Four days after learning of decades-old child abuse allegations against their senior pastor, Robert Morris, hundreds of Gateway Church employees packed an auditorium in Southlake, Texas, on Tuesday to learn his fate.
Some staff members seemed solemn as they found their seats. Others looked angry. One participant took out her cell phone and secretly pressed record. She later shared the audio with NBC News and described the encounter in an interview. A second person present confirmed her story and the authenticity of the recording.
Kenneth W. Fambro II, a real estate manager who serves on Gateway’s board of elders, struggled through tears as he delivered the news that employees came to hear: Morris, one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders, was resigning from the church he had come to. ‘was founded 24 years earlier.
“This,” Fambro said of accepting Morris’ resignation, “was one of the most difficult decisions of my life.”
The recording of Fambro’s comments reveals the deeply conflicted feelings of church leaders as they come to terms with the knowledge that their founding pastor—the man who had built Gateway into one of the largest megachurches in America and served on the former president’s spiritual advisory board Donald Trump – had pleaded guilty to ‘inappropriate sexual conduct’ with a child.
Fambro opened Tuesday by acknowledging that he and other church officials had long known that Morris had admitted to sexual misconduct when he was young. It was a story Morris told so many times over the years from the pulpit and in one-on-one conversations that “you can get a little numb to it,” Fambro said, according to the recording.
“Pastor Robert has done a phenomenal job of being open and transparent about his transgressions and his past, his moral failures,” Fambro said on behalf of the council of elders, which is charged with governing the church.
“What we didn’t know was that she was twelve years old.”
Cindy Clemishire, the woman who accused Morris of abusing her as a child, disputed the idea that Morris had been transparent. In a statement to NBC News, she said she was disturbed that Gateway elders were wrestling over whether to remove him from their leadership.
“What is so difficult about accepting the resignation of a man who repeatedly sexually assaulted a little girl for almost five years and then lied about it?” Clemishire said after reviewing a transcript of the recording from NBC News. “Why wasn’t he fired?”
Clemishire and her attorney, Boz Tchividjian, claim she contacted Morris and church officials in 2005 and 2007 with her allegations and that the Gateway board of elders should have investigated Morris’ version of events long ago. (Fambro started attending church in 2006 and became an elder in 2014, according to Gateway’s website.)
Morris has not been charged with a crime and did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The allegations were made public Friday in a post published by The Wartburg Watch, a website aimed at exposing abuse in churches. Clemishire, 54, described in the post and in a subsequent interview with NBC News how Morris had molested her for years beginning on Christmas night in 1982, when she was 12.
Initially, Morris and Gateway elders responded Friday and Saturday by acknowledging in statements that Morris had several sexual encounters with a “young lady” when he was in his 20s and saying he had been transparent about his sin and had repented.
“Since the resolution of this 35-year-old issue, there have been no other moral failures,” the elders said in a message to employees on Friday.
But some Gateway parishioners and staffers viewed the statement itself as a moral failure. Why had Church leaders described the alleged sexual abuse of a twelve-year-old with euphemisms?
Fambro did not address that question in his comments Tuesday, and he and other church elders did not respond to messages seeking comment. A Gateway spokesperson also did not respond.
The person who made the recording of Tuesday’s staff meeting said she shared it with a reporter because she believes the board of elders is “gaslighting” employees over its initial defense of Morris and should be replaced. NBC News is not naming the woman because she fears retaliation.
During the meeting, Fambro defended the council of elders, which he said had drawn criticism from members who felt leaders had taken too long to respond to the crisis.
He said leaders deliberated in hours-long meetings Monday and Tuesday and followed guidance they had long received from their now former senior pastor.
“If you’ve been here long enough, you’ve heard Pastor Robert say, ‘Before we can go any further, we need to hear God,’” Fambro said.
Fambro also told staff that he and the other elders have “great compassion” for Clemishire and will not tolerate what happened to her.
“You won’t hear us try to explain it away,” Fambro said.
But, he added, that doesn’t mean “we don’t love Pastor Robert, that we don’t defend him.”
He then spoke at length about the profound impact Morris had on his life and the lives of tens of thousands of church members. Fambro encouraged the audience not to let the revelations of child sex abuse lose sight of the good that God had done – and would continue to do – through Gateway and Morris.
“So yes, there is an anointing on this house. Yes, there is an anointing on Pastor Robert,” Fambro said. “But and/and, yes? Some things had been done. They can both exist.”
Fambro asked staff to pray for Morris’ family, including his son James Morris, who is a senior pastor and would succeed his father upon his planned retirement next year.
Robert Morris still favors Gateway, Fambro said, and that’s why he’s resigning.
“Pastor Robert wants to see Gateway Church succeed in the body of Christ,” Fambro said. “Pastor Robert wanted to resign so he wouldn’t be a distraction.”
Clemishire said the elders’ continued support for Morris “makes me sick.”
“How can a church believe that a man can be anointed by God after sexually abusing a child and then lying about it for decades?” she said. “This is disgusting.”
Although elders asked attendees not to record Tuesday’s meeting, Fambro seemed to sense his words could ultimately reach a broader audience. He said he was afraid someone would “take a sound clip, a fragment or part of a sentence” and distort its meaning.
Finally, before another church leader stepped forward to describe the counseling services that would be available to employees, Fambro encouraged audience members to focus on what they can do to help the church succeed.
“I can dwell on the past,” he said. ‘You can do that too. Or I can choose to say, “That’s a data point. How can I influence the future?’”
“How,” Fambro added, “do we proceed?”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
