. It was initially aimed at desperadoes who committed crimes while roaming the frontier, and seems well-tailored for a modern-day desperado like Morris, who engaged in what amounted to child sex tourism. Drummond pounded heavily on that law in announcing the charges, pointing out that Morris “was not a resident or inhabitant of Oklahoma at any time” when he molested Cindy.

Morris was formally arraigned on March 17. He faces a minimum of 15 years in prison if convicted on all charges, and a maximum of 100 years. To my mind, anything less than 20 years—a life sentence at his age—would be a joke. After all, Morris was a minister at the time he molested and groomed Cindy, making upward departure essentially a requirement.

So why move further? Well, the answer lies in how we got here in the first place. Drummond told NBC News that the impetus for the investigation into Morris came from several prosecutors in his office who wanted to find a way to right the terrible wrong done to Cindy 40 years prior. They understood that laws are supposed to set the bare minimum standard of behavior for living in society. In their eyes, what Morris did to Cindy fell so far below that minimum that it had to be investigated, if only for the sake of the historical record. Drummond was of the same mind, and didn’t hesitate to greenlight it.

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.

But in a situation like this, turning the screws to a faceless corporation doesn’t feel like justice. If it is legally possible to do so, those who knew Cindy wasn’t just a “young lady” must be brought up on criminal charges, and put in prison for as long as legally possible. If that isn’t a legal possibility, then it is long past time to abolish statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse. Justice in a situation like this depends on other people doing what they are morally and legally required to do, and something is wrong if the clock can run out because others lack common human decency.

One way or another, if there is any justice, Floyd’s tenure at Gateway ought to be a short one. This church must be driven out of existence, either by way of civil or criminal action. Willbanks and his compatriots need to learn, one way or another, that you cannot give the finger to survivors and expect to get away with it—at least, not in this world.