It’s no secret that one big reason we as a country don’t get it about sexual assault is because elements of the church have their collective heads up their collective asses on this matter. And that’s the most diplomatic term I can use. Time and again, we’ve seen survivors of sexual assault get kicked in the teeth and a bunch of other places by the church—even when the assault happened as part of the church’s platform. In other words, some of the very people whom you expect to be lifting survivors up are pushing them down.
We got a lovely reminder of this earlier in the week. At the dawn of the new year, two Dallas-Fort Worth churches came under fire for hiring Chuck Adair, a registered sex offender whose crimes were profiled on “America’s Most Wanted.” In his days as a minister in the 1990s, he had a bad habit of inappropriate behavior with minors. In covering this furor, a major online Christian newspaper,
The Christian Post, somehow
thought it acceptable to describe one of those instances not as grooming, but an “extramarital relationship.” That passage has since been removed—without a correction being appended, a serious breach of journalistic ethics. The fact that it was even allowed to run at all says a lot, in my mind, about how far behind the curve the church is on this matter—and how it’s hamstringing the nation as a whole.
Things started heating up last week, when victim advocate and Metroplex resident Amy “Watchkeep” Smith got wind that Adair was now a preaching pastor at Grace Place Church of Christ in Duncanville, south of Dallas. She’d also learned that Adair was a part-time staffer at Watermark Community Church, a nondenominational megachurch in north Dallas. Watch here.
Trigger warning: discussion of sexual abuse and grooming It’s no secret that one big reason we as a country don’t get it about sexual assault is because elements of the church have their collective heads up their collective asses on this matter. And...
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Asking. For a friend.
Your own logic.
