UNITED STATES
Washington Post
Covenant Life Church pastors face scrutiny over ex-church member’s abuse
By Dan Morse, Published: June 1
Early last year, the pastors of Covenant Life Church — a congregation of several thousand in the middle of Montgomery County — faced a crisis.
Detectives had just charged a former member with molesting four teenage boys more than two decades earlier and indicated that, back then, some church leaders looked the other way. The pastors decided to take a strong stand.
“Covenant Life Church had no knowledge of such abuse until many years after the abuse when an adult who had been victimized as a child came forward,” they wrote on the church’s blog in February 2013, decrying the trauma that sexual abuse can inflict. “We continue to invite your prayers for all those involved in these matters.”
Now, the church has been forced to confront statements made in court that three of the teen victims or their families had come to church leaders for help in the early 1990s and that the church officials did not call police.
The testimony came during a May trial of Nathaniel Morales, who was convicted of the long-ago abuse and is scheduled to be sentenced at an Aug. 14 hearing that likely will draw more attention to the abuse and how pastors handled it.
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