UK Baptist pastor faces up to 80 years in prison

Christa Brown writes about the case of Robert Dando:

• Dando was very closely connected to the highest levels of Baptists’ worldwide leadership. He previously served as executive assistant to the president of the Baptist World Alliance. This was a guy who ran with the big dogs.
• Dando “was embroiled in another child sex abuse scandal when he was a minister at Orchard Baptist Fellowship” in the United Kingdom. In 2001, when the leader of the church, Dr. Anthony Gray, was convicted of serious sex offenses against a 14-year-old boy, Dando said this: “All our youth work is carried out within proper guidelines.” Yet, we now know that Dando too was sexually abusing kids, and had been since at least as far back as 1995. (Do these guys run in packs?)
• At the time of his arrest, Dando was the prominent senior minister of Worcester Park Baptist Church in suburban London.
• Dando pled guilty to repeatedly abusing 2 boys in Virginia, starting when they were 7 and 8 years old. Virginia prosecutors said that, under questioning, Dando also admitted to sexually abusing boys in the United Kingdom.
• Dando had plenty of access to kids. His wife was a national vice-president of the Boys’ Brigade, a Christian youth organization with more than 500,000 members in 60 countries. Dando also worked for a children’s charity in India.
• Dando previously worked as a magistrate on a family court panel, which dealt with child care and child access proceedings.

Update: Dando target of UK investigation

Claire Fox of the Guardian writes:

A Baptist minister who admitted abusing children in the US faces a British police investigation after confessing to similar offences.

Reverend Robert Dando, 46, a senior minister at Worcester Park Baptist Church, pleaded guilty in Fairfax, Virginia, to four counts of sexually molesting the two young sons of family friends.

Dando sexually abused the boys between 1995 and 1999, from the ages of seven and eight.

Officials told Fairfax County Circuit Court one of the victims said Dando molested him by touching his genitals on 50 to 60 different occasions.

Fairfax County prosecutors have also revealed Dando admitted under questioning to touching young boys in the United Kingdom in a similar way.

Associate pastor barred from church pending resolution of sexual misconduct charges

Emerald Baptist Church Associate Pastor and Minister of Music Norman Henley Keesee has been barred from church activities and the church grounds pending resolution of charges of sexual misconduct and lewd acts.

Keesee, a Southern Baptist, was arrested by Greenwood, S.C., police after "the mother of a 13 year old girl and attendee of Emerald Baptist Church met with authorities to alert them to allegations made by her daughter."

According to GWD Today:

The victim stated that during private keyboard lessons conducted in the victims bedroom, Keesee would touch areas of her body that were not conducive with the lesson. The victim said that she would pull away from Keesee but that he would continue his actions during the lesson. According to the mother, Keesee had given her daughter keyboard lessons from February to July of this year. The victim had told her mother at the end of July that she no longer wanted to play the keyboard, which according to the mother was very strange at the time. The victim also gave a second child's name with which Keesee had given keyboard lessons.

Associated Baptist Press reports that Pastor Curtis Eidson said:

As the pastor of the church, I am not here tonight to defend anyone's innocence nor to declare anyone's guilt. It's not my place. I am here to say tonight, though, that with all that is going on Norman is still my brother in the Lord and the victim is still my sister in the Lord. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change that.

North Carolina youth minister arrested

Thomas L. Elliott, who is a youth minister at Autryville Baptist Church in North Carolina, was arrested in an undercover internet sex sting by the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office Thursday evening, the Sampson Independent reported.

Elliot was a volunteer youth minister at Evergreen Baptist Church before being hired at Autryville Baptist.

[Cross posted at BaptistPlanet.wordpress.com]

Finland still refusing to extradite Baptist minister accused of genocide

The case of a Rwandan Baptist minister accused of genocide took a disturbing turn today when his defense argued that police tortured witnesses to extract evidence against him.

According to YLE:

The 57-year-old suspect sought political asylum in Finland in 2003. The man was arrested in 2007 on suspicion of planning, leading and implementing massacres. Suspicions were aroused in connection with a background study during the consideration of his asylum application.

Finland stands by its refusal to extradite the individual to Rwanda. He is in custody, however. Finland's National Bureau of Investigation expects to have its inquiry completed by summer. An extension of tomorrow's deadline for filing charges has been requested.

Austrian prisons (and ours)

The Quakers who first devised American penitentiaries tried (and failed) to create the conditions for criminal repentance, reform and restitution to society as good citizens.

Austria has similar goals and an entirely different approach, as the sentencing of Josef Fritzl revealed to us all this week.

The London Times reports:

“The Austrian penal system aims not only at enforcing punishment, but also attempts to bring the inmate back within the norms of society,” said a spokesman for Austrian prisons last week when asked whether it was right that Fritzl should enjoy such a lax regime.

The man who was jailed last week for murder, rape, enslavement, coercion and incest after locking his daughter in his cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children by her (six of whom survived):

. . . will be able to improve his English or study other foreign languages, as well as singing in the choir or training in a gym that is better-equipped than those of many hotels. As an inmate, he will be offered a wide variety of hobbies and entertainment, including tennis, darts and art classes.

Your thoughts?

Honoring Christian sanctuary, humanity and immigration

It was within the law to require Jose Juan Hernandez to leave church one Sunday in Texas to be arrested on suspicion of illegal re-entry after deportation. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was performing his sworn duty.

Yet such an arrest, unless to safeguard public safety, unnecessarily disregards the socially constructive tradition of churches as a place of both real and spiritual sanctuary.

Seven denominations have signed a Church World Service (CWS) letter [.pdf] of concern about the arrest to President Obama.

The letter makes three, reasonable requests:

First, make public the current “informal” ICE guidelines that have allowed agents to make arrests at churches under specific circumstances. These guidelines have been kept secret and thus have created fear among immigrants and the faith communities that serve them.

Second, revise these guidelines to prohibit the arrests of undocumented persons in churches and schools unless there is a direct and clear threat to community safety.

And third, work with Congress to pass immigration reform that unites families, provides a pathway for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status and eventual citizenship, and respects the God-given dignity of all persons.

While honoring and enforcing the law, let us not forget that we are fundamentally a nation of immigrants.

Despite the complex balances required by immigration law, do we not believe and wish to honor the promise inscribed on that iconic statue:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Is it not the door that has made us strong?

Reluctant to diagnose Lyme Disease?

Disturbing twists occur in the debate over how Terry Joe Sedlacek's behavior was affected by his Lyme Disease. Sedlacek is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Pastor Fred Winters at First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois and has apparently Lyme-Disease-related brain damage and behavior problems.

"There are a lot of physicians who are reluctant to diagnose Lyme disease," said Dr. Daniel Cameron, president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. "They don't want to get involved in something that has psychiatric and medical issues."

Our religion and the beheading in Buffalo

Susan Jacoby -- responding to the beheading 37-year-old mother-of-two Aasiya Hassan by her husband -- issues a call to conscience:

Of course there is a general relationship between patriarchal religion and domestic violence, and the more rigid and traditional the form of patriarchal religion, the stronger the relationship. Whether this particular murder by beheading in Buffalo was an "ordinary" instance of domestic violence or whether the Pakistani-born Muslim husband was animated by a sense of entitlement derived from his interpretation of Islam, or by his upbringing in a society in which "honor killings" are often winked at by law enforcement authorities, I do not know. [ . . . ] But the official skittishness and media evasions surrounding this case are part of the grand American tradition of pretending that religion has only good effects on individuals and society.

Read her honest, complex and disturbing piece here.