Malignant people target nice church people. Nice church people are willing to forgive and overlook a lot of stuff. Church is one of the places where you most need to be on guard because in amongst the good people are many evil people who are specifically there to target the naive.
Yep. Exactly why is is good to ask a lot of questions of new people who show up at church. The same would go for a VFD or any other community organization which tends to attract good people.
Thank you all for your wise words and encouragement. The last time people raised concerns our pastor cried at the pulpit at how hard we make things, reminded us that “such were some of you.”. He used to not reveal anything about the crimes until it blew up when a member did some research and found we had the most dangerous sex offender in the county (out on a technicality) in our congregation. We sat with him, he interacted with our kids and we had no idea. Pastor was completely fooled until someone convinced him to look at the guy’s records-he realized what a con artist the guy was.