Preachers = Predators

lumbingmi

lumbingmi

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This story showed that Catholic Church isnt only church that has issues with fraud preachers. Sad , isn't it :ugh3:

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.
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Never forgot that I found my preacher's porn books hidden in his suitcase. LOL.

What's your exp with preachers when you find them to be nothing but a fraud ?
 
I'm not surprised, either! Preachers are humans just like the rest of us and make the same mistakes and have the same weaknesses that anyone else does. Just because they hold themselves up as being more moral than the average person doesn't mean they are. And because we all just blindly accept that they are so good and would never do wrong to another, it is the perfect disguise for them to hide behind and get away with their bad behavior.
 
simple - restructure the church so that every preacher is required to pass an annual background check. If they're there for the right reasons they'll put up with it, if not they'll run like roaches in the daylight. I think too many churchgoers believe in the goodness of man so much that they are easily blindsided and conned into thinking if they say they have been Christian since their childhood and raised in a Christian home or if they've experienced rebirth, or redemption through prayer that the person is genuine. Not always.

Ive seen two preachers fall. You want to know why preachers fall? They loose focus on why they are in the profession. Remember that show on A&E a while back called God or the Girl? If they are evening questioning that then they should not be in the profession and should resign to being a deacon or very helpful church member but not in a main role or leadership position.

The SBC is very badly set-up to conduct self-investigations. It is set up as a loose confederation of churches, but yet they have a fairly strict set of doctrines that all the churches should adhere to. Ive seen many SBC churches break off from the main convention over doctrinal disputes.

I think the SBC should be re-organized over a period of years so that instead of it being a loose confederation of several thousand churches across the nation (and world should I say - theyve got huts in Zimbabwe), it needs to be set up to where you have a regional parishes and each parish consists of 3-4 state counties and they meet annually to discuss parish issues. Then those parishes have to answer to the state boards which is comprised of people elected from the regional parish that are not preachers or youth minister, more likely a well respected deacon. This way all self-investigations are done by third parties and any investigations are done by the state board and person who represents the church in the parish is not allowed to take part in said investigation. The national convention should be comprised of all state boards +1 member from each parish elected to go. This way the SBC would be more investigatible of itself and it becomes more self-policing, and everyone is hold everyone else accountable to uphold the moral standards set forth by the SBC Doctrine.

Sorry to ramble on but that is MHO.
 
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