Covering Up Child Sexual Abuse at Trinity Baptist Church and Trinity Christian Academy
My 2016 interview with Tom Messer, the current pastor
What follows is my 2016 interview with Trinity Baptist Church Pastor Tom Messer. It contains some graphic and upsetting information. In my last substack post, I said I was revising my 2016 book, Devil in the Baptist Church: Bob Gray’s Unholy Trinity. I’m doing that here, amidst my other projects and other substack content, “in real time.” Thus far, I’ve reworked part of the book that quotes my father, for whom I had used a pseudonym in the first edition of the book. I’ll share parts of that revision and thoughts about it soon. Today, however, I wanted to share the “prelude” to the 2016 book. I updated a word or two, but otherwise left it as is. The interview was the last thing I did in writing the book. It happened in Tom Messer’s office, July 14, 2016. This is the first time I’ve put most of a post behind a paywall. While I feel a bit apologetic about that, there are several reasons for it, and it won’t become habit.
Tom Messer, the current pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, shakes my hand and invites me into his large comfortable book-lined office.
It’s the same office in which Bob Gray sexually abused children for decades.
Messer had told me he didn’t want to meet because he “had no confidence” that I would be “fair and impartial.”
When I persisted, telling him I really wanted to understand his perspective, he said he’d be happy to meet with me, but in a followup email said I shouldn’t expect him to discuss Bob Gray. I asked him what we would talk about, if not Bob Gray.
He responded, “I will be in my office tomorrow at 11 if you care to meet, I will treat you kindly, and will try to help you anyway I can. If not, I have plenty of other things to do.”
We sit on couches across from each other. He leans to his side and rubs his forehead tiredly. He asks me about myself, asks me when I was a student at Trinity Christian Academy. He has a way of listening to you that makes you feel he cares.
I ask him if there’s a “fair and impartial” way he believes this book could be written. I ask him if it’s his opinion I shouldn’t write the book at all.
“Well,” he says, “Gray’s been dead for nine years. I do think it’s an old story. To go digging something up that happened back in the ’80s, I think only a handful of people will be interested.”
Messer wants the church to move on. He wants to focus on his present ministry. He says he’s “been more successful” in counseling Gray’s victims privately than in making public statements.
“When I first heard what you wanted to talk to me about,” he says, pauses, leans back into the couch and threads his fingers together on top of his head, “my first reaction was, ‘Sigh.’”
Tom Messer doesn’t want to have to keep talking about Bob Gray.
Then we talk about Bob Gray.
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