Tag: People: Robert Morris

News updates – 2025 03

Time to look back at some news stories I’ve talked about and see where they are now.

Pride goeth before a fall

One of the major stories in the Metroplex this week is that Robert Morris, the former pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake, has been indicted on five counts of lewd or indecent acts to a child in Oklahoma. Morris was a travelling preacher in Oklahoma in the 1980s when he met Cindy Clemishire, who was then 12 years old, and began to molest her. This story had come out inside Gateway Church over the years, but only became publicly known when Clemishire told her story about how Morris abused her for five years last June. Morris resigned and Gateway has been splintering ever since.

Part of the problem with Gateway was that it had a bad culture, as described in this DMN article. When the story of Morris’ disgrace came out, he initially responded that he’d had a moral failure with “a young lady” 35 years ago; at least some Gateway elders didn’t know that she was a pre-teen even though the so-called moral failure had come up as early as 2007.

One of the things the DMN article describesis the culture of megachurches like Gateway, which has about 19,000 in-person attendees every week now, after membership has dropped by at least a quarter from its heights. Morris, who had become a celebrity evangelist and a spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, was apparently a talented preacher, and his leadership had made the church one of America’s largest. But there was rot at the heart of Gateway Church, one that manifested in ways that the DMN describes, and now Gateway has fallen: financially, in attendance, and morally. And yet, as the DMN notes, some parishioners, even women who have been abused, still want Robert Morris back as pastor.

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