Trigger warning: discussion of sexual abuse and grooming
It’s no secret that one big reason we as a country don’t get it about sexual assault is because elements of the church have their collective heads up their collective asses on this matter. And that’s the most diplomatic term I can use. Time and again, we’ve seen survivors of sexual assault get kicked in the teeth and a bunch of other places by the church—even when the assault happened as part of the church’s platform. In other words, some of the very people whom you expect to be lifting survivors up are pushing them down.
We got a lovely reminder of this earlier in the week. At the dawn of the new year, two Dallas-Fort Worth churches came under fire for hiring Chuck Adair, a registered sex offender whose crimes were profiled on “America’s Most Wanted.” In his days as a minister in the 1990s, he had a bad habit of inappropriate behavior with minors. In covering this furor, a major online Christian newspaper, The Christian Post, somehow thought it acceptable to describe one of those instances not as grooming, but an “extramarital relationship.” That passage has since been removed—without a correction being appended, a serious breach of journalistic ethics. The fact that it was even allowed to run at all says a lot, in my mind, about how far behind the curve the church is on this matter—and how it’s hamstringing the nation as a whole.
Things started heating up last week, when victim advocate and Metroplex resident Amy “Watchkeep” Smith got wind that Adair was now a preaching pastor at Grace Place Church of Christ in Duncanville, south of Dallas. She’d also learned that Adair was a part-time staffer at Watermark Community Church, a nondenominational megachurch in north Dallas. Watch here.
In another post, Smith unearthed evidence that suggested Watermark was very much aware of who Adair was.
She linked to an article in The Dallas Morning News from 2012 detailing Adair’s history. In the 1990s, when Adair was working at a church plant in Tulsa, he had an affair with a college girl. They’d met when the girl was a high school senior and a member of the youth ministry at Garnett Road Church of Christ in Tulsa, where Adair was a youth minister. As questionable as that was in and of itself, at an earlier stop at Skillman Church of Christ in Dallas in the mid-1980s, a number of girls in his youth ministry grew concerned that he was hugging them in ways that went way beyond what a youth minister should have done even then.
Two years later, he surfaced at Golf Course Road Church of Christ in Midland, Tex., where he began grooming 13-year-old Kristen Berryhill under the guise of “counseling” her. At the time, he was 33—old enough to be her father. Kristen’s parents grew concerned enough that by 1993, they wrote Adair demanding answers. By 1994, Adair said, other people at Golf Course Road were seeing they were “a little too close,” and he resigned rather than face certain termination.
Supposedly, Adair never intended to see Kristen again. However, it instead escalated into sexual activity. When a private investigator hired by the Berryhills busted Adair, he and Kristen fled. However, after “America’s Most Wanted” profiled Adair, he was tracked to Las Vegas and arrested after 11 days on the run. He was convicted a year later of sexual assault, and sentenced to 10 years in prison and a lifetime stay on Texas’s sex offender registry. Adair married Kristen in 1998 soon after she turned 18; they divorced in 2000.
Adair received sex offender treatment while in prison and was paroled in 2005. He returned to Skillman and served as a minister and head of a prison ministry. That’s right—the very same Skillman where a number of the members of his youth ministry were concerned two decades earlier that he had no concept of boundaries. He has since moved on to Grace Place as a preaching minister, and also works at Watermark in a non-pastoral role in their prison and adult recovery ministries. He has also spoken at a number of other churches in the Southwest.
In a statement, Watermark's elders said that they were well aware of Adair’s past, and that both he and they agreed he was permanently disqualified from any sort of work with minors. But what about adults who were victims of grooming and child sexual abuse? What message does it send to them that he has any kind of role in ministry at all? And how does it explain his role as a teaching pastor at Grace Place? Or how he has been a guest speaker elsewhere?
How that happened, to my mind, has a LOT to do with how The Christian Post initially described Adair’s earlier relationship with a girl in Tulsa. It actually characterized this as an “extramarital relationship.” No, this isn’t snark.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! This wasn’t merely an “extramarital relationship.” At best—AT BEST—it was clergy sexual abuse. Surely the powers that be at The Christian Post know by now that the power balance between pastor and parishoner is so unequal that consent is impossible. When that’s the best-case scenario, considering Adair’s history, that’s not a good sign.
By this afternoon, however, this passage had been changed. This is how it now reads as of this writing.
Adair, who is now 62, was convicted of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1996, according to previous reporting by The Dallas Morning News. That conviction came after he initiated a sexual relationship with a girl he met in his youth group while working for Garnett Church of Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1990.
But that’s not enough. Why? In the absence of something I haven’t seen, no corrections have been appended. Not on the article itself, not on The Christian Post’s socials. This is a pretty egregious breach of journalistic ethics. More importantly, you have to wonder how that original passage made it to the tubes in the first place. How did someone not realize how problematic at best and insensitive at worst this sounded, especially with Adair’s history? If you’re wondering how a registered sex offender is still working at a church in this capacity, here’s your answer.
