Let Us Prey: Big Trouble at First Baptist Church – article about sexual abuse in Baptist churches
Standard disclaimer: Being married and a parent, or saying you are a Christian, or working as a preacher, does not automatically make you more godly, ethical, or loving than anyone else.
And single Christian ladies who’d like to get married: time to give up on the “be equally yoked” teaching, since so many Christian men are rapists and perverts.
I blogged about one of the pervy idiots mentioned in the article before, here:
(Link): Ex-mega church IFB pastor (who is married) Jack Schaap gets 12 years in teen sex scandal
Notice in the article below that one of the sexual assault victims was depicted as being a “temptress.”
I have blogged on something along those lines before, please see
(Link): Let Us Prey: Big Trouble at First Baptist Church
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- A string of assaults and sexual crimes committed by pastors across the country have one thing in common: The perpetrators have ties to the megachurch in Hammond, Indiana.
BY BRYAN SMITH
PUBLISHED DEC. 11, 2012
… [Baptist preacher] Schaap continued to rub the stick—up and down, up and down—and converse with God, sometimes angrily, sometimes ecstatically, for more than a minute. What he was doing was unmistakable: simulating masturbation, in front of thousands of children, in the middle of a church service. A row of white-coated high-ranking churchmen seated behind Schaap watched in silence. At the end, as usual, young men streamed up to the stage.
… The true believers of the ultrafundamentalist Independent Baptist movement were accustomed to Schaap’s style.
If he wasn’t scolding his flock for not living up to God’s demands (tithing, volunteering, “soul winning”), he was delivering R-rated sermons that, for example, likened the Lord’s Supper to having sex with Jesus Christ. “He would just repeatedly talk about sex and repeatedly talk about women, how they were dressed and body parts . . . in graphic detail,” recalls Tom Brennan, who attended the church for six years and is now an Independent Baptist pastor at Maplewood Bible Baptist Church in Chicago.
Unfortunately, it went well beyond talk. Last September, Schaap, 54, a married father of two, pleaded guilty to taking a 16-year-old girl he was counseling at First Baptist across state lines to have sex. Denied bond, he awaits sentencing in the Porter County Jail; the minimum term is ten years.
But Schaap is not simply one of those rogue evangelists who thunders against the evils of forbidden sex while indulging in it himself. According to dozens of current and former church members, religion experts, and historians interviewed by Chicago—plus a review of thousands of pages of court documents— he is part of what some call a deeply embedded culture of misogyny and sexual and physical abuse at one of the nation’s largest churches.
Christian Pundit 