It’s 10pm; do you know where your pastor is?

This post was written by an anonymous guest blogger.

Sometimes “clergy sex abuse” looks like a priest molesting an altar boy. 

Sometimes it looks like a deacon whose “brotherly” hugs are way too tight. 

Sometimes it looks like a pastor who is sought out for counseling and takes advantage of a vulnerable person who just needed a confidante.

And sometimes, “clergy sex abuse” looks like a charming preacher who lives a double life, conveniently living in another town from his church and thus keeping secrets from his congregation for the better part of a decade. 

Had they done their due diligence when he sought a job there, they would have discovered that he had been disinvited and banned from mission trips for preying on the college girls; fired from every church job; and had finagled a non-disclosure agreement from one church where the youth group had stumbled upon porn he’d stored on his office computer. 

But they didn’t do their due diligence. They didn’t know they needed to. They simply trusted his dimpled smile and believed what they were told.

For ten years.

The deacon board had no inkling of their beloved pastor’s profane tirades over the fence at his neighbor, his mounting unpaid debts, his day drinking, his flat refusal to pay child support to his ex-wife, or how he took advantage of people during the course of his weekday job. 

And they certainly did not know about his promiscuity, including one-night stands, seeking threesomes through hookup websites, and juggling multiple girlfriends at once.

Until they received the following email. 

It’s 10pm; do you know where your pastor is?