WICHITA (KS)
The Roys Report [Chicago IL]
June 16, 2025
By Julie Fidler
In a Father’s Day letter to congregants, a Presbyterian church in Wichita, Kansas, admitted it ignored multiple reports of child sexual abuse by its youth pastor in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Eastminster Presbyterian Church paid a settlement to only one of the victims after a lawyer contacted the church threatening to sue, the letter said. The letter named former student ministries director, Bodie Weiss, as the man who groomed and sexually abused 23 students.
Weiss was hired by Eastminster in April 1989 and worked there until January 2006, when he left to take a position at another church. He died in June 2020 at the age of 58, apparently of Covid.
The church’s secrecy about the matter and the outrage expressed by some of the victims have been widely reported in Wichita. Eastminster is the home church of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and part of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
Initially, the church claimed the allegations first came to light in July 2024, when former youth group member Tyson Stuart went public with his experiences with The Wartburg Watch.
At that point, the church hired the investigative group Fact Finding Ministry (FFM) to look into the other allegations, conducting more than 52 interviews with former staff, victims, and witnesses.
Eventually, 23 victims were identified by FFM.
But on Sunday, the church admitted that on three separate occasions prior to July 2024, allegations were made against Weiss—twice during Weiss’ employment with Eastminster—but they were dismissed.
The first allegation was in December 2000, when a former student accused Weiss of sexually harassing him in the 1990s. After interviews with Weiss and the student, the church determined the student’s accusations “were not credible,” their letter said.
Then in May 2005, two men in Pennsylvania contacted an Eastminster pastor to allege that in 1980, Weiss engaged in inappropriate sexual activity with them at a Pennsylvania church. At that time, Weiss was 18, and the men were 16.
The church said it investigated the accusations, interviewing Weiss and the pastors of the Pennsylvania church, but that “a determination was made that the allegations could not be substantiated.”
It was after that second incident that Weiss left Eastminster in 2006 to accept a position elsewhere.
Then, in July 2008, an attorney representing a former student sent Eastminster a demand letter, alleging the student had been sexually abused by Weiss. The church investigated the claim, and Eastminster’s insurance carrier agreed to pay a monetary settlement to the student and his family.
Eastminister claimed the student’s family also requested a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) because “the student’s family felt that public disclosures about any abuse that had taken place would be harmful to their son.”
The church did not explain why it never contacted law enforcement. Even after the first allegations went public in 2024, it opted to hire FFM, which is owned by Randy Coffman, an Eastminster congregant.
The church has been secretive about the matter for a year, first stating that it would not share the findings of the investigation with the general public but only with congregants and investigators. A summary of the findings could be viewed only while under supervision on the church’s premises following a June 22 “Repentance, Lament, and Healing” service.
Its newest letter supports some of the victims’ claims that Eastminster’s leaders were well aware of Weiss’s improprieties, which included grooming practices, and allowing inappropriate relationships between an older man and boys.
The success of Weiss’ ministry caused Eastminster “to place too much trust in Weiss and to allow Weiss to lead those student ministry programs with too much autonomy and not enough accountability” it admitted.
The allegations were not shared with Eastminister’s elders at the time, the letter said, and no current elder was involved in any of the investigations.
“The current Eastminster Session and staff are grieved by these shortcomings,” the church’s most recent statement said, “by the abuse that took place during Weiss’s time at Eastminster, and by the harm that was caused to the young people who should have been safe in our care and to their families and loved ones.”
Stuart was a middle-schooler at the church in the 1990s when he became active in the youth and leadership groups. He remembers Weiss being “very well-respected” and “very kind.” Stuart told KWCH-TV Ch.12 Newsthat the abuse began when Weiss invited him to his home for a counseling session. Weiss told Stuart, then 17, that he wanted to teach him a lesson in intimacy.
“He had me lay on top of him, and he held me for a while,” Stuart explained. “I don’t know if that was ten seconds or if it was a minute. But afterward, he asked me to kiss him on the mouth. I kissed him, and that was that. I left there that day feeling like I had learned something.”
It wasn’t until nearly two decades later that Stuart realized this was grooming and abuse. Upon learning that others in the youth group had been victimized, his decision to go public about his story, is what launched Eastminster’s investigation a year ago.
Andy Warren, another of Weiss’ victims who attended Eastminster at the same time as Stuart, viewed Weiss as a father figure—something he desperately needed at the time. It wasn’t long, however, before the then-teen saw a darker side of his youth group leader, though it never turned physical for him the way it did for Stuart.
Speaking to KAKE-TV Ch. 10, Warren said that that one day, while alone with Weiss in his vehicle when Warren was only 14, Weiss stopped on a dirt road. Weiss then reportedly told the student that it was “time to play put out or get out.”
The student would go to Weiss’ home for counseling sessions, only for Weiss to emerge, shirtless, from taking a shower, he said. That is how Stuart says his kissing encounter with the church leader began on that fateful day.
Both Stuart and Warren say there is still more to the story than Eastminster is letting on. Warren tried questioning the owner of FFM about those claims but told KAKE he was given a non-answer.
Moreover, Warren told the station, the summary report is a mere six pages out of a 200-page full report. And Stuart told KAKE he knows the student whose lawyer threatened the church, and he was told it was the church, not the family, that initiated the NDA.
Neither FFM nor the church responded to requests for comment by The Roys Report (TRR).