MARYLAND
World Magazine
The day before Easter, members of Covenant Life Church learned police had arrested one of their former children’s ministry volunteers on charges of child sexual abuse. The news cast a familiar pall over the Gaithersburg, Md., congregation already struggling under the cloud of past child sex abuse allegations within its membership.
On March 16, Montgomery County, Md., authorities charged Larry Ellis Caffery, 66, with nine counts of child sexual abuse and two counts of false imprisonment. His arrest comes as the threat of a new class-action lawsuit looms over Covenant Life Church (CLC) founder C.J. Mahaney and leaders within Sovereign Grace Churches (SGC,), formerly Sovereign Grace Ministries, over allegations they covered up accusations of child sexual abuse involving church members decades earlier.
A 2012 civil lawsuit alleged Mahaney, CLC, SGC, and others covered up sexual abuse in SGC churches, including CLC, the former flagship church of the SGC coalition, of which it is no longer a member. A Montgomery County judge dismissed the case in 2013 on technical grounds but did not rule on the merits of the case. Mahaney denied the charges against him. In 2014, a Maryland jury convicted former CLC youth ministry volunteer Nathaniel Morales on five counts of sexual molestation related to events in the 1980s and 1990s.
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