A blog recounting the alleged sexual abuse of a woman when she was 12-years-old by Gateway Church Pastor Robert Morris has prompted the Texas-based megachurch to acknowledge decades-old “moral failure.” However, in a statement to staff, the church did not note the age of the woman at the time of the “inappropriate sexual behavior,” referring to her simply as a “young lady.”
Gateway Church was founded in 2000 by Morris and has more than 100,000 people attending each weekend at their nine sites and online.
On Friday morning, The Wartburg Watch published a story, alleging that Pastor Morris had sexually abused Cindy Clemishire, a 54—year-old grandmother of three from Oklahoma, beginning in 1982, when she was 12.
Around 4 p.m. yesterday, Executive Lead Pastor Thomas Miller sent a statement from Gateway’s elders to church staff via the messaging platform Slack, according to sources close to the church. Those sources also provided The Roys Report (TRR) with a screenshot of the message from Miller and the elders’ statement.
In the statement, Morris admitted that “in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying.” Morris described the behavior as “petting and not intercourse” and said it happened “on several occasions over the next few years.”
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