MISSOURI
Riverfront Times
By Danny Wicentowski Fri., May 29 2015
Doug Lay was beloved among his students at St. Louis Christian College. The student body voted him 2015’s Teacher of the Year.
But the bookish English professor was nowhere to be found among the well-wishers who gathered at First Christian Church of Florissant earlier this month for the college’s graduation ceremony.
Lay’s conspicuous absence was no accident: He’d been banned from the church’s premises in April, one month after he’d started raising questions about the way the church’s senior pastor, Steve Wingfield, handled allegations of sexual abuse.
In a meticulously researched report titled “Is It Enough: Sexual Abuse Within the Church: A Case Study at First Christian Church of Florissant,” Lay accused Wingfield of ignoring warnings about a youth minister named Brandon Milburn. A former student of Lay’s, Milburn had once been a rising star in the north county megachurch. Last year, Milburn was unmasked as a serial child molester.
In 2014, Doug Lay sent his accusation-filled report, “Is it Enough,” to FCCF leadership.
As documented in a Riverfront Times investigation, Milburn started hanging around First Christian Church of Florissant, or FCCF, in 2005. That’s also where he found his victims, two eleven-year-old boys, whom he abused repeatedly between 2007 and 2009.
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.