D-FW churches have been rocked by a year of abuse scandals. Is it more than a coincidence?

(TX)
Dallas Morning News [Dallas TX]

July 24, 2025

By Adrian Ashford

The News talked with experts who work with or study abuse survivors in evangelical Protestant churches.

Earlier this year, just shy of his Frisco megachurch’s 25th anniversary, lead pastor John McKinzie confronted one of the most challenging situations in his time as a pastor.

A former student pastor at Hope Fellowship disclosed to church leaders that he had inappropriate contact with a minor at a previous church, McKinzie said.

“What goes through your mind is — ‘Oh, my gosh, this is the worst thing that could ever happen,’” McKinzie told The Dallas Morning News.

Dallas-area churches like Hope Fellowship have been grappling with allegations of abuse with renewed urgency since June of last year. That’s when Cindy Clemishire publicly accused the pastor of Gateway, one of D-FW’s largest megachurches, of abusing her when she was 12.

Since June 2024, at least 11 D-FW pastors have resigned or been removed from their posts following allegations of sexual abuse or harassment, sexual misconduct or impropriety or what their church describedonly as a “sin” or “moral failure” without further elaborating.

As the Dallas area grapples with this slew of abuse allegations in evangelical, Protestant churches, The News talked to lawyers, researchers and therapists to hear whether there are risk factors in those church environments, specifically, that make people less safe from sexual violence.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, all of the churches whose pastor departures made the news since June 2024 are Protestant, and eight of the 10are nondenominational.

Experts on abuse in Protestant environments pointed to several possible factors leading to Dallas’ year of scandals. Those include a lack of accountability in nondenominational churches; theologies that emphasize wifely duties and female submission; and “purity culture” teachings that tie together sex and shame.

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas, disagrees with such arguments about purity culture or evangelical teachings. Neither, he said, is a cause of abuse in the church.

“People can take any truth and take it to an extreme and twist it,” he said. But teaching what the Bible really says about the roles for men and women and about saving sex for a one-man and one-woman marriage, he said, doesn’t lead to abuse.

“What leads to abuse is not following what the Bible says,” Jeffress said. “The Bible is very clear about, for example, child abuse. Jesus said if anyone hurts a child, it would be better that he had a millstone tied around his neck and [be] thrown into the sea.

”Jeffress criticized a “culture of secrecy” in some churches. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant for sin,” he said, “and things ought to be brought out and dealt with in a biblical way.”

Conversations about sexual abuse

Conversations about abuse in religious communities have increased over the past few decades, particularly since, starting in 2002, The Boston Globe exposed the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

As scrutiny of the Catholic Church grew, abuse in the church came to be seen as a “Catholic problem,” Christa Brown, an activist and the author of Baptistland, said in an interview.

Brown wrote an opinion piece for The News in 2006 in which she said she was abused by a Baptist pastor. In the years after that story was published, she kept up a blog between 2006 and 2012 tracking pastors or volunteers with Baptist ties who were arrested or convicted of abuse.

Since Brown first began tracking cases of abuse in the Baptist church, the number of media outlets, bloggers and activists tracking abuse in churches has grown. Advocates for survivors have wondered why abuse — which happens across society— seems to be happening so often in the church.

At Gateway, the scandal surrounding founder Robert Morris prompted a reckoning over the church’s culture. Six former staff members told The News the church had a “narcissistic” culture, where criticism was silenced and staffers were left with lasting trauma. The church’s elder board chair said in January that the top officials who ran the church before Clemishire came forward were all gone.

In March, Morris was indicted on five counts of lewd or indecent acts to a child in Oklahoma, charges based on Clemishire’s abuse allegations. He could face up to 20 years in prison for each of the five charges, according to the Oklahoma attorney general’s office. His preliminary hearing is scheduled for Sept. 4.

The Gateway scandal was a motivator for a new bill signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in June. “Trey’s Law,” spearheaded by Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, and Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, bans the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence sexual abuse survivors.

McKinzie, at Hope Fellowship, said he learned from the way other local churches handled scandal. “There’s no question that the circumstances of the last few months of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex shaped our decisions in transparency,” he said.

His church tried to be as transparent as possible, McKinzie said, and it sent congregants a two-page email sharing more information about the former student pastor, who was terminated. McKinzie also addressed the situation from the pulpit.

McKinzie said he’s received several emails since the church’s announcement from congregants who thanked him and described their own experiences with abuse.

“Every one of them were situations — now that was another time, but — situations where [abuse] was not disclosed or dealt with,” McKinzie said. “Easy to criticize history, but man, just seems like 20 years ago or 30 years ago, we handled these things so much different.”

Responding to abuse

Boz Tchividjian, the grandson of the late evangelist Billy Graham, didn’t set out to become an expert on abuse in Protestant churches.

Tchividjian said in an interview that when he began specializing in sexual abuse cases, he was surprised by the number of abuse cases connected to a church or faith community.

He has worked on over 1,000 cases as a prosecutor since he began his legal career in the ‘90s, he said, and created and served as chief of the first sex crimes division at the office of the state attorney in a Florida judicial court.

In 2004, Tchividjian founded GRACE, one of the leading organizations focused on helping evangelical churches respond to abuse. He stepped down from his role as executive director in 2020 and now runs a private practice focused on sexual abuse survivors.

Tchividjian has represented several victims of alleged abuse in Dallas-area churches since June 2024. His clients have included the father of an alleged victim of abuse, who sued First Baptist Dallas in November, and Clemishire, the woman who accused Morris of abuse.

Abuse happens in churches of all kinds, Tchividjian said.

With abuse cases in nondenominational churches, he said “one of the common threads I see through most of those cases is this dearth of accountability with top leadership.”

“A nondenominational church, by its name and nature, is not really formally connected to any body of churches. It doesn’t really answer to anyone outside of that particular church,” Tchividjian said. “Whereas at least on paper, in a Presbyterian Church or a Methodist church, you have the presbytery who can go in and discipline the pastor.

”George Mason, who led Dallas’ Wilshire Baptist Church for about 33 years, agreed with that assessment.

“I think a big part of the problem is that in almost all of these cases, and maybe all of them,” he said, “they are in churches that are part of what we might call the Free Church tradition,” which he said includes both nondenominational and Baptist churches.

He highlighted that in other professions such as medicine and law, there’s a chain of authority and a group of people who can discipline a licensed lawyer or doctor. “They are licensed by them, and they have to live up to certain agreed-upon standards,” Mason said, “and if they violate those standards, they’re sanctioned.

“None of that exists in the Wild, Wild West that is American religion in the Free Church tradition.

”Tchividjian also pointed to particular dangers he’s seen come into play in megachurches like Morris’ Gateway Church.

“I would say, one of the dangers of these megachurches, and Dallas is filled with them, is this notion of — the top leadership is in complete control,” he said. “Not only just in the decisions they make, but in their ability to influence large swaths of people. And there is very little accountability for those in the top echelon of leadership.”

Teachings about women

Sheila Gregoire is a Christian author, researcher and speaker known for her books critiquing evangelical teachings about women and sex.

Her 2021 book The Great Sex Rescue compiled data from surveys of over 20,000 women, most of whom Gregoire said identified themselves as American evangelicals.

Gregoire and a team of researchers asked the women whether they’d been taught and believed popular evangelical teachings about sex. The women were also asked standardized questions about consent, self-esteem and their sexual and relationship experiences.

The women were not selected at random but recruited by Gregoire’s team of researchers — a method assailed by her critics as biased.

In an interview, Gregoire said she found exposure to and adherence to several popular evangelical teachings about women and sex were highly correlated with whether someone had painful or nonconsensual sexual experiences.

She found that women who believe “a wife is obligated to have sex with her husband when he wants it” were 39% more likely to experience primary sexual pain, according to a summary of her research she shared with The News.

Her team found that women who believe “all men struggle with lust; it is every man’s battle” are 79% more likely to engage in sex “only because they feel they have to.

”Those teachings are found in several popular evangelical marriage and dating books that sold millions of copies, Gregoire said. In her work, she’s critiqued books including Love and Respect and For Women Only.

“So much of evangelicalism is really wedded to the idea that men need to be in power over women,” Gregoire said.

“I think a lot of times it’s taken as an abuse problem, but it’s so much bigger than that. It’s actually a worldview and a view-of-women problem, and until you fix that, you’re not going to fix abuse,” she said.

The authors of Love and Respect and For Women Only are among those who have addressed concerns Gregoire raised about their teachings. Those authors have said in public statements that they condemn abuse and also take issue with the non-random nature of her surveys.

‘Purity culture’

Emily Joy Allison is widely credited with launching the #ChurchToo movement with a 2017 X thread. She alleged that when she was 16, a youth leader in his 30s at her evangelical megachurch pursued a romantic relationship with her and told her not to tell anyone.

When her parents found out, they told Allison to apologize to the youth leader, and he left the youth group and moved to other churches, Allison alleged.

“[N]ot a single adult in my life who knew thought to say ‘it’s not your fault’ for MONTHS,” she wrote on X.

Allison went on to write #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing, a 2021 book that connected her own story to attitudes about “purity culture” in the evangelical church.

The “purity culture” label has been used, primarily by critics, to describe both a set of beliefs about moral sexual behavior and an evangelical subculture that emerged in the 1990s and put a heavy emphasis on opposition to premarital sex.

Purity culture teaches that any sexual activity outside of a heterosexual, lifelong marriage is not only wrong but shameful, Allison said in an interview. In an environment that embraces purity culture, the only sex education children are given is usually fear-laden warnings against sex outside of marriage, she said.

“Because sex is so shrouded in secrecy and shame, there’s also a sense in which [abused children] don’t feel comfortable talking to adults about this kind of stuff, because they think ‘Oh, I will get in trouble,’” Allison said. “That’s not an unfounded fear, unfortunately.

”Kelly Wolfe said she was raised in a Church of Christ congregation in the Lewisville area and was a member at The Village Church, an evangelical megachurch in Flower Mound, for eight years.

The purity culture she grew up with taught her that it was a young woman’s responsibility to be modest enough to stop men from “lusting” over her, she said.

“I knew what the rules were, and I knew what could be displayed at church,” Wolfe said. “I didn’t know the things that I was OK with, the things that I was not OK with, the things that felt violating to me, like I didn’t even understand how to listen to my own body.”

Wolfe said she was raped in college, but she didn’t tell anyone for seven years.

‘Secret Keeper Girl’

Dannah Gresh is a popular Christian author who specializes in sexual theology and parenting young girls and has written a number of books on purity and modesty.

She is known, in part, for her “‘Truth or Bare’ fashion tests,” designed to help young girls evaluate whether their clothing is modest.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement and what Gresh called a “revisiting” of conversation about purity culture, she said she’s changed some of the words and messaging she uses.

Gresh said in an interview that she changed the name of her popular book Secret Keeper Girl: The Power of Modesty for Tweens to True Girl: Discover the Secrets of True Beauty. She also said she now prefers using the word “dignity,” instead of “modesty,” to talk about how women should dress and present themselves.

Hard conversations about purity culture are worth having, Gresh said.

However, she advised those critical of purity culture not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” or ignore the Bible’s guidelines for sexual integrity. She also cited statistics on hookup culture’s negative influence on young women’s mental health.

She said she would love to see more research on abuse in the church and on the impact of purity culture teachings and attitudes about sex.

“That is a very expensive endeavor, to do it well,” she said, “but I long for it in my heart.”

Church culture

Kathryn Keller, co-owner of Dallas Therapy Collective, specializes in religious trauma and spiritual abuse. She works with many clients who have experienced abuse in a religious environment.

Keller highlighted that abuse happens everywhere, and said many of her clients have held on to their faith despite difficult experiences in the church.

She described several cultural dynamics that can make an environment — religious or otherwise — more prone to problems with sexual violence and abuse.

Those dynamics were: disembodiment (“disconnection from one’s needs and feelings”), shame (“the belief that I am ‘bad’ and unworthy of connection”), boundaries (“the lack of understanding of what’s yours and what’s somebody else’s, and the lack of ability to claim your space in that”) and codependency (“a pattern of connecting with people through minimizing your needs and wants”).

“If I am going into a church and hearing constantly that I’m a terrible sinner, I was born bad, and I’m not trained to listen to my body and listen to my feelings, obviously, that’s going to really negatively impact my sense of self and my identity,” Keller said. She said people in that kind of environment may not know what their boundaries are or whether they’ve been violated.

Keller said those four dynamics certainly aren’t part of every church’s culture. But they’re useful warning signs.

McKinzie, from Hope Fellowship, said the past year of turmoil in D-FW churches had impressed on him the importance of honesty and transparency.

He said he hoped that fellow Christians in D-FW had learned from the last year or two that lying or withholding the truth comes back to bite you.

Truth matters, McKinzie said, and not only for a church and its congregants. “It matters,” he said, “to a world that’s watching.”

https://archive.ph/dV0kP#selection-1671.0-1671.90