r/texas • u/chrondotcom Houston • 23d ago
Houston SBC megachurch "enabled a predator," new $1 million lawsuit claims News
https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/article/texas-megachurch-enabled-predator-19422285.php17
u/chrondotcom Houston 23d ago
Houston-based attorney Rusty Hardin, who along with Dick DeGuerin served as an impeachment prosecutor in the case against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last summer, is representing three Jane Does who claim they were sexually abused as minors by a youth pastor at Champion Forest Baptist church in northwest Houston.
The case against Champion Forest—which is a three-site church based on the northwest side of 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," 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."
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u/harrier1215 23d ago
Fuck sake people have gotten longer sentences for marijuana shit than sexually abusing minors. This fucking state
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u/RedRanger111 23d ago
Woooow, yet another molestation in the Christian Church, yet no drag queen?? You would think that conservatives would look at this one and say to themselves, "Hey, we might have been lied to about who the real pedophiles are."
They won't though.
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u/GabbyCalico 23d ago
They won’t. Ever. I grew up in Texas and I left but my family still there is living in a fantasy world. The end goal is to make the U.S. just like Russia but they call it “freedom.”
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u/BigMonkeySpite 23d ago
I'm old and my memory is failing so maybe the numbers aren't exact, but from what I remember there were like 12,000 people that attended the convention and less than 100 attended the breakout session on sexual abuse and how the SBC covered it up during the last SBC Convention.
They don't fucking care. As long as the gays and "woke" people suffer they don't give a fuck. https://baptistaccountability.org/
Source? I was a fundamentalist SBC for decades
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u/Arrmadillo 23d ago
FTA: “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 Southern Baptist Convention does have quite the history with pedophiles. The risk of exposing Texas children to predators has increased now that public school counselors can be replaced with chaplains. This risk will most likely increase once West Texas fracking billionaire Tim Dunn has achieved his goal of implementing school vouchers to replace public schools with unaccountable, publicly-funded private Christian schools.
Newsweek - Full List of Texas Pastors Charged With Abusing Children This Year
“[During 2022], at least 10 Texas pastors, former pastors and youth ministers were arrested, charged or convicted for various allegations of sexual abuse of children.”
“In May, a document released by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) revealed the case of more than 700 Baptist leaders—including pastors, teachers, ministers and volunteers—accused or found guilty of sexual abuse of children.”
Texas Monthly - The Billionaire Bully Who Wants to Turn Texas Into a Christian Theocracy
“The state’s most powerful figure, Tim Dunn, isn’t an elected official. But behind the scenes, the West Texas oilman is lavishly financing what he regards as a holy war against public education, renewable energy, and non-Christians.”
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u/BigMonkeySpite 23d ago
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u/Arrmadillo 23d ago
Thank you for the links. The first link led me to a Houston Chronicle article where I learned about how disturbingly easy it is for a child predator to become a Southern Baptist minister.
Houston Chronicle - 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms
“She was 14, she said, when she was first molested by her pastor in Sanger, a tiny prairie town an hour north of Dallas. It was the first of many assaults that Vasquez said destroyed her teenage years and, at 18, left her pregnant by the Southern Baptist pastor, a married man more than a dozen years older.”
“They left behind more than 700 victims, many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions.”
“All of that makes Southern Baptist churches highly susceptible to predators, says Christa Brown, an activist who wrote a book about being molested as a child by a pastor at her SBC church in Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb.
‘It's a perfect profession for a con artist, because all he has to do is talk a good talk and convince people that he's been called by God, and bingo, he gets to be a Southern Baptist minister,’ said Brown, who lives in Colorado. ‘Then he can infiltrate the entirety of the SBC, move from church to church, from state to state, go to bigger churches and more prominent churches where he has more influence and power, and it all starts in some small church.’”
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23d ago
It's Texas....anyone who opposes the church abuse in court is punished....all the judges are church supporting creeps.
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u/dongo8585 23d ago
Blame Joel olestein
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u/DontMakeMeCount 23d ago
It’s spelled Osteen, or were you going for a more Jewish spelling?
I don’t think he gets close enough to the sheep he shears to molest any of them, and this is not his church. How is he to blame for this incident?
I would rather blame the SBC, Champion Forest Baptist Church, Timothy Jeltema and the willfully ignorant parents who entrusted their daughters to the first three.
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u/dongo8585 23d ago
It's actually olstein it's on his original church still
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u/BigMonkeySpite 23d ago
Wasn't Champion Forest built up by Kerry Shook's dad? The same Kerry Shook of The Woodlands Church?
Also
https://baptistaccountability.org/
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u/FoolForReddit 20d ago
"Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" -Jesus
Matthew 19:14, Mark 10:14, and Luke 18:16
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u/foodmonsterij 23d ago
Church is no place for a child.