FBC-Tyler: Did they tell people in the pews?

The Baptist Standard reports that Mike Massar, pastor of First Baptist Church of Tyler, will be nominated for first vice-president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas at the BGCT’s annual meeting.

First Baptist Church of Tyler is still another prominent church where my perpetrator worked. He was their children’s minister for about a decade.

Do you think Pastor Massar ever told all the people in the pews about the fact that their prior children’s minister was reported for sexually abusing a kid? Do you think Pastor Massar told people in the pews that the molestation report was substantiated by another Southern Baptist minister who attested to his knowledge of it? Do you think Pastor Massar told people in the pews that their prior children’s minister was listed in the BGCT’s secret file of clergy for whom there is “substantial evidence” of sexual abuse? I wonder.

First Baptist Church of Tyler received written notice about my perpetrator, Tommy Gilmore. They received notice from me, and nineteen months later, they also received notice from FBC-Farmers Branch, the church in which I was abused as a kid. That was something I insisted on as part of the settlement of my lawsuit -- a lawsuit I filed because it was the ONLY way I could get the church that knew about the abuse to do something to warn people.

Those letters were sent by certified mail and received by the Chairman of Deacons at FBC-Tyler in July 2004 and February 2006. So there were certainly leaders within the church who knew, and it seems likely that Pastor Massar would have known as well.

But were people in the pews ever told?

Or do you think it was handled at FBC-Tyler similarly to how it was handled at First Baptist Church of Atlanta? That's another prominent church where my perpetrator worked, and even though FBC-Atlanta received the same double-notice that FBC-Tyler received, Atlanta church leaders ran us off the property when we tried to leaflet people leaving the church. If church leaders had already informed their congregants about Gilmore, why would they care if people saw our leaflet about him?

My perpetrator sure was well-connected to ambitious men and prominent churches. At FBC-Atlanta, he worked with 2-term Southern Baptist president Charles Stanley. From there, he went to First Baptist Church of Oviedo, where he worked with former Florida Baptist Convention president Dwayne Mercer (who, incidentally, is reported to have had some other sexual harassment, abuse and misconduct allegations against his ministerial staff).

He may have even had some connection to Paige Patterson. They went to Hardin-Simmons University together. It’s a small Baptist school in Abilene, and my perpetrator was just a year or two ahead of Patterson.

It seems strange that Gilmore was so well-connected to denominational leaders, and yet when I notified the Southern Baptist Convention about him, they wrote back that they had no record of him being in ministry. Of course, it’s easy enough to delete a name from the SBC’s ministerial registry, and so perhaps it’s true that there was no existing record.

But isn’t it hard to imagine that no one in Nashville knew where he was?

And why was there no one at the SBC, at the BGCT, at FBC-Tyler, or at FBC-Atlanta who was even willing to help me track this clergy child molester?

Did they not want me to find him? Did they not care about what he did to a kid? Did they not think parents in his current church were entitled to be warned?

If your kids grew up in a church with a known child-molesting minister, wouldn't YOU want to know?

That brings me back to my initial question: Do you think Pastor Massar told people in the pews at FBC-Tyler about the fact that their prior children’s minister was known to have sexually abused a kid?

Additional Note of 10/30: I just learned that Mike Massar was a member of the Board of Trustees of East Texas Baptist University, where minister James A. Moore works as the Director of Choral Activities. That's the same Moore who knew about minister Tommy Gilmore's sexual abuse of me as a kid and who kept quiet about it for 30 years while Gilmore continued to work as children's minister in other churches, including Massar's church, First Baptist of Tyler. Not only might it have been troubling for FBC-Tyler to learn that its prior children's minister was a child molester, but perhaps it would have also been troubling for ETBU if news got out that its Choral Director kept quiet and covered up for a clergy child-molester. Are all these guys connected??? Clergy perpetrators, clergy cover-uppers, and denominational leaders -- do they all just look out for one another?

Correction: One letter to FBC-Tyler was sent by certified mail and the other by regular mail.