UNITED STATES
The Raw Story
SCOTT KAUFMAN
16 SEP 2014
Despite allegations that he abused his position in Victory Church to curry sexual favors from his parishioners, a feature-length documentary about controversial “Fight Church” pastor Paul Burress was released on Tuesday, according to Hemant Mehta.
Earlier this year, former members of his Rochester, New York congregation accused Pastor Burress of abusing his power in the community to entice people into his swinger lifestyle.
In an email, the church’s executive pastor, Al Odgen, characterized those claims as a “vindictive email attack against Paul and Victory [Church],” and accused the church’s “enemies” of being “obviously in collusion with each other.”
The film does not address the controversy surrounding Pastor Burress’s abuse of power within his church, focusing instead on his ministry and the children and young men who fight in it.
The filmmakers, Daniel Junge and Bryan Storkel, wrote in The New York Times that one of the abiding concerns of Burress and other pastors who practice mixed martial arts (MMA) is that “the modern church [has] become ‘feminized’” because it fails to realize that “many of the Bible’s core tenets involve fighting.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.