Loss of Appeal Will Not Hinder Church-planting Efforts, Official Said

By Barbara Denman
Daily Commercial
March 22, 2014

http://www.dailycommercial.com/life/article_bf5bb26d-0663-5d30-b465-2b3caa76ac57.html

Photo courtesy of Florida Baptist Witness

Regardless of the outcome of its appeal of a $12.5 million award to a man sexually abused in Lake County by a minister convicted of molestation in 2007, the Florida Baptist Convention will continue to plant new churches, one official said.

During a recent meeting at the Lake Yale Baptist Conference Center in Leesburg, the State Board of Missions heard about a new church being planted in Miami. Gary Yeldell, the convention’s attorney of record, also brought the board up to date about the jury award appeal.

The words of a child brought a personal perspective to the new Miami church when 5-year-old Jackson Allen took the microphone.

“We moved to Miami to tell people about Jesus,” the youngster told the board, “by planting a church called Christ Centered Church.”

Jackson, his father Derek, mother Lindsay and siblings Meredith, 3, and Sawyer, 10 months, shared their testimonies of how God called them from a church in Alabama to start a church in Miami, despite knowing no one there and little about the city.

On Feb. 9, the Allen family launched C2 Church on the north campus of Florida International University after having visited hundreds of homes and making 75,000 contacts.

The Florida Baptist Convention’s Urban Impact Center staff in Hialeah supported Derek Allen in his efforts along the way and provided accommodations for mission teams to help plant the church, he added.

The Allens were invited to the meeting by Al Fernandez, lead strategist of the convention’s Church Planting Group, who also introduced the church-planting team, a collection of “great diversity,” he explained. The staff included five Hispanics, two Haitians, an African, an African-American and three Anglos, he said, “representing one of the best church-planting teams in the nation.”

In other business, board members heard from Yeldell about the convention being found negligent in a sexual abuse lawsuit involving a pastor who helped start two mission churches in Lake County. A jury awarded $12.5 million to the plaintiff, a then 13-year-old boy now in his 20s and attending college, despite the jury conceding that the pastor — Douglas Myers — was never an employee of the convention.

Yeldell expressed confidence that “the appellant court will overturn the jury’s verdict,” he said, “based on the jury’s express findings (Myers) was an independent pastor who was not hired, employed or supervised by the convention.”

Myers helped start two now-defunct churches in Lake County — the Triangle Community Church in Eustis and the Harbor Baptist Fellowship in Howey-in-the-Hills. Myers admitted to molesting the boy repeatedly over a six-month period ending in 2005, was sent to prison in 2007 for molesting the boy and was released in December 2012 after serving five years. A registered sexual offender, he currently lives in Prince Frederick, Md., according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Both the victim and his mother sued the convention, claiming it failed to uncover past allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior at other churches where Myers served.

John Sullivan, convention executive director-treasurer, assured the board that “regardless of the outcome of the trial and appeal to come, we cannot let this case hinder our efforts to support church-planting efforts in our state.”

Citing the example of the Allens’ commitment to plant new churches, Sullivan, calling the family a “breath of fresh air,” emphasized, “we are not going to stop doing the right thing just because of this lawsuit.”

Denman writes for the Florida Baptist Witness, where this story first appeared. The Daily Commercial staff contributed material to this report.