Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Evangelical, Pentecostal, and independent Sevier County, Tennessee, USA · 1996

United States: pastor convicted of statutory rape of a congregant; retaining church ousted from SBC decades later

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

pastor of a Baptist church

Organization

Shiloh Baptist Church, Sevier County, Southern Baptist Convention

Spiritual nexus

The victim was a member of the congregation the defendant pastored; the 2021 ouster of a retaining church documents the denominational-accountability arc the case set in motion.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 1996-01-01 · guilty plea; later denominational action against a retaining church

    Tennessee state court, USA. John Randy Leming, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, pleaded guilty in 1996 to two counts of statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old member of his congregation (1994 offences), receiving eighteen months. Decades later, another SBC church that hired him — Antioch — was ousted from the Convention in 2021 for retaining him, whereupon he resigned; the 2021 ouster is among the SBC's first enforcement actions of its kind.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • pastoral authority over a sixteen-year-old congregation member

Primary record

Sources

institutional reporting against interest conviction and denominational action report 'Former abuser resigns after church ousted from SBC', Baptist Standard, 16 Mar. 2021.

Reports the 1996 conviction and the 2021 SBC ouster of the retaining church.

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