COLORADO SPRINGS (CO)
The Roys Report [Chicago IL]
June 6, 2025
By Julie Roys
When the news broke a year ago that a famous Dallas pastor had sexually abused a 12-year-old girl in the 1980s, church leaders across several states swore they knew nothing about it.
Now it turns out they did.
Just-released court documents show that Bible teacher Jimmy Evans and leaders at a Colorado megachurch knew all along that Gateway Church founder Robert Morris had sexually abused Cindy Clemishire.
Despite this, Evans said in a statement last year that he was “shocked and devastated” by recent revelations of Clemishire’s abuse.
And Brady Boyd, pastor of New Life Church—a megachurch in Colorado Springs, which reportedly had been informed of Clemishire’s abuse in 2007—acted like the abuse was news to him when it became public.
Addressing New Life’s congregation in June 2024, Boyd said it had “been a hard week” for him personally. And he urged congregants to pray for Clemishire, “who came forward with new information” that had led to Morris’s resignation.
The stunning revelations about what Evans and New Life knew—and when—are included in a motion filed last Friday in Tarrant County, Texas, as part of Morris’ lawsuit against Gateway over retirement payments.
Clemishire and her sister, Karen Black, also spoke with The Roys Report (TRR) and confirmed the events mentioned in the documents and provided additional details.
In the motion and its attached exhibits, Morris admits he molested Clemishire when she was 12. But Morris repeatedly argues that he informed Gateway elders of this fact in 2005, 2007, and 2011. Yet, he states, the elders continued to employ him and agreed to pay him millions in retirement monies.
Evans was a Gateway elder or apostolic elder during those years and Boyd was an elder both in 2005 and 2007.
Then in 2007, Boyd left Gateway to lead New Life, which had been embroiled in a sex scandal that prompted its founding pastor, former National Association of Evangelicals’ President Ted Haggard, to resign.
The court documents note that Karen Black “protested and spoke explicitly” to New Life leaders about Morris and Clemishire when she heard of Boyd’s selection.
Black told TRR that she was a New Life member at the time and was concerned that hiring Boyd would increase Morris’s influence at the church. Given the scandal New Life had already endured, she wanted to protect the church from further harm.
So, in 2007, Black said she met with New Life’s pastoral search committee and told them that Morris had molested her sister for years in the 1980s, beginning when Clemishire was just 12.
According to a 2006 article in the Summit Daily, New Life’s search team included Lance Coles, now New Life executive pastor; Brian Newberg, now New Life senior executive pastor; former youth pastor and creator of The Thorn John Bolin; former New Life pastor and President of Window International Network Beverly Pegues; former New Life Prayer Pastor Joseph Winger, now an elder at Boulder Street Church; and two New Life members: Thelma Miller and Mary Napier, whose late husband served 15 years as a New Life trustee.
Also on the search team was Ross Parsley, now pastor of One Chapel in Austin, Texas. But Parsley told TRR he “resigned early in the process to become a candidate” for the senior pastor position. “As a result, I was not involved in the search committee’s meetings or discussions other than as a candidate,” he said.
Not only did New Life proceed with hiring Boyd after meeting with Black in 2007, but it also made Morris, whom Boyd described as “one of my closest friends,” an overseer.
When Gateway heard about Black’s meeting with New Life leaders, they convened a special elder meeting to discuss how to respond, according to Morris’ filing.
A 2007 letter attached as an exhibit describes this meeting between Evans, Morris, Pastor Olen Griffing, Attorney Shelby Sharpe, and then-Gateway elders Tom Lane, Steve Dulin, and Kevin Grove. The letter is addressed to Boyd and other Gateway elders: Gayland Lawshe, George Grubbs, and Dave Smith.
Morris recounted what happened with Clemishire in the 1980s and his “process of repentance and restoration,” the letter states. It adds that Griffing, who was Morris’s pastor in the 1980s and oversaw Morris’s restoration, “corroborated Robert’s account.”
The letter then outlines a suggested response to Black’s disclosure, stating that those at the meeting “felt strongly that (Morris’s past with Clemishire) is a closed issue and does not need to be exposed by Robert.” However, if because of Black’s discussions with New Life, “the media picks up on the story . . . we will have a prepared statement to give them,” the letter stated.
Other documents in Friday’s filing show that New Life leaders and Gateway’s elders were again told about Morris’ crimes in 2011.
Included in Friday’s filing was an anonymous 2011 email, which was addressed to Morris, New Life pastors Boyd and Coles, elders@gatewaypeople.com, Tom Lane, and various media. The email’s subject line was “NEWS RELEASE: Pastor Robert Morris of Gateway Church in Dallas molests 12 year old girl” and included Clemishire’s name, her parents’ name, and accurate details of her abuse.
Gateway officials’ response was to confront the sender with legal threats “if he proceeds with disseminating this false and misleading information.” It’s not known if the sender ever followed up with any news media.
TRR reached out this week to Boyd, Coles, and New Life Church for comment about their actions in light of knowing about Morris’s abuse in 2007. No one responded.
However, in March, when TRR first learned about Black’s meeting with the search committee, we emailed Coles. He responded that since Morris is now being tried for child sex crimes in Oklahoma, “New Life Church respectfully declines a request for a media interview and trusts the judicial process to reach a just and appropriate conclusion.”
This week, we also reached out to Evans, who is mentioned several other times in Morris’s court documents, but he did not respond.
The documents also implicated other former Gateway elders and apostolic elders, like the late Jack Hayford and televangelist James Robison.
Included in the filing was a proposed announcement Morris reportedly wrote in 2011 and distributed to all of Gateway’s elders at the time. According to an archived version of Gateway’s website, the elders in 2011 included not only Evans but Robison, Hayford, Lane, Dulin, Grove, Smith, Lawshe, Todd Lane, and Jeremy Carrasco.
In the announcement, Morris admits “kissing and petting” Clemishire who “was about 2 weeks before her 13th birthday.”
The proposed announcement also states, “Jimmy Evans and I spoke with (Clemishire’s) pastor a few years ago and he gave us a good report.”
Clemishire told TRR that the context for the visit by Evans and Morris was her disclosure around 2007 to her Oklahoma pastor, Mark Crow, that Morris had molested her as a child. Crow pastored Victory Church in Oklahoma City at the time but now pastors Mosaic Church, also in Oklahoma City.
Clemishire confirmed with TRR that Crow met with Morris and Evans around that time.
TRR reached out to Crow for comment, but he did not respond.
Despite these multiple indications Evans knew years ago about Morris’ abuse of Clemishire as a child, Evans posted a statement in June 2024, saying he was “shocked and devastated” by revelations of Clemishire’s abuse. Evans claimed Morris told him he had “had an affair with a woman in (his) early 20s.” But Evans claimed, “I was unaware of anything like the allegations shared last week.”
Similarly, Robison claimed in a video last year he had “no idea” Morris’s past “moral failure” was “a crime against a child.”
TRR circled back with Robison this week, asking for comment in light of revelations in Morris’s filing. Robison did not respond.
Another former Gateway elder mentioned numerous times in Morris’ court documents is Executive Leadership Institute founder Tom Lane. Lane issued a statement last June, denying he knew Clemishire’s age when the abuse occurred.
However, when TRR presented Lane with the evidence contained in the recent court filing, Lane’s attorney replied: “Tom removed his original statement, after subsequently seeing some past communications from 2011. Rather than attempting to adhere to memory and mental impressions, he anticipates releasing an additional statement at some time in the future, after the benefit of reviewing everything relevant . . .”
Former Gateway elder Steve Dulin, founder of MasterPlan Business Ministries, is similarly named on numerous documents in Morris’s filing.
TRR reached out to Dulin for comment, but he did not answer.
We also reached out to Gateway Church for comment. A church spokesperson replied that Morris’s filing is “just the latest sad attempt by Robert Morris to deflect blame away from himself to others for his criminal actions. We have consistently and publicly said that there were Elders and employees at Gateway who knew about this issue before it became public, and either didn’t take action or didn’t inquire further. That was fundamentally wrong . . .”
The church noted that it has already removed the elders who knew about Morris’s abuse and failed to act. The elders removed last year are Kevin Grove, Gayland Lawshe, Thomas Miller, and Jeremy Carrasco. Lane left Gateway in 2023 and Dulin left in July 2024.
However, in one of the documents included as an exhibit in Morris’s filing, Morris’s lawyer claims that from “2000 until at least 2023, prospective Gateway elders were informed of Robert’s moral failure that occurred in his early 20s—namely, his sexual encounters with an underage girl. . .”
TRR asked Gateway specifically about this claim, which would mean that current elders Tra Willbanks, Kenneth Fambro, and Dane Minor had prior knowledge of Morris’s crimes.
A Gateway spokesperson reiterated prior statements that anyone who knew or should have known about Morris’s abuse has been removed from the elder board. The person added that neither Willbanks, Fambro, or Minor were told about Morris’s abuse until the news became public.