TEXAS
Dallas Observer
By Amy Silverstein Wed., Feb. 25 2015
The letter was anonymous, just like other warnings that came before it. In late January, it arrived in the mailboxes of advocates who work on behalf of Christian sex-abuse victims. For 26 pages, it offered a rambling defense of a place that shouldn’t need one — Prestonwood Baptist Church, a Plano mega-church with 37,000 members, three campuses, decades of mostly good publicity and a celebrity pastor named Jack Graham.
But for the last several years, the church has come under scrutiny from a small, vocal group of Christian critics for its handling of child sexual abuse. None of the critics has been more effective than Amy Smith, the daughter of a former Prestonwood deacon. Five years ago, Smith alerted a church in Mississippi that a pastor on its staff had been quietly accused of child molestation at Prestonwood decades before.
John Langworthy, a former youth minister at Prestonwood, resigned from the Mississippi church not long after Smith spoke up and soon faced criminal charges in that state. He pleaded guilty to molesting five boys between the ages of 6 and 13 in the early ’80s in Mississippi. He avoided prison time and is now registered as a child sex offender. Smith was widely credited for bringing Langworthy’s crimes to light and causing him to admit to “sexual indiscretions” from the pulpit of his Mississippi church. The case disappeared from headlines soon after, but Smith has stayed on Prestonwood’s case, holding rallies outside the church, seeking other victims and publicly pressuring Graham to open up about what he knew of Langworthy’s crimes.
Yet the anonymous letter that arrived this January insisted that Smith was a liar. Smith had an agenda, the author wrote, but didn’t say what it was. She had fooled countless activists, journalists and Prestonwood officials. “I am dead serious and committed to exposing Amy Smith’s many falsehoods and stopping her continued and relentless attacks upon Prestonwood and Jack Graham,” the author warned.
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