18 VA Southern Baptist Pastors 'Credibly Accused' Of Sex Abuse: Report

VIRGINIA — Eighteen Southern Baptist pastors in Virginia are among about 700 of the denomination’s clergy who have been “credibly accused” of sexual abuse, the church’s governing body said with the release of a secretly maintained list late Thursday.

The document dump comes after a bombshell report Sunday from an independent investigator who said the top leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention stonewalled and denigrated sexual abuse victims for two decades to protect their own reputations and remained “singularly focused on avoiding liability” for the church.

Virginia pastors on the Southern Baptist Convention’s list of “credibly accused” clergy are:

• Jason Roy Bolton, a former youth pastor at Potomac Crest Baptist Church in Woodbridge, was arrested in 2010 on charges he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl in his church. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a minor. He was sentenced to three years in jail, with all three years suspended, and two years of supervised probation. He was arrested again and charged with stalking. As of 2011, he was on the Virginia Sex Offender Registry.
• Dennis Ray Collins, a former youth minister and volunteer baseball coach at Thalia Lynn Baptist Church in Virginia Beach, was convicted in 2010 of indecent liberties with a teen that occurred in the mid-1980s at a Virginia Beach high school. He received five years confinement and 20 years probation. He is a registered sex offender in North Carolina.
• Jeremy “Jack” Ryan Duffer, a former youth pastor at Seaford Baptist Church near Newport News, was sentenced in York Circuit Court in 2010 on eight counts of aggravated sexual battery with a minor and one count of indecent acts with a child, according to Virginia court records and the Virginia State Police sex offender registry. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
• Christopher Alan Hogge, a former pastor at Battery Park Baptist Church in Isle of Wight County, pleaded guilty to 19 child pornography charges in 2017. He is serving a 16-year prison sentence.
• Clyde L. Johnson, a former pastor in Petersburg, was convicted of abusing four girls ages 9 to 16 in 1987.
• Jacob Daniel “Jake” Kepple, a former youth pastor at First Baptist Church in Charlottesville, pleaded guilty in 2016 to having sexually abused a child between 2009 and 2011. He was sentenced to five years, with 30 days suspended. He is registered as a sex offender in Virginia.
• Grover Bernard Lewis, a former pastor at Gillenwater Chapel Church in Nickelsville, was convicted on two counts of sexual battery in 2010 and sentenced to six months in jail, with all but five months and 15 days suspended.
• George O. Lowe, a former pastor at Mount Hope Baptist Church in Stafford, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2008 for each of two counts of taking indecent liberties with a minor. Half of the sentence for each conviction was suspended, leaving Lowe with a sentence of five years in prison with 10 years of probation.
• Antawn McCullum, a former youth minister at Macedonia Baptist Church in Arlington, was sentenced in 2004 for sex abuse of a teenage boy in 2002. He is listed on the Virginia sex offenders registry.
• Joshua Young Moon, a former professor at Liberty University in Lynchburg, was convicted of aggravated sexual battery in 2010 and sentenced to a 180-day jail term.
• Kenneth Larry Payne, a former pastor at New Prospect Baptist Church in Monroe, was found guilty in 2007 of indecent liberties and sodomizing a 17-year-old boy and was sentenced to five years probation, with five years of probation suspended. He died in 2017.
• Gerald Lee Porter, a former volunteer Bible school teacher at River Oak Church in Great Bridge, pleaded guilty to a federal charge of the receipt of "images of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct." None of the images involved children he knew or children from his church. He was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison in 2017.
• Hawthorne Reed Jr., a former pastor at First Baptist Church in Dublin, was found guilty in 2008 on two counts of forcible sodomy and one of aggravated sexual battery. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
• Joseph Steven Shrewsbury, a former church youth coordinator at Shady Grove Baptist Church in Thaxton, pleaded guilty in 2007 to 12 counts of taking indecent liberties with a minor, two counts of aggravated sexual battery and one count of carnal knowledge for molesting a 13-year-old boy in 2005 who came to him seeking spiritual help. He was sentenced to 20 years, with four years and six months of that time suspended.
• Daniel Louis Silverman, a former associate pastor at Heritage Baptist Church in Vinton, pleaded no contest while maintaining his innocence in 2008 regarding allegations of sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, suspended after serving 18 months, and ordered to register on the sex offender registry.
• Dean Harold Stone, a former deacon at Heritage Baptist Church in Vinton, was convicted of child molestation in 2008. He was sentenced to 48 years in prison for 12 felony sex crimes involving three young girls.
• Robert D. Tardy, a former deacon at Peace Baptist Church in Dunn Loring, was sentenced to two to 10 years in prison in 1998 for abuse against a 5-year-old boy.
• James Preston Tyndall, a former pastor at Stokesland Baptist Church in Danville, resigned and admitted to deacons that he abused a 5-year-old girl in 1994. He was charged with six felony sex crimes. He was convicted in 2000 and released in 2016.

Patch has reached out to the churches for comment, but they did not immediately respond. We'll update this story if we hear back.

The release of the names is a public repudiation of the way leaders at the nation’s largest Protestant denomination have responded to allegations of sexual abuse in the past. In doing so, the SBC’s top leaders said they’re committed to listening more attentively to survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

» Read the full list of accused clergy.

"This list is being made public for the first time as an initial, but important, step towards addressing the scourge of sexual abuse and implementing reform in the Convention," the SBC Executive Committee said in a statement on its website. "Each entry in this list reminds us of the devastation and destruction brought about by sexual abuse. Our prayer is that the survivors of these heinous acts find hope and healing, and that churches will utilize this list proactively to protect and care for the most vulnerable among us."

The denomination also released the full report of the investigation conducted by Guidepost Solutions on its handling of sexual abuse allegations. It's available on the website, too.

The denomination’s executive committee said Wednesday in a joint statement with Guidepost Solutions, which conducted the investigation, that it is creating a hotline for sexual abuse survivors that will be “an important stopgap measure” until more meaningful reform can be addressed at the SBC annual meeting in Anaheim, California, next month.

Gene Besen, the interim executive committee counsel, said in a statement after the meeting that the prompt release of the names is in the Southern Baptist Convention’s best interests.

“It’s important, it is of immediate concern to the public and to the survivor committee, and we need to do it right away,” he said.

In an interview with The New York Times, Besen said that moving quickly means that some accused pastors’ names may be redacted because the claims couldn’t be substantiated by news reports and other sources, but researchers may put them back on the list as more facts are known.

“We have become too familiar with using techniques to slow processes down,” Ed Litton, president of the SBC’s Executive Committee said, according to an account in Christianity Today of the decision to release the names of “credibly accused” pastors. “We need to be very mindful that the world is watching, and they don’t need to see business as usual … we have to do this right.”

• Related: Top Southern Baptists Stonewalled Sex Abuse Victims, Report Says

Under the “business as usual” practice, victims of sexual abuse and congregants who supported them repeatedly shared allegations of sexual abuse with top church leaders, “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling and even outright hostility” by some Executive Committee members, according to the nearly 300-page report.

“Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC's response to these reports of abuse … and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC,” the report said, continuing:

“In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its policy regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

Survivors of abuse, both congregants and seminary students, have long pressed the denomination to release the list of clergy “credibly accused” of sexual abuse. The list was maintained for about a decade by an Executive Committee staff member who turned it over to the Executive Committee’s former vice president and general counsel.

The investigator found no indication that anyone “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.