United States: pastor convicted of statutory rape of a congregant; retaining church ousted from SBC decades later
Request a correction or replyRecord class
Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
pastor of a Baptist church
Organization
Shiloh Baptist Church, Sevier County, Southern Baptist Convention
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
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
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
Cited 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.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/baptists/former-abuser-resigns-after-church-ousted-from-sbc/ Corpus classification: institutional-reporting-against-interest; evidentiary role: conviction-and-denominational-action-report. SHA-256 00df2da259055b4466c5b03bd2a928b07993342239bfe2d80d851db667e51a3a
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
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