LITTLE ROCK (AR)
Baptist News Global [Jacksonville FL]
December 12, 2023
By Mark Wingfield
A former Southern Baptist children’s minister accused of child sexual abuse has asked an Arkansas court to seal his record, an effort critics say would hinder other potential victims from coming forward.
Meanwhile, the Southern Baptist church where he last served had been hailed by its well-known pastor as a place free of any potential abuse. Now, the legal counsel for both sides are members of that same church. And the pastor is in hot water for not informing the congregation of the allegations.
The case involves Patrick Stephen Miller, 37, who was charged with second-degree sexual assault and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor harassment in January 2022. He was given a one-year suspended sentence, with 19 days credit for time already served, and wasn’t required to register as a sex offender, according to court documents.
However, Miller remains under investigation as a second victim now has come forward. Based on media reports, there could be still other victims.
According to reports in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, most members at Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., did not know Miller had been arrested, charged with a crime, convicted or sentenced.
Joseph Gates, a Sunday school teacher at Immanuel, is legal counsel for the original victim and the second alleged victim. In a letter to the congregation last week, Gates accused Pastor Steven Smith of keeping this information from the church, despite the first victim’s family asking him in 2018 to inform the parents of other “potentially affected girls.”
Smith, who is the son of former Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith, has served the church since 2017. Previously, he served as vice president for student services and professor of preaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also served on the preaching team at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas. In addition to his current pastorate, he serves as a preaching professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
News of the apparent cover-up of a convicted child abuser at the church has not set well within the network of SBC leaders who have been battling allegations of mishandled responses to clergy sexual abuse.
One of the chief watchdogs on that front, Christa Brown, posted a column on Substack saying the Arkansas newspaper’s story “exposed the ugly underbelly of abuse cover-up patterns in the Southern Baptist Convention.”
She cited nine ways Miller’s case fits the typical pattern of not dealing with clergy sexual abusers. Among those:
- “Church officials commonly keep congregants in the dark about child sex abuse allegations even though parents in the pews are the very people who most need to know so that they can talk with their kids.”
- Southern Baptist leaders’ words usually “are oriented toward institutional image management and controlling the narrative” for “institutional protection.”
- “Clergy sex abusers are able to easily church-hop, even after their abuse has been reported.”
- The SBC “still does not out its own sexually abusive pastors.”
- SBC officials “almost never stand with the abused even when they tell people that’s what they do.”
- SBC church officials “come clean about clergy sex abuse only after the news is already public or after a reporter has informed them that an article is about to run.”
Miller reportedly worked as an intern at Immanuel and later joined the staff as assistant director of children’s ministry at the time the abuse occurred. His acknowledged victim and alleged victim were in third or fourth grade at the time the alleged abuse occurred.
After leaving Immanuel Baptist in Little Rock, Miller moved to First Baptist Church of Moore, Okla., in suburban Oklahoma City. There, he served as associate pastor to children for two years, resigning just months before his 2018 arrest.
The story of Miller’s abuse and alleged abuse is told in court filings cited by the Arkansas newspaper.
At the Arkansas church, Miller was responsible for teaching children while the adults were gathered for worship and Bible study.
The court record states: “During Sunday night and Wednesday night services, he routinely played ‘hide and seek’ with his class. This would include defendant Miller hiding in a darkened and locked closet with one of the students. During these ‘hiding’ sessions in a darkened and locked closet, defendant Miller would tickle, grope and molest the young adolescents he was charged to teach.”
The first victim came forward in early 2016 and said Miller had taken her in a dark closet three or four times and rubbed her stomach under her shirt. Two years later, she told a friend Miller had touched her elsewhere as well. She told investigators Miller had touched her vagina, court records state.
The fact that this happened, was reported and resulted in a conviction without members of the Little Rock church knowing about it seems incredulous to church members.
Gates, the church Sunday school teacher and attorney, said a few months after Miller’s conviction, with stories about abuse in the SBC in the news, Smith portrayed Immanuel Baptist Church as a place where children had been shielded from abuse, telling the congregation, “We have had, for many years, protocols in place that, by God’s grace, have proven effective in the prevention of abuse.”
Gates, who is the father of three girls, says that was untrue. Not only did the pastor know what had happened, so did other staff members and church leaders.
Faced with the allegations from his own church member, the pastor told the Democrat-Gazette: “We have actively participated with law enforcement in every step of this process. We grieve any form of abuse and are vigilant about the safety of children.”
Later, he told the newspaper: “During the law enforcement investigation, church leaders did not publicly discuss the matter. There’s a very real concern that doing so could have undermined or negatively affected the ability of prosecutors to make their case and obtain a conviction.”
Smith also asserted: “As we tend to the spiritual needs of our church members, nothing is more important than keeping them — and their children — safe. Patrick Miller deceived and betrayed us with this horrific behavior. He is fully responsible for what he did.”
Now that Miller is attempting to seal his court records, the initial victim and the second alleged victim and their families are opposing that request, as is the state of Arkansas.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Karen Whatley was scheduled to hear the case last week but was out sick. The hearing has been rescheduled for Feb. 1.
In one odd twist, the current executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention is Rex Horne, former pastor at Immanuel. What the state convention was told about the abuse and its perpetrator is not clear.
One of the chief objectives of Brown and other advocates for abuse prevention and reform is to create a system to alert all SBC churches to known perpetrators of sexual abuse in SBC churches nationwide. Despite two years of debates and the appointment of two task forces, the planned SBC “Ministry Check” website still says its content is “coming soon.”
That’s why Brown has stopped pulling punches in her writing. “Kids are not safe in the Southern Baptist Convention,” she said this week. “An institution in which such egregious patterns persist does not deserve to have children in the pews.”