Gateway Church elder says accepting resignation of pastor in sex abuse scandal was ‘difficult’ decision

It is revealed in a covert audio recording that church leaders informed employees at the megachurch he established in Texas about Pastor Robert Morris' departure.

Hundreds of Gateway Church personnel gathered in an auditorium in Southlake, Texas on Tuesday, four days after they became aware of claims of decades-old child sex abuse against their senior pastor, Robert Morris. The purpose of the gathering was to find out what would become of him.

As they found their seats, a few staff members looked serious. Others had a furious face. A participant removed her phone and surreptitiously pressed the record button. In a later interview, she talked about the discussion and shared the tape with NBC News. An other witness attested to her story and the veracity of the tape.

Kenneth W. Fambro II, a real estate executive who serves on Gateway’s board of elders, struggled through tears as he delivered the news that employees had come to hear: Morris, one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders, was resigning from the church he’d founded 24 years earlier.

“This,” Fambro said of accepting Morris’ resignation, “has been one of the most difficult decisions in my life.”

The audio recording of Fambro's speech shows how deeply confused church leaders are as they try to come to terms with the fact that their founding pastor—the man who turned Gateway into one of the biggest megachurches in America and was a member of the spiritual advisory board for former President Donald Trump—confessed to having had "inappropriate sexual behaviour" 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 often over the years from the pulpit and in one-on-one meetings that “you can get kind of numb” to it, Fambro said, according to the recording.

“Pastor Robert did a phenomenal job of being open and transparent about his transgressions and his past, his moral failures,” Fambro said, speaking on behalf of the elders board, which is charged with governing the church. 

“What we did not know was that she was 12 years old.”

The woman who claimed that Morris had molested her while she was a youngster, Cindy Clemishire, denied that Morris had been open and honest. She expressed her displeasure that Gateway elders couldn't agree on whether to remove him from leadership in an NBC News statement.

“What is so difficult about accepting the resignation from a man who repeatedly sexually abused a little girl for almost five years and then lied about it?” Clemishire said after having reviewed a transcript of the recording provided by NBC News. “Why wasn’t he terminated?”

Clemishire and her lawyer, Boz Tchividjian, contend that she contacted Morris and church officials with her allegations in 2005 and 2007 and that Gateway’s board of elders should have long ago investigated Morris’ version of events. (Fambro began attending the church in 2006 and became an elder in 2014, according to Gateway’s website.)

Morris hasn’t been charged with a crime and didn’t respond to messages requesting comment.

The allegations were made public Friday in a post published by The Wartburg Watch, a website focused on 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’s 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 matter, there have been no other moral failures,” the elders said in a message to employees Friday.

However, a few employees and parishioners of Gateway saw the comment as a moral faux pas in and of itself. Why had church authorities used euphemisms while discussing the alleged sexual molestation of a 12-year-old?

Fambro didn’t address that question in his remarks Tuesday, and he and other church elders didn’t respond to messages requesting comment. A spokesperson for Gateway also didn’t respond.

The lady who recorded Tuesday's staff meeting said she gave it to a reporter because she thinks the board of elders should be changed since it is "gaslighting" staff members over its original support of Morris. The reason NBC News isn't naming the lady is that she worries about reprisals.

At the meeting, Fambro defended the board of elders, which he said had been fielding criticism from members who felt leaders had taken too long to respond to the crisis.

He said leaders had deliberated during multiple hourslong meetings Monday and Tuesday and were following the guidance they’d long gotten from their now-former senior pastor.