ST. LOUIS (MO)
The Kansas City Star
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
08/01/2014
ST. LOUIS
A minister is taking his own denomination to task, claiming in a lawsuit that the Presbyterian Church was partly responsible for sexual abuse he suffered as a teenager.
The Rev. Kris Schondelmeyer, a youth minister in Toledo, Ohio, is seeking unspecified damages in a lawsuit he filed against the Louisville, Ky.-based Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); First Presbyterian Church of Fulton, Mo.; the Missouri Union Presbytery in Jefferson City; and his alleged abuser, Jack Wayne Rogers.
Schondelmeyer, 31, a native of Sedalia, Mo., said he was sexually abused at a youth conference in 2000 in Maryland. At the time, Rogers was a lay pastor in Montgomery County, Mo. The lawsuit alleges Presbyterian officials allowed Rogers to work as a chaperone despite Rogers’ 1992 conviction for child pornography.
An attorney for the denomination declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
Rogers, 69, has a long criminal history.
In 2004 he pleaded guilty in Missouri for practicing medicine without a license and assault for cutting off a man’s penis at a hotel in Columbia as part of a makeshift gender reassignment surgery. That same year he was convicted of federal child pornography and obscenity charges.
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