Dan Earl Allmond, Youth Pastor of Tampa Baptist Church, Tampa, a Southern Baptist Church, and a married man, suddenly resigned on December 9, 1998 and disappeared off the scene when the police were called in concerning a complaint made by a female high school student that she was having sex with the pastor as a minor.

 

Senior Pastor McCormick of Tampa Baptist Church denied all knowledge about the sexual activities and ordered the staff of Tampa Baptist Academy to stay silent on the whole matter and not to discuss Dan's previous sexual escapades with no one! McCormick's own daughter was sexually promiscuous and had to leave school for a while for fear of being pregnant.

 

The bible states that a Senior Pastor must be one who rules his own house well, having his children in submission with all reverence (for if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?). Hence Senior Pastor McCormick resigned as pastor  in the spring of the next year when he sought to divorce his wife.

 

Dan Earl Allmond faced two counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. Police said that the youth pastor had sexual relations with the girl on church property and at his home on W Paris Street. The sexual relations occurred between August and October, Cole said according to jail records reported the Tampa Tribune.

 

Allmond is a Sex Offender under Florida law and now the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Sexual Offender/Predator Unit has his picture pasted on the web at http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/sexual_predators/OffenderFlyer.asp?keys=26812

 

Most Southern Baptist pastors and preachers are hypocrites in that they don't practice what they preach. Take the case of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist and religious right fundamentalist, who jumped on the media bandwagon about Roman Catholic pedophile priests and stated:

 

It is time for the Catholic Church to get serious about protecting children.
 
The fact is, any cleric - Catholic or Protestant - who molests a child to satisfy his own dark urges should be immediately dismissed and severely punished. Period.
 
However, church leaders have gone blind to their responsibilities. Revelations that top U.S. clergy protected pedophiles and failed to prevent them from interacting with credulous children is simply unforgivable. It is criminal! This is not the time for compromise, settlement or bargain. It is time for the church to attend to ridding itself of pedophiles and painstakingly ensuring that virtuous and honorable men are recruited to replace them.
 
President Bush has stated that any nation that harbors terrorists is guilty of terrorism. Similarly, any church leader who provides safe haven for a pedophile priest, pastor or rabbi is just as guilty. It is unthinkable that men who have yielded their lives to ministry would descend to such depths that they would sexually abuse little children. It is just as unthinkable that a church leader would protect these men.
( Catholic Church leadership must expel pedophiles By Rev. Jerry Falwell Worldnetdaily April 27, 2002)
 
But according to Southern Baptists own statistics and reports most of their pastors are sexual perverts and reality shows their church leaders protects their pastors and not the sheep.

 

Just as a hidden iceberg destroyed the Titanic after the crew had ignored multiple warnings, lives and ministries of pastors and other church staff are being destroyed at a remarkable rate by sexual infidelity, the president of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board warned a group of pastors, missionaries and other denominational leaders.

 

Robert E. Reccord cautioned pastors, missionaries and other denominational leaders attending the April 10-13 Connection 2002 conference in Ontario, California, about avoiding temptations that lead to sexual infidelity. 

 

Reccord cited survey statistics from the book "Men's Secret Wars" by Patrick Means that indicated 64 percent of pastors or church staff struggled with sexual addiction or compulsion. Twenty-five percent admitted to having sexual intercourse with someone besides their wife while married, and after they had accepted Christ. Another 14 percent admitted some form of sexual contact short of intercourse.

 

Reccord also noted the importance of every Christian leader having someone to whom he is accountable, someone who will ask him the hard questions about his personal life and thoughts. He noted research which found little in common among more than 200 fallen ministers except two things: all no longer had a regular quiet time in fellowship with God, and none had made themselves accountable to a person or group.

 

Ann Graham Lotz, the second daughter of Southern Baptist Evangelist Billy Graham,  stated in Tampa, Florida in April 2002,  "I'm not accountable to my critics, I'm only accountable to God."' ..

 

Sexual involvement by Baptist leaders with others is a real problem in North America.  A 1991 national survey of mainly Protestant pastors by a group at the Center for Ethics and Social Policy, Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California -- described by its researchers as "small and not scientifically controlled" -- uncovered similar findings: About 10 percent of those surveyed had been sexually involved with a parishioner. Another study published in the winter 1993 Journal of Pastoral Care found that only 6.1 percent of Southern Baptist pastor respondents admitted to having sexual contact with a person either currently or formerly affiliated with their church.

 

Surveys of ministers reveal the existence of a growing moral breakdown in pastors' lives. Almost one in four pastors answered yes to the question, "Since you've been in local church ministry, have you ever done anything with someone (not your spouse) that you feel was sexually inappropriate?" One in five pastors confessed to sexual misconduct of some kind, with one in eight admitting adultery, and only 4 in 100 were found out by their local church. (1988 survey in Leadership magazine).

 

On April 8, 2002 the Christian Science Monitor reported that 'Despite headlines focusing on the priest pedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant, and most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but church volunteers.  These are findings from national surveys by Christian Ministry Resources (CMR), a tax and legal-advice publisher serving more than 75,000 congregations and 1,000 denominational agencies nationwide.

 

The CMR findings also reveal:
- Most church child-sexual-abuse cases involve a single victim.
- Law suits or out-of-court settlements were a result in 21 percent of the allegations reported in the 2000 survey.
- Volunteers are more likely than clergy or paid staff to be abusers. Perhaps more startling, children at churches are accused of sexual abuse as often as are clergy and staff. In 1999, for example, 42 percent of alleged child abusers were volunteers - about 25 percent were paid staff members (including clergy) and 25 percent were other children.

 

On March 25, 2002  the LA Times in an article by TERESA WATANABE, Times Staff Writer  Sex Abuse by Clerics-a Crisis of Many Faiths wrote

 

The wave of clergy sex scandals now engulfing the Roman Catholic Church has battered other denominations as well, producing an uneven record of response that ranges from the Episcopal Church's aggressive and detailed policies to the Southern Baptist Convention's widespread lack of written standards…

 

Similar charges have been leveled against the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest of the Baptist bodies in the United States. Dee Ann Miller, a victim's advocate and author of books about the topic, said she had received complaints from victims in 30 states, half of them involving minors. She said church officials have not been responsive.

 

When she first told church officials about her own sexual assault by a Southern Baptist missionary in Africa several years ago, Miller said, she was told by two leaders that it was at least partly her fault.
In a 1993 survey by the Journal of Pastoral Care, 14% of Southern Baptist ministers surveyed said they had engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior, 70% said they knew a minister who had and 80% said they lacked written guidelines.

 

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist ethics committee, said the convention's churches are fully autonomous and probably did not adopt written policies because it was obvious that sexual misconduct was wrong. He said training about sexual misconduct is conducted at Southern Baptist seminaries, which produce about half of the convention's clergy, and that the cases he knows about led to swift removal or resignation of the guilty party.

 

"Most Baptist ministers know sexual misconduct is a career-ending move," he said.

 

It's amazing that no one is alarmed that the survey reported that "14% of Southern Baptist ministers surveyed said they had engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior."  But because Southern Baptist churches and Assembly of God Churches are fully autonomous it's very easy and convenient for these churches to bury a scandal as was done with Tampa Baptist Academy?

 

A full blown scandal came out in November 98 in the four million member Church of God headquartered in Tennessee. The Church of God is one of the oldest  Pentecostal denominations in America  even though about fifty percent of its members do not have a Pentecostal experience with the evidence of speaking in tongues. The senior pastor of RiverHills Church of God, Tampa Florida, was also a long-running adulterer for five years. His adultery was with another pastor's wife of University Church of God. Tampa Florida.

 

The denomination and key members of the church knew about the adultery for around nine months and did nothing about it. That is until someone threatened to post the story on the internet and then the pastor Dempsey resigned.

 

Riverhills Church of God accepted Senior Pastor Dempsey's resignation but the other church voted to do nothing about the adulterous affair by the pastor's wife as it was considered to be the pastor's problem.  Pastor Dempsey was also actively involved in and pushed the Assembly of God Revival in Brownsville. Florida where the financial integrity of pastors and secret way of doing things has also been questioned and brought out by the media.

 

Without telling the sheep the reasons why the Senior Pastor resigned the Church of God leadership led by interim Pastor - Florida State Overseer J. Smith fleeced from them $ 6,000 to help the wolf in sheep's clothing. The denomination once again put the interests of its pastors above those of the sheep.

 

J. Smith, the  Florida overseer or bishop who handled the crisis for the last three weeks concerning  the adultery with the pastor of Riverhills church of God, Tampa  and the pastor's wife of University Church of God, Tampa had to have serious heart surgery.

 

Church officials denied it had anything to do with his dealings concerning the adulterous pastor who was on the state board for Church of God or  Smith razing or fleecing money from the sheep at Riverhills without telling them why the adulterous pastor resigned. 

 

Pastor Dempsey broke his oath as a minister by being an adulterer and deceiver for five years and was not entitled to a penny including severance pay with out the church members being told the truth first of what had gone on. But pastors and overseers always try to take care of their own? Then they wonder how they ended up on a hospital bed?