I found myself thinking back to this last week when a pastor in my adopted hometown of Muskegon took to social media to rail against the LGBT community. And yet, this pastor doesn’t have the guts to cut the cord with a pastor who coddled two men who are either in prison or about to go to prison for sexual assault. I mentioned this Saturday, but I’m reposting because it got lost in the news of the raid on Iran.
Last Wednesday, Tim Cross, pastor of Living Word Church of Muskegon, took to social media to discuss the Beatitudes. Specifically, Matthew 5:10-12, persecution. He used that to go on a tirade about cancel culture. Watch here.
Cross claimed that persecution is the price of “standing up for righteousness.” In particular, he claimed that he was being persecuted for speaking out against trans rights and gay rights. As he put it, the church’s job was to say that things like homosexuality and transgenderism were wrong. He claimed the price of it was to be “lied on,” among other things.
Just another anti-LGBT tirade from a right-wing evangelical pastor, right? Well, this video from Cross isn’t just incendiary, but hypocritical as all hell. For all of his talk about righteousness, Cross has been deafeningly silent about his connections with a pastor who coddled sexual predators. Given that I’m just nine minutes from this church, it’s particularly unnerving.
Cross has longstanding ties with one of the more prominent evangelists in Midwestern charismatic circles, Mark T. Barclay, founder and pastor of Living Word International Church in Midland. Cross graduated from Barclay’s Supernatural Ministry Training Institute before founding what is now Living Word Muskegon in 1985. For a long time, he publicly declared Barclay was his pastor.
The problem? Barclay has been under a heavy barrage over how he handled—or more accurately, mishandled—reports that two of his ministers abused their authority and trust in a heinous and despicable way. As I mentioned last year on my Substack (diaried here), the way Barclay handled it makes his claim to be a “preacher of righteousness” false advertising.
In 2023, James Randolph, Barclay’s son-in-law and Living Word Midland’s longtime youth minister, was charged with six counts of criminal sexual conduct, including two first-degree counts involving a minor younger than 16. He was convicted last August, and faces life in prison when he is sentenced in March. Long before then, however, enough had come to light that proved Randolph should have never been in his post in the first place.
In October, local CBS affiliate WNEM-TV revealed that in 1984, Randolph took part in a violent gang rape of a 15-year-old special needs girl. Facing life in prison, Randolph pled guilty to third-degree criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to 10-15 years in prison. He was paroled after eight years, and turned up in Midland soon afterward. According to former Living Word member Dana Stahl, for years Living Word members were led to believe he was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and “took the hit for others.”
The truth only came out when Randolph was arrested in 2023. This was alarming on several counts. Even in the 1990s, it was well known that letting a confessed violent sex offender to work with children was a BAAAAD idea, simply because of the extreme likelihood they will reoffend. This hit Stahl pretty hard. She and her husband Dan had run the church nursery for 23 years, with Randolph as her supervisor. Plus, she spent much of her working life helping special needs kids.
When Dana and Dan told this story to the hosts of Legacy of Abuse, a podcast focusing on the misdeeds of another pastor in Barclay’s network, they were being extremely kind in saying that Barclay exposed Living Word Midland to significant “liability.” Dana Stahl told me said liability zoomed when Barclay allowed Randolph to attend his church while he was on pretrial release. You literally can’t make this up.
It turns out Cross has a part in this as well. His daughter, Stephanie Green, who spent the first 25 years of her life at the Muskegon church before walking out in disgust after someone outed her as bisexual, told me that her dad introduced Barclay to Randolph. According to Green, her dad met Randolph in 1985, not long after Randolph went to prison for the gang rape. Cross ran an SMTI branch in the prison where Randolph was incarcerated, and served as a mentor to Randolph during what would be eight years behind bars. A month after Randolph was paroled, Cross took him to a conference in Midland where he met Barclay and Barclay’s daughter, Dawn. Cross and Randolph maintained a close relationship for years.
According to Green, Randolph frequently recalled that Barclay, an ex-Marine, was initially unwilling to let Randolph date Dawn, even going as far as to grab Randolph by the lapels, slam him against the wall, and threaten him to stay away from them. Green initially thought it was “a joke about a protective father,” but in hindsight she believes it’s hard proof Barclay knew he was giving the keys of his youth ministry to a confessed violent sex offender.
Perhaps Cross is feeling some guilt over this, because he recently cut out the part in his official biography about Barclay being his pastor. But that isn’t nearly enough. Going on a homophobic tirade is bad enough, but it looks even worse for Cross if he isn’t willing to apologize for his role in getting Randolph into Living Word Midland.
That alone would be enough to question Cross’s priorities. But another came down the pike in January, when Living Word Midland’s former longtime associate pastor, Randy Saylor, pleaded no contest to 11 counts of criminal sexual conduct against minors. Why not a guilty plea? Well, Saylor was concerned about potential civil liability.
The nature of that potential liability became clear last Tuesday, when Saylor was sentenced to 10-25 years in prison. He’s 73 years old, so this is tantamount to a life sentence. The Midland Daily News learned that one of Saylor’s victims had told Living Word Midland officials about what Saylor had done to her—and that said officials did absolutely nothing. As Midland County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Courtney Driscoll put it, they “swept it under the rug.” If I were one of the officials involved in this decision, I’d have a lawyer on speed dial. Clergy are mandated reporters in Michigan.
One would have thought Cross would be just as fast to speak up as he was when he took to social media to rail against the LGBT community. But he didn’t. Either scenario would have been enough by itself for a pastor with any backbone, any sense of decency, to cut ties with Barclay. Both together? If Cross even thinks he has a decision to make, it says a lot about him. Any church where this is even a matter for debate isn’t safe. It sends a terrible message to survivors, and should give any families with children pause about linking up with it.
I look at this, and I’m reminded of how the nation’s so-called moral guardians circled the wagons around a guy who has had 25 women accuse him of sexual assault, and who was caught on tape reveling in degrading women. In what world can this happen? Apparently in a world where a pastor can take to social media to thunder against the LGBT community, but seems to think he even has to debate whether to cut ties with a mentor who coddled a couple of men who were far more of a threat to kids than any two or three gays, lesbians, or drag queens you can name.
