UNITED STATES
Stop Baptist Predators
Christa Brown
Jack Graham will be a featured speaker at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual Pastors’ Conference on June 9 in Houston. His topic? Leadership.
So . . . let’s talk a little about the kind of leadership that Jack Graham has shown.
Graham is the senior pastor at the 32,000-member Prestonwood Baptist megachurch in Plano, Texas. It’s a church that has been mired in a clergy child molestation cover-up scandal that just won’t go away – mainly because the church leadership just keeps digging itself deeper.
For example, last March, Prestonwood officials called the cops on a church member who dared to ask questions about the widely-reported cover-up – an act that only made church leadership look like bullies. And Graham himself refused to comment back in 2011 when WFAA-News first reported the scandal – a refusal that only served to raise more questions. Two years later, with the cover-up scandal still in the news, Graham tried to use Jesus to justify his continued silence on the alleged cover-up – a justification that looked like nothing more than an evasive “cop-out.”
So this is the kind of leadership that Jack Graham has shown. It’s the kind of leadership that declines any transparency and that acts as though it’s above accountability. More importantly, it’s the kind of leadership that raises disturbing questions about whether church image and crony protection were given priority over kids’ safety – and about whether church leadership violated the law in failing to report to the police information about suspected child sex abuse.
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