Around Dallas, the Church Scandals Seem to Have No End

On a Sunday morning, the pastor of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, took the stage with his wife to reassure their congregation.

“Lisa is the only woman I’ve ever been with, and I’m the only man she’s ever been with — and I say ‘been with’ in a biblical sense,” said Ed Young, who founded the church in the late 1980s.

About 4,000 people were in the room, with thousands more watching online. The pastor added, “We don’t have to worry about any sexual skeletons in our closet coming from the past.”

In normal circumstances, it was the kind of claim that many churchgoers would hope went without saying. But in the Fort Worth area this year, a pastor with a clean reputation is not to be taken for granted.

The Youngs’ joint sermon came in late June, days after Robert Morris, the founder of the nearby Gateway Church, resigned as senior pastor after being accused of sexually abusing a child in the 1980s.

The week before, another local pastor with a national profile, Tony Evans, shocked many evangelicals by stepping away from the pulpit over an undisclosed “sin.”

Gateway is one of the largest churches in the metro area, which is known for its many and mammoth-size congregations. Mr. Evans’s predominantly Black church in South Dallas, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, claims a membership of about 10,000 people.

The drumbeat of downfalls, surprise departures and even arrests continued all summer and into the fall. An associate pastor at Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco (3,700 attendees) was fired in July for a “moral failure.” The lead pastor of Cross Timbers Church in Argyle (5,000 attendees) resigned over “inappropriate and hurtful” actions.

Another local pastor with a national profile, Steven J. Lawson, fell in mid-September, when leaders of Trinity Bible Church of Dallas announced that they had removed him over an “inappropriate relationship that he has had with a woman.” A running list of local pastors “involved in controversies this year” maintained by the local television station WFAA now contains 17 names, including five involving criminal charges. This week, a leader at Revival City Church in McKinney was arrested on a domestic violence charge.

“It’s like the unbuckling of the Bible Belt,” Mr. Young said in an interview last week.

There’s no clear pattern to the scandals, which range widely. The churches are all Protestant but belong to different denominations — or none at all — and have different theological beliefs and worship styles.

But the cumulative impact has been unsettling for many Christians and their leaders in Dallas, a city that the magazine Christianity Today once declared “the new capital of evangelicalism.”

“People are trying to uncover the ‘why,’” said Mary DeMuth, an evangelical author who lives in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall.

The Dallas-Fort Worth region is home to more than 6,500 houses of worship, the highest concentration in the top 10 largest urban regions in the country, according to the 2020 U.S. religion census. Four of the 20 largest churches in the country are in the area.

It’s a place where one might overhear intense prayers at coffee shops, where weekday Bible studies can draw hundreds of people and where celebrity pastors loom large — literally — on billboards along the highway. One popular downtown church advises visitors to start waiting in line up to two hours before its Sunday service.

At Gateway, the revelations unfolded over time. Mr. Morris, a onetime faith adviser in President Donald J. Trump’s administration, had disclosed a “moral failure” decades ago to elders at his previous church and even referred to it obliquely from the pulpit, though he never offered specifics publicly.

This summer, a woman named Cindy Clemishire came forward and said Mr. Morris began abusing her when she was 12 and he was a married pastor. The abuse continued over the course of five years in the 1980s, she said.

After her account became public, Mr. Morris confessed in June to “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady.” The backlash to his characterization of child sexual abuse as “inappropriate” and his adolescent victim as a “young lady” was immediate. He resigned days later; his son James, who had been named as his successor, also left the church, along with a founding elder.

The church, which did not describe the offense as the sexual abuse of a child until later in the summer, has suffered some consequences. A spokesman, Lawrence Swicegood, said the church now drew about 19,500 people a week, a decline of nearly 25 percent from earlier this year.

In an interview this week, Ms. Clemishire said she wished Gateway would more clearly name Mr. Morris’s actions as criminal and provide more avenues for people in the church to report abuse by leaders.

But she said she was encouraged by Mr. Morris’s departure and by the other ousters in the region.

“I honestly feel like people are taking it more seriously than they ever have, finally,” she said.

In a statement to The New York Times this week, Mr. Swicegood said the church was committed to protecting, “first and foremost, children and the most vulnerable.”

Some evangelicals have proposed a revival of “the Billy Graham rule,” or the principle that a man should never be alone with a woman who is not his wife. Critics point out that it effectively prevents women from advancing in organizations led by men. The “rule” was one of several guidelines developed by Mr. Graham’s team in the 1940s, as the evangelist’s profile was rising — a fortress against the temptations of pride, lust and frequent travel.

Larry Ross, who has headed an eponymous public relations firm in Dallas for 40 years, represented Mr. Graham for decades.

Accountability is crucial in preventing and responding to failures, Mr. Ross said, but so is perspective.

A faithful, clean-living pastor is like an airplane taking off or landing successfully at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Mr. Ross said, recalling a similar insight from Mr. Graham. It happens thousands of times a day, and no one notices. “But if any one of them crashes, it’s going to be on the news,” he said.

Others observed that many of the affected churches were essentially accountable only to their own members, with little, if any, external denominational oversight.

When independently governed churches grow large enough, true accountability is almost impossible, said George Mason, who retired in 2022 as pastor of a prominent, progressive Baptist church in Dallas after more than 30 years.

Because an independent church’s popularity and growth depend largely on a single charismatic man, his downfall would bring not just institutional embarrassment, but a threat to employee livelihoods and, as some see it, to the salvation of perhaps thousands of people.

In that sense, “it is a systemic thing,” Mr. Mason said.

For some pastors, the outbreak is a nudge to humility, especially given the previously sterling reputations of several men in the headlines this year.

“Stories like this remind me to be watchful about my own life,” said Bart Barber, a pastor in Farmersville, Texas, about an hour northeast of Dallas.

“I want to get on and say, ‘It’s terrible, a true pastor should never do that!’” said Mr. Barber, the previous president of the Southern Baptist Convention. “Then I think, ‘What would Steve Lawson have said in an interview five years ago?’ Probably something very similar,” he said, referring to the pastor who resigned at Trinity Bible Church of Dallas.

Ms. DeMuth, the writer, sees the exposures as a positive thing, a downstream effect of the #MeToo movement and a rising appetite for transparency in church circles. It’s “God cleaning house and saying, ‘Enough of this tomfoolery,’” she said.