AUSTRALIA
Perth Now
BY ANNETTE BLACKWELL AAP OCTOBER 15, 2014
A SENIOR Pentecostal pastor whose son-in-law ran his church’s youth program had no idea he was sexually abusing a 13-year old boy, an inquiry has been told.
IAN Lehmann, who led a small Queensland church where Jonathan Baldwin took sexual advantage of the boy between 2004 and 2006, says he still struggles to accept his son-in-law’s guilt.
Baldwin, who had charge of a 200-strong youth congregation, was jailed in 2009 for eight years, with a non-parole period of four years, for indecent treatment of a child under 16 and for one count of sodomy. He is no longer in jail.
Pastor Lehmann on Wednesday told a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearing he found “pedophilia and homosexuality” repulsive, but when he sits down to have a meal with Baldwin “I don’t think I am doing this with a pedophile”.
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