{"id":2131,"date":"2011-05-31T06:00:04","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=2131"},"modified":"2011-05-31T06:00:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T12:00:04","slug":"innocence-stolen-justice-served-in-baptist-rape-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=2131","title":{"rendered":"Innocence Stolen, Justice Served in Baptist Rape Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can a 15 year-old girl recover her innocence, an innocence that was stolen from her\u00a0when a trusted, 39 year-old member of an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church (IFB) raped her 14 years ago?\u00a0 The short answer is she can’t.\u00a0 But, even though\u00a0Tina Anderson\u00a0had something precious stolen from her all those years ago, she can — with God’s help and the help of\u00a0family and friends\u00a0—\u00a0heal from the grievous\u00a0crime that was committed against her in 1997.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Part of that healing process occurred last week\u00a0when\u00a0Ernie Willis “was found guilty of three counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault and one count of felonious sexual assault for raping Tina Anderson twice in 1997, when she was his 15-year-old babysitter.”<\/a><\/em>\u00a0 He now faces up to 50 years in prison for\u00a0his crimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even though the jury only took one day to bring back a guilty verdict on four counts, the most ardent defenders of\u00a0Willis\u00a0and Trinity Baptist’s\u00a0former pastor, Chuck Phelps,\u00a0continue to believe that a 39 year-old married man (Willis)\u00a0having sex with\u00a0a 15 year-old was somehow consensual.\u00a0 There is a Hebrew word for that kind of thinking:\u00a0 baloney!\u00a0 I wonder how these same defenders would feel if their daughter was faced with the same set of circumstances?\u00a0 Would\u00a0they buy the defense that their 15 year-old\u00a0child\u00a0could\u00a0engage in consensual\u00a0sex with a man 24 years her senior?\u00a0 For supposed Christians to accept this defense, particularly with the facts of this case, is absurd and disgusting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They say that the wheels of justice grind slowly.\u00a0 In this case, those wheels seemed to have been purposely slowed down by the actions of Trinity’s former pastor, Chuck\u00a0Phelps.\u00a0 In fact, if one\u00a0reviews the actions and words of Rev. Phelps, both in 1997 and today, one\u00a0could reasonably conclude that Phelps abrogated his moral responsibility to help one of the “least of these” in\u00a0the congregation that he was entrusted by God to oversee.\u00a0 How he chose to\u00a0respond to\u00a0the original allegations when they\u00a0first\u00a0came to light\u00a0in 1997 is a case study\u00a0in what pastors should not do\u00a0(at least if they want to obey the law — both God’s and man’s).\u00a0 And, just so we are clear, God has instituted governments to carry out His justice (see Romans 13).\u00a0 Unless one wants to argue that New Hampshire’s rape laws somehow contradict God’s laws, then Rev. Phelps seems to have a mighty big problem!<\/p>\n

The facts of this case — which I was alerted to by a reader of From Law to Grace —<\/em>\u00a0are both\u00a0sad and outrageous.\u00a0 That a pastor of any church, much less a church where Christ is supposedly proclaimed, could take the actions that Phelps has admitted<\/strong> to taking,\u00a0is breathtaking.\u00a0 From the moment that Pastor Phelps was apprised of the situation involving Willis, an usher at Trinity Baptist Church in Concord, NH, and the 15 year-old Anderson,\u00a0he appears to have taken the absolutely bare minimum of steps to protect\u00a0the minor victim\u00a0while simultaneously taking extraordinary steps\u00a0to make this problem go away.<\/p>\n

As he was taking these steps, Phelps seems to have wrapped his decisions in a spiritual veneer,\u00a0even going so far as to use “church discipline” to deal with the\u00a0“sin” of both Willis and Anderson.\u00a0 According to Phelps, the 15 year-old pregnant teenager “voluntarily” stood before the congregation to confess her sins.\u00a0 I guess the sins would have been having sex before marriage and getting pregnant.\u00a0 At the same public gathering, Willis also confessed his sin of being unfaithful to his wife by having sex outside of marriage, but, according to church members, “the confessions were presented as separate issues and there was no suggestion that Willis was the father of Anderson’s baby.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/em> <\/a>Can we say in our best Church Lady voice, “How convenient.”<\/p>\n

I believe that Biblical church discipline is a still-relevant principle that Jesus Christ instructed the church to practice (see Matthew 18).\u00a0 However, I do not believe that what happened in Tina Anderson’s case is what Jesus meant.\u00a0 And, in no event can a\u00a0system of\u00a0“church discipline” circumvent the criminal justice system in the case where there is reason to believe that a minor child has been sexually abused by an adult, in this case a member and leader within the church.\u00a0 Furthermore, I’m not sure how “voluntarily” young Tina Anderson stood before the members of Trinity Baptist Church to confess that she was guilty of having sex before marriage.\u00a0 I suppose that those who think this type of confession was voluntary are the same kind of people who think that this 15 year-old girl could voluntarily consent to have sex with a man twice her age.<\/p>\n

Not only was Biblical church discipline abused in this case, but the moral, ethical, and legal obligations to a young victim of an alleged\u00a0(at the time) crime were apparently\u00a0abused by the undershepherd\u00a0of the church that this teenage girl was attending.\u00a0 The local police\u00a0apparently were investigating this case when it occurred, but “were unable to find Anderson and closed the investigation.”\u00a0 <\/em>Could Pastor Phelps have helped the police with the investigation?\u00a0 He could have, but he must have had different thoughts at the time.<\/p>\n

In actions which would further slow the wheels of justice in this case, the pastor and Ms. Anderson’s own mother\u00a0arranged for Tina to be sent to live with another IFB\u00a0family in Colorado:<\/p>\n

In his testimony this week, Phelps said he did not notify police that Anderson was leaving the state for Colorado but added, “I didn’t whisk her away…I’ve been thrown under the bus on this thing.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Was this an anonymous family?\u00a0 Did Pastor Phelps or anyone else at Trinity know the name, address and phone number of the family that Tina Anderson was shipped away to live with?\u00a0 And, to try to use some kind of clergy\/parishioner privilege to withhold information relating to the sexual assault of a minor will not fly.\u00a0 The judge in the case\u00a0admitted Pastor Phelps contemporaneous notes into evidence in the Willis case.\u00a0 In most jurisdictions today, clergy (be they Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, etc.) have no privilege to withhold vital information when they\u00a0know or have reason to know that a minor is being abused (physically and\/or sexually).\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Pastor Phelps to now feign injury at being thrown under the bus should bring him no sympathy whatsoever.\u00a0 No one threw him under the bus.\u00a0 By his own foolish actions, Pastor Phelps — both then and now — has thrown himself under the bus.\u00a0 For whatever happens to him, both in terms of obstruction of justice (which could be a distinct possibility if it was proven that he withheld information from the police which would have aided in their original investigation) and divine justice, will have been earned on his own merit (or demerit as the case maybe).<\/p>\n

There are really no winners in this sad tale of a sexual predator using the influence of the church to steal the innocence of a young girl and of the powerful pastor attempting to\u00a0make\u00a0it all go away by perverting the laws of God and man.\u00a0\u00a0Justice\u00a0came slowly for Tina Anderson, but come it did.\u00a0 For those who\u00a0continue to make excuses and stand behind half-truths and lies, justice may not come\u00a0this side of heaven.\u00a0 But, justice will be served someday!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How can a 15 year-old girl recover her innocence, an innocence that was stolen from her\u00a0when a trusted, 39 year-old member of an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church (IFB) raped her 14 years ago?\u00a0 The short answer is she can’t.\u00a0 But, even though\u00a0Tina Anderson\u00a0had something precious stolen from her all those years ago, she can —…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,30,35],"tags":[121,227,232,246,265,353,507,517,576,3389,710,894,988,1000,1042],"class_list":["post-2131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-law","category-religion","tag-baptist-rape-case","tag-chuch-phelps","tag-church-predator","tag-concord","tag-criminal-justice","tag-ernie-willis","tag-ifb","tag-independent-fundamental-baptists","tag-justice","tag-law","tag-new-hampshire","tag-sexual-abuse","tag-tina-anderson","tag-trinity-baptist-church","tag-wheels-of-justice"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-yn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}