HOUSTON (TX)
Chron [Houston TX]
April 25, 2024
By Eric Killelea
The suit accuses SBC and its affiliated Champion Forest Baptist of negligence while a youth pastor committed crimes of sexual abuse against minors in the church.
Three Jane Does who claim they were sexually abused as minors by a youth pastor at Champion Forest Baptist sued the Houston megachurch and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) last week, alleging negligence and seeking more than $1 million in damages.
The case against Champion Forest—which is a three-site church based on the northwest side of the city—comes after 34-year-old ex-minister Timothy Jason Jeltema was sentenced in 2022 to five years in prison after pleading guilty to sexual abuse crimes.
The suit alleges the church and the SBC failed to protect the girls from the abuse. “In what has sadly become an all too familiar story, this case involves stolen childhoods and shattered faith,” Houston-based attorney Rusty Hardin wrote in the suit filed April 19 in Harris County District Court. While SBC-affiliated churches “have known for years that churches are a hunting ground for depraved individuals seeking to prey on the innocence or children,” Champion Forest “invited, encouraged, and enabled a predator to be part of their trusted inner circle.”
The suit states the Jane Does have suffered “extreme emotional distress.” It also accused church leaders of mishandling their reports of sexual crimes and accused then pastors of interfering with police investigations into Jeltema’s crime—a significant claim as there remains a federal investigation into the SBC’s handling of sexual abuse.
“Had the church done what it was supposed to do, plantiffs would not have been harmed and their faith would not have been shaken to its core,” Hardin wrote in the suit. The crimes “robbed them and their families of the community of faith they desperately sought and needed to navigate their lives.”
Marc Sheiness, the Houston attorney for Champion Forest, on Monday filed a “general denial” response in district court. “We are heartbroken and grieve with those who are victims of any kind of sexual impropriety,” church representatives said in response to questions Thursday. “We are praying for healing and restoration for the victims. We encourage anyone with information regarding potential criminal activity, especially any victims, to contact law enforcement immediately.” Neither Hardin nor the SBC immediately responded to requests for comment.
“In what has sadly become an all too familiar story, this case involves stolen childhoods and shattered faith.”
According to the suit, Champion Forest’s former executive pastor Stephen Trammell in 2009 allegedly “recruited” Jeltema, then aged 18, to work primarily with girls in middle school and high school. The suit also alleges that the church “encouraged” Jeltema to “develop extremely close relationships with the girls he pastored” in part by being available to contact them 24/7 through phone, text and social media platforms including Snapchat and Instagram.
“The nature of this conduct by Timmy is part of a long line of instances reported widely as being a systemic problem within churches, and in particular larger, ‘mega-churches’ where there are large numbers of church members desiring to have their young children engaging in wholesome youth activities with peers who hail from a similar family background and with common interests,” according to the suit. “This inherent vulnerability has resulted time and again in instances of gross abuse by adults who wear the mask of loving, caring and respectable servants who minister to youth.”
The suit blamed Champion Forest for failing to “establish standards and procedures” for hiring and training Jeltema, “particularly with regard to the appropriate boundaries and interactions between staff members and children and adult males and female youth.” It also suggested that Jeltema was “able to engage his deviancy in one form of fashion with 25 young women” at the church. “This pattern is well known to the Southern Baptist Convention, however, SBC officials ‘decided’ to distract, minimize, avoid and often cover up these problems,” the suit states.
In an email sent by Sheiness on Thursday, church representatives said Champion Forest Baptist has “multiple layers of policies and procedures in place” including a national background check that it performs on staff and volunteers working with youth under age 18. They added that the church has “long established” regulations that prohibit pastors of students and young volunteers from communicating electronically “one-on-one” with students.
During a church camp in Florida in June 2018, one Jane Doe “begged” to speak with her parents after telling church leaders that Jeltema was sending her sexual images and lewd comments via phone and social media messages, according to the suit. Trammell and then chief youth pastor Steven Morris allegedly “refused” to call her parents and instead “isolated” her. “They then grilled [Jane Doe] questioning her veracity,” the suit claims. “It was not until after the pastors demanded to see her cell phone so they could confirm her outcry that they eventually called Jane Doe 3’s parents.”
The girl and her parents went to report the crimes at the Tomball Police Department, and the pastors joined them, the suit said. When the police attempted to question the Jane Doe alone, Trammell allegedly tried to “intimidate the police officers into letting him be present” and said his “church was a mega church, and that ‘they did not know who they were dealing with.'”
After leaving the police station, Trammell allegedly went to Jeltema’s apartment. “Upon information and belief, immediately following that conversation, Timmy destroyed his phone and his computer with a hammer, destroying much of the evidence that would have uncovered the extent of his wrongdoing, additional victims, and the church’s entanglement with Timmy’s pedophilia,” the suit said.
Later that month, the Tomball police charged Jeltema with online solicitation of a minor. At the time, the church said Jeltema had been terminated from his position as youth pastor the previous month after admitting to having “improper contact via social media” with an 18-year-old church member, according to the Houston Chronicle. The church said Thursday that Jeltema was “immediately dismissed for a clear violation of the church’s written code of conduct” as well as Jeltema’s admission that he didn’t follow its regulations prohibiting him from communicating solely with students. The church also said it reported the incident to law enforcement and “fully cooperated” with the investigation.
Trammell left Champion Forest in November 2020, and is currently the executive pastor at Houston’s First Baptist Church. Morris remains a pastor at Champion Forest’s North Klein campus. Meanwhile, Jeltema is still at the state prison known as the Dolph Briscoe Unit in Frio County. He’s eligible for parole in November and yet is expected to be released in 2027.