a real Romeo...
Posted on 08/27/2007 2:33:24 PM PDT by Santa Fe_Conservative
ROMEOVILLE, Ill. (ABP) – Despite warnings from a denominational official as well as another church, a Southern Baptist congregation near Chicago allowed a convicted child molester to preach for years.
In the end, it took media inquiries for Jeffrey Hannah, 42, to relinquish his leadership positions at, and resign as a member of, First Baptist Church of Romeoville, Ill.
The news about Hannah comes at a time when the Southern Baptist Convention is under heightened scrutiny about its role to protect children from sexual predators in the ministry. Unlike in more hierarchical denominations, Southern Baptist congregations have had few methods for vetting potential ministerial candidates. Many have unwittingly employed convicted sex offenders to work with children and youth.
“Clergy child molesters use their position of spiritual trust as a weapon. No matter how remorseful they may seem, that weapon should never again be placed in their hands,” according to Christa Brown, Baptist outreach director with Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and founder of StopBaptistPredators.org. “They cannot be allowed back in the pulpit. It's a faulty forgiveness theology that would require kids to serve as the litmus test for finding out whether a child molester’s remorse is genuine.”
Hannah, by all accounts a charming and charismatic man, joined the Romeoville congregation shortly after his release from Graham Correctional Center in Hillsboro, Ill., in January 2001. He began preaching that same year, not long after the church’s pastor resigned. He continued to do so for at least three years and also served as a worship leader and adult Sunday school teacher.
He had served his sentence for pleading guilty in September 1996 to four counts of criminal sexual assault involving teenage girls. His plea-bargain agreement involved dropping several other counts
(Excerpt) Read more at abpnews.com ...
All flights to Chicago are fully booked now....as ambulance-chasers are headed for the Windy City to line up to chase the Church’s deep pockets.
Good luck finding deep pockets in a Baptist Church. Some of them are well funded while many others scrape by month to month.
Your definition of deep pockets and my definition may differ. I’m not sure that sueing a church with a weekly attendance of 48 is going to make anyone rich. And given that half the congregation has apparently voted with their feet over the last few years, it doesn’t appear that the pastor was universally loved.
One would think that the only institutions in this country that knowingly put sex perverts in positions of authority over minors are churches.
Do those types actually fly commercial?
I find it strange that right across from this headline is the one about Southern Baptist taking their kids out of public schools!
Is part of the problem the way that girls look and dress now days? I have four nieces and everyone of them looked like they were 18 when they were 12 or so.
Another thing, my wife and I used to be members of a large Southern Baptist church and sang in the choir. I swear that the dresses that some of those girls wore to church were unreal. If they sat on the front row of pews, you could see their panties if you were sitting in the choir loft. The minister of music even told the parents, or so my wife told me, that they need to watch how their daughters dressed for church.
Sad.
Well it is the one that claims it cares more about protecting children than anyone else.
a real Romeo...
Well it is the one that is reported on everytime one of its minions steps out of line, that's for sure.
Do you think it's the only one? Or might there be others that reporters choose not report on.
At least by those over the age of consent.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1622466/posts
http://www.bnd.com/editorial/story/109074.html
just a couple more god fearing men who like to abuse children
What you didn't put up; I suspect not because it isn't happening, but because it isn't reported, is stories of perverts that choose institutions other than churches to ply their sick habits. And that's my point.
I work with youth and too many of them dress like streetwalkers. I gross them out by telling them that old men are lusting after them. I’m honestly shocked at the parents that let their daughter walk around like that. I won’t let my daughter walk around the house like that.
No. A pervert is “a little setback”
http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=8088
“When you hit a bump in the road—the pastor has mentioned six months here of challenges—forget the bump in the road. That’s all it is. You’ve got to move on,” Falwell said in a keynote address of a three-day meeting of the Southwide Baptist Fellowship at Trinity Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla.
Robert Gray, the former 30-year pastor who led the church out of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1960s, was arrested in May. He is scheduled to stand trial Nov. 27 on two counts of capital sexual battery, because two of his accusers say he molested them when they were 6 years old.
Twenty-two people, including one man, have come forward since May to accuse Gray of abusing them. The other allegations involve children older than 12, meaning they cannot be prosecuted due to a statute of limitations.
I am all for forgiveness, but you better damned well believe that I’d find a way for him to serve in such a way that he never was in a position of power over children.
Pushing papers in some back office somewhere always needs to get done.
Sometimes I think young people, especially girls, really don’t know just how lustful most the male adult population is. They have no idea of the power their sex and their bodies have over the opposite sex. That’s what gets so many of them in trouble. I know it’s not PC to say they “were asking for it” but that’s how many males see it. I don’t buy the “asking for it” but darned if I would walk among starving people carrying a big old plate of food right out in the open. And the sex drive in some men is much more powerful than the the drive to eat.
Guess I’m opening myself up to a lot of flaming here, but that’s been my observation over the years. In any case it’s unfair for anyone who has something someone else wants to flaunt it and make it a point of impressing on them just how powerless then are to get it.
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