Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Other or denomination not established Benton County, TN, USA · 2023

Joshua Henley: forty-five-year sentence after parish work was used to transport and abuse a teen

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Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

pastor of Holladay Church of Christ, youth pastor at an Indiana church, girls' basketball coach

Organization

Holladay Church of Christ

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The federal disposition states that Henley was a Tennessee pastor, then an Indiana youth pastor, when he returned to Benton County and transported a teen to Indiana under the guise that she would help at his new parish. Instead he assaulted her. Court reporting also identifies ministry and coaching as the positions through which he met the three minors. Church work was therefore a documented access and travel pretext, not merely an occupational label.

Pastoral or clerical authority
Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2023-03-03 · guilty plea and sentence

U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. Henley pleaded guilty to eight federal counts involving production, possession and transportation of child sexual-abuse material, transfer of obscene material to a minor, and interstate transportation of a minor for criminal sexual activity. The court sentenced him to 540 months in federal prison followed by ten years of supervised release.

Documented coercion mechanisms

youth-ministry access
purported parish-assistance trip
interstate transport under a church pretext
grooming through positions of trust

Cited record

Sources

official prosecutor release criminal disposition and nexus U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Tennessee, 'Former Benton County Coach and Youth Pastor Sentenced to 45 Years for Exploiting Children' (Mar. 6, 2023).: The official sentencing release records the offenses, forty-five-year term, ministry and coaching roles, and transport of a teen under the guise of assisting at a new parish.
contemporaneous specialist court reporting disposition and nexus corroboration Audrey Jackson, 'Former minister sentenced to 45 years for sexual abuse,' Christian Chronicle (Mar. 14, 2023).: Contemporaneous court reporting corroborates the eight convictions, sentence, ages without naming survivors, ministry access, church-property conduct and Vacation Bible School pretext.

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.justice.gov/usao-wdtn/pr/former-benton-county-coach-and-youth-pastor-sentenced-45-years-exploiting-children Corpus classification: official-prosecutor-release; evidentiary role: criminal-disposition-and-nexus. SHA-256 22ccd6b9da2dbb40e2ab31401afe0112e1254e168fdc9da5c60411386d523e17
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://christianchronicle.org/former-minister-sentenced-to-45-years-for-sexual-abuse/ Corpus classification: contemporaneous-specialist-court-reporting; evidentiary role: disposition-and-nexus-corroboration. SHA-256 1a638da5319676e4741005dd74e9d45447e6caf85227879ed4d2c927992148aa
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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