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| Jack Schaap delivering his "Polishing the Shaft" sermon at the church's 2010 Youth Conference. See video of the sermon. |
On March 20th, Jack Schaap, the
prior pastor of the 15,000 member First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana, was
sentenced to 12 years in prison for sexual abuse of an
underage girl whom he had been counseling.
More than 100 letters of
support were sent to the judge before the sentencing hearing. As reported in
the Chicago Tribune, the
letters attested to Schaap’s “decades of good works” and claimed that “stress
and health problems, including prostate troubles” had led him “to stray.”
Schaap’s wife described her
husband’s “affair” with the girl as “consensual” and said that her husband was
suffering from “a severe case of prostatitis.” She asked that the judge grant
leniency in her husband’s sentencing.
And though the pastor still
had plenty of supporters, the church was apparently not so supportive of the
girl. After the scandal broke, she was expelled from Hammond Baptist High
School and her family expelled from the church.
The evidence against Schaap
was overwhelming. Prosecutors pointed to nearly 700 text messages, phone calls
and letters along with photographs on the pastor’s computer.
“In a statement, the victim
wrote that Schaap would text her from the altar during his sermons. In another
statement, written as a letter to Schaap, she wrote: ‘When you first kissed me
I was shocked. . . When I asked you if it was wrong, you said ‘No.’ You told me
that I was sent you from God, I was a gift to you.”
Like so many other clergy
perpetrators, this is a pastor who essentially used God as a weapon to sexually
abuse a kid.
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| Nine of the offenders with ties to First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana: from top left: (first row) A. V. Ballenger, Christopher Settlemoir, Chester Mulligan; (second row) William Beith, Jack Schaap, Tedd Butler; (third row) Joseph Combs, Craig Sisson, Russell Overla (Chicago Magazine photo) |
But lest you start thinking
that Schaap was just a rogue “bad apple” sort of Baptist pastor, consider the
dreadful history of First Baptist Church of Hammond – a history that was
recently detailed in a feature article in Chicago Magazine called
“Let Us Prey.” Schaap’s conviction is simply the latest in “a string of
assaults and sexual crimes committed by pastors across the country” who all
“have one thing in common:” they all have ties to the First Baptist Church in
Hammond, Indiana.
“According to dozens of current and
former church members, religion experts, and historians . . . plus a review of
thousands of pages of court documents,” Schaap is part of what some call “a
deeply embedded culture of misogyny and sexual and physical abuse” at the
church. “Multiple websites tracking the First Baptist Church of Hammond have
identified more than a dozen men with ties to the church – many of whom
graduated from its college, Hyles-Anderson, or its annual Pastors’ Schools –
who fanned out around the country, preaching at their own churches and racking
of a string of arrests and civil lawsuits, including physical abuse of minors,
sexual molestation, and rape.”
It is a culture that many say is "enabled by cover-ups and cultlike control."
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