When Giants Fall

The last two weeks have been tumultuous for evangelical churchgoers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, to say the least. Two of the most revered megachurch leaders, Pastor Robert Morris of Gateway Church and Pastor Tony Evans of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, both stepped down after revelations of sin. While Evans’ confession of an unspecified sin “a number of years ago” was cloaked in vagueness, Morris’ was not, thanks to the public outcry of an Oklahoma woman who claimed that Morris sexually abused her for more than four years beginning when she was 12 years old. Morris was a married traveling evangelist in his early 20s at the time. The now 54-year-old victim, Cindy Clemishire, says she first reported the abuse to top Gateway leaders in 2005.

Something that didn’t exist in 2005, a cadre of first-rate Christian investigative journalists such as Julie Roys of The Roys Report and Leonardo Blair of The Christian Post, are zealously following new leads in the story. Thank God for them. You can read about Clemishire’s shocking allegations—which Morris acknowledged as true, at least in part—here, here, and here. Morris resigned as pastor last Tuesday.

If you’re not from the area or don’t follow religious news, I can’t overemphasize what a big deal these men are locally as well as nationally and internationally. Morris led a charismatic megachurch with a purported membership across nine campuses of 100,000, and he was one of former President Donald Trump’s most ardent evangelical supporters. Evans is a towering figure among Black evangelicals. In addition to many other accomplishments, he was the first African-American to obtain a Ph.D. at Dallas Theological Seminary. Until now, there have never been any public scandals concerning Morris or Evans.

I was stunned by the sexual allegations against Morris. Which isn’t to say I didn’t have prior concerns about Gateway Church culture. I voiced them regularly as a student at The King’s Seminary, which Gateway now controls. (I graduated with a Master of Divinity in 2023.) I studied alongside dozens of Gateway members and staffers, and it hurts my heart to think of what they must be going through. There is no quick or easy way to process the sordid facts of this case with the man Gateway people thought they knew. The remaining Gateway leaders, who all served under the humongous shadow of Morris, are struggling to navigate the next steps with new revelations emerging practically every day that point to a series of deceptions by Morris. I hope they get to the bottom of who on the elders board knew what and when, because they’re losing credibility each time they retract hastily put-together public statements that turn out to be false.

While I was never a member of Gateway, I attended several of its services and events and read Morris’ books in class (one of which refers to a “catastrophic moral failure” early in his ministry in which he “committed a grievous betrayal of my marriage vows”). I hold out hope for the church and seminary to survive this crisis, based on the many good people I knew at both institutions and, more important, my knowledge that God does not abandon his faithful people, regardless of the failings of their leaders.

I personally benefited from a Gateway member whom I met for the first and only time when she prophesied to me in late 2019 that I would be debt-free within a year. The pandemic landed just a few months later, and almost immediately I lost my full-time job. But, thank God, my husband and I were completely out of debt in a little more than a year, despite the job loss. I respect any church environment that cultivates the proper use of the spiritual gifts and gives its members freedom to use them, because this is becoming increasingly rare.

That said, Gateway must use this extremely difficult moment to examine critically the culture they acquiesced to and helped maintain under Morris. Holy Scripture and the example of Jesus Christ must be our guide, not a set of “best practices” adapted from the corporate world that produce “successful” churches. I pray that prophetic leaders will emerge at Gateway and rebuild this ministry from the inside out, and I know that if they undertake this challenging task, God will provide wisdom. Right now, however, public statements by Gateway leaders have the distinct whiff of being vetted by lawyers and crisis-management experts.

I’m sure these leaders are reeling, but that is not prophetic leadership. Think Samuel, Elijah, and Nathan, who called out sin fearlessly and hewed to God’s concept of justice without submitting their every utterance to a church marketing department tasked with avoiding controversial subjects and never offending anyone.

Based on my observations and interactions with Gateway folks in seminary, I’d like to point to some areas that call for soul-searching and reform.

■ Gateway members and staffers displayed excessive adulation for Pastor Robert Morris. The ministry was built on his celebrity, public persona, and patina of success. Though Morris had announced he would retire in 2025, I was surprised to find out last week that the plan was for him to continue to be the lead preacher on Sundays. Morris was absolutely the looming figure over Gateway.

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that many Gateway members and staffers were gaga over him. He was known as a strong, practical Bible teacher, and his teaching was respected even by non-charismatics. (Gateway Church is technically a neo-charismatic church, but I won’t delve into the fine points of church history here.) The level of adulation for Morris, however, far exceeded the normal respect one accords to a lead pastor. One seminary student who was a Gateway staffer frequently made public service announcements in class—I don’t know what else to call them—extolling the many virtues of “Pastor Robert.” I don’t recall ever hearing the slightest criticism of Morris in the numerous student discussions I took part in. Sorry, but no human being deserves that kind of unqualified support, nor should we even desire it as leaders.

It’s alarming to me that any mature Christian leader in 2024 would even tolerate this degree of adulation, because we have seen that disaster so often follows, as attested to by the succession of nationally renowned pastors who’ve fallen into grievous public sin over the last several years.

Paul and Barnabas tore their robes when the people of Lystra ascribed a miracle to them instead of God and began to offer sacrifices for mere men (Acts 14:1-18). These early evangelists rent their clothing, the sign of utmost grief and despair in their Jewish culture, because they wanted to be absolutely certain that the focal point was Jesus Christ.

Still we don’t learn. We tend to think it’s someone else in the church who will fall, because their leader or organization isn’t as “excellent” or pure as ours. Yet few if any of the Gateway members and staffers I interacted with even knew Morris personally—he wasn’t accessible to normal people. Their trust in Morris was based on his public image. Perhaps a little healthy skepticism was in order here.

■ Gateway is a conformist culture. Gateway people spoke about Morris as though he were the unassailable paragon of Christian success. He reportedly possesses a large personal fortune and unabashedly stocked his elders board with men who were owners of successful businesses. When we surround ourselves with people who act and think just like us, we will develop blind spots.

I detected no concern among my Gateway classmates when Morris lifted up Trump and Trumpism at the cost of members of color fleeing his Southlake congregation, even after The New York Times made Gateway the centerpiece of a lengthy story on  the “Quiet Exodus” of African-Americans leaving predominantly white evangelical churches in the wake of their white leaders’ and members’ embrace of Trumpism.

I didn’t hear a peep of dissent when Morris, a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, jumped on the election-denier bandwagon and signaled support for the fake-electors scheme of late 2020 in an email to church members and seminary students.

“Many of you are asking questions about the status of the presidential election,” Morris wrote in the November 17 email, more than two weeks after Joe Biden had won a clear majority in electoral votes. “There are many rumors, stories, and narratives circulating. For example, the press has supposedly ‘called’ the election…The United States has a process to elect the president that culminates in the Electoral College casting their votes on December 14 and is certified by Congress on January 6.”

We now know that the fake-electors plot was in motion as early as November 2, 2020, “involving a sprawling cast of pro-Trump lawyers, state Republican officials and White House aides in an effort that began before some states had even finished counting their ballots,” according to The New York Times. The goal was that Vice President Mike Pence would somehow use the fake electors to thwart certification of the election on January 6—the day the Capitol riot erupted. Morris would have had access to Trump and Trump aides in his position as an evangelical advisor, and clearly he was listening to their conspiracy theories. (The Trump campaign immediately distanced itself from Morris when the sexual allegations against him surfaced.)

Morris’ alliance with Trump was a terrible decision on many fronts. But his overwhelmingly white congregation in Southlake, one of the wealthiest communities in the DFW area, evidently saw no problem with this.

■ Gateway turned a deaf ear to racial justice initiatives, despite holding tremendous influence to be a difference-maker in the charismatic-Pentecostal churches. Gateway exemplified the cynicism concerning racial justice that I’ve seen often in white-led charismatic-Pentecostal churches since we entered the Trump years. I plan to deal with this in depth in an upcoming post; there is too much to say here.

The collective shrug from Gateway when African-Americans began to desert the church was telling. This should have been occasion for agonized soul-searching, a deep examination of the many things Scripture has to say about justice, and, yes, corporate repentance for the racism embedded in American church culture.

I guess those Black members were expendable.

Maybe this should have been expected given Morris’ dismissal of “identity politics” in one of his books. “So many of us have grown accustomed to viewing ourselves primarily as members of one or more aggrieved groups who aren’t getting our fair share of the pie,” he wrote in The Blessed Church. “More and more that paradigm is leaking into the church.”

Morris took pride in raising up new leaders, and perhaps a few of them have the courage and prophetic clarity to rebuild Gateway on the firm foundation of Christ alone. There might be a Samuel, Huldah, or Micaiah on staff right now who will arise to speak truth to power, regardless of the consequences. In the meantime, I hope that Gateway members will be patient and allow their elders time to find their voice and begin charting a course forward.

Though their initial response was to send a statement to staff supporting Morris and repeating his lie that the victim was a “young lady,” Gateway’s elders have since unequivocally condemned Morris’ treatment of a 12-year-old girl as well as his attempts to cover up the severity of his sin and silence the victim.

That’s a first step toward justice, at least.

I welcome comments. Just keep them civil.