Text 923, 178 rader
Skriven 2007-04-14 10:03:00 av ROSS SAUER (1:123/140)
Ärende: "Christians?"
=====================
Looks like it isn't just the Catholics.

And the Southern Baptists listed below, are the same idiots who want to 
outlaw forever gay marriage, sex education, and female ministers.

Preachers Accused of Sins, and Crimes

ABC News Investigation Uncovers Predators in Protestant Churches

By JIM AVILA, BONNIE VAN GILDER, and MATT LOPEZ
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 United States. And the organization is structured in a way that 
makes it difficult to police these preacher predators. The convention 
has 16.3 million members and 43,000 independent churches. 

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 Missouri and Kentucky. 

One member of the Missouri church, Lee Orth, said that "Nobody saw it 
coming. I think we felt betrayed, blindsided. You know, Shawn was a very 
charismatic person."

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 Missouri church by Davies. What 
bothers people most about what happened is that Davies could have been 
stopped before he reached their church.

A History of Abuse

A young man in Kentucky was one of Davies' victims years before he went 
to Missouri. For four years, the young man, who asked that we not use 
his name to protect his privacy, lived with his secret. He said that it 
nearly destroyed him. "It started with watching movies, and he would ask 
to masturbate," the man said. "He said it was normal for guys to do it. 
... One day he just grabbed me while we were watching one of the movies 
and he just kinda did what he wanted." 

After four years, the man finally told his father, who then went to the 
police. Kentucky authorities opened an investigation and alerted the 
victim's church. By then, Davies had moved on to other churches.

The family is now suing the Kentucky church for failing to supervise 
Davies. When "20/20" asked to talk to church leaders, their attorney 
declined our interview requests. 

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.

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 Denton, Texas, where 
the minister publicly confessed to "making a terrible mistake" last 
November after a woman sued, claiming she'd been raped as a teen. 

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 Florida church -- Lyle Whittaker -- committed suicide after 
he was charged with sexually abusing an 11-year-old-girl. 

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." 

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

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