Pastor Robert Morris resigns from Gateway Church after child sex abuse allegation
Robert Morris has resigned as senior pastor at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, three days after confessing to engaging in “sexual behavior” with a child over the course of a few years in the 1980s.
Robert Morris has resigned as senior pastor at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, three days after confessing to engaging in “sexual behavior” with a child over the course of a few years in the 1980s.
The board of elders at Gateway made the announcement Tuesday in a statement to NBC News.
“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital relationship, which he had discussed many times throughout his ministry, was with ‘a young lady’ and not abuse of a 12-year-old child,” the church leaders said in their statement, noting that they had not known the victim’s age or the length of the alleged abuse. “Even though it occurred many years before Gateway was established, as leaders of the church, we regret that we did not have the information that we now have.”
The megachurch also announced it had hired the law firm Haynes & Boone to conduct an independent review of the allegations to ensure elders had a complete understanding of what happened.
Robert Morris, center, founding pastor of the megachurch Gateway, during a service at the church in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2018. Ilana Panich-Linsman / The New York Times / Redux fileMorris, a former member of President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory committee, had long told a story to his congregation and church leaders about a “moral failure” involving sexual sin when he was a young minister in his 20s.
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