Apparently 38 years of being President of Pensacola Christian College is enough. Today Dr. Arlin Horton officially announced that he is resigning.You can read the official text here.

According to the official release “Dr.” Troy Shoemaker will be the next President. And yes, his doctorate was, in fact, granted by the very unaccredited college he’s about to take over.

Perhaps this change spells better days ahead for my alma mater. I certainly hope so.

North Texas Missionaries Murdered in Mexico: MyFoxDFW.com

As NPR Reports:

Bob Jones University used to be a “station of the cross for aspiring presidential candidates,” NPR’s Ari Shapiro reports on Friday’s All Things Considered. Candidates like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan all spoke at the school, a “bastion of the most conservative brand of evangelical Christianity,” Shapiro says.

But he explains that tradition changed after the 2000 campaign, when candidate George W. Bush campaigned there without mentioning the school’s ban on interracial dating. As Shapiro reports:

“The school ultimately dropped the ban, and apologized. President Bush apologized, too, for failing to speak out. Today, Bob Jones no longer officially endorses or hosts candidates.”

Until a decade ago, Shapiro reports, the school “referred to Catholicism and Mormonism as cults.” That meant it wasn’t a natural stop for Romney, a practicing Mormon.

“So this week something happened that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago,” Shapiro says: Romney came to Greer, S.C. — just a five-minute drive from Bob Jones — and didn’t make a stop.

Instead, he focused on foreign companies like BMW, Bosch and Hitachi that have invested in Greenville.

“I want to make America the most attractive place in the world again for investments,” Romney said during a campaign stop.

And, as Shapiro puts it, that let him make his pitch “without having to worship at the altar of the evangelicals.”

Which leads me to wonder: has Bob Jones really stopped calling Mormonism a cult? Or is that just bad reporting?

If you haven’t already read it, check out the transcript of this meeting here.

You can also find more information on the background of this discussion here.

I’ve had some personal interaction with the lady who had this meeting and I have ever reason to believe that this transcript is legitimate and accurate. It’s also appalling but that doesn’t come as any real surprise.

Apparently if you’re the pastor’s niece and the associate pastor’s daughter, a little sexual assault on ar student is easy to sweep under the rug at Hilltop Baptist Church and School.

Huffington Post reports:

According to the indictment, the teacher, 32-year-old Terah Allyn Rawlings, has been charged with eight counts in all: four counts of sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust-pattern of abuse (a class 3 felony), four counts of sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust (a class 4 felony), and obscenity promotion (a class 2 misdemeanor).

KRDO reports the teacher allegedly had a relationship with the boy for two and a half years, beginning when he was 15. Anonymous sources told the station the school covered up the relationship until a staff member called the sheriff against the school’s permission.

Hilltop Baptist School’s senior pastor, 63-year-old Franklin “Wayne” Knight, was also arrested. Knight is Rawlings’s uncle.

Rawlings’s father, 57-year-old Raymond “Alan” Knight, the school’s former athletic director and associate pastor, has been arrested as well and charge with failure to report child abuse or neglect. The school’s Facebook page boasts Alan was the 2011 Division 1A coach of the year.

Jan Ocvirk, the school’s former principal, was also arrested. She faces two counts of failure to report child abuse or neglect.

It is interesting to note that Wayne Knight is also the President of Patriot Bible University, the institution responsible for granting tax evader Kent Hovind his doctorate.

As CBS reports:

Paul LaDuke, 75, has been charged with sexual exploitation of a child. LaDuke has been a math teacher at the school for 26 years.

Investigators determined that, while seated at a podium in class on Friday, LaDuke unzipped and lowered his pants and masturbated while students were present in the classroom.

“Through the course of our investigation, our detectives have come to believe that this has happened several times per year for 10 years or more, possibly,” Nebel said.

Asked if there had been previous complaints that did not result in any action against LaDuke, Nebel said no.

“It’s not that it’s been reported and nothing has been done, it’s just that during the course of the investigation, we’ve come to learn certain information and I can’t go further for the fact that there’s a possibility of more charges before a grand jury,” Nebel said.

You can visit the school website here.

Is a fundamentalist church responsible for the actions of the pastors they hire if they have not bothered to perform a background check on him? This is the question being raised by the alleged victim of Matthew Jarrell, the apparent serial rapist who committed suicide while being held in a West Virginia jail.

As Zac Taylor of the West Virginia Gazette-Mail reports

A woman is suing a Texas church, claiming that its leaders should have known that their head pastor had a history of sexual assault before allowing him to travel to West Virginia, where he allegedly raped her in his car before committing suicide in prison days later.

The woman, whom the lawsuit identifies only by her initials, is also suing the Open Door Baptist Church in Mesquite, Texas, for hiring Matthew Jarrell as its head pastor and apparently failing to perform an adequate background check that would have uncovered a history of criminal activity.

…

The lawsuit states that Jarrell inflicted serious emotional and physical damages on the woman as a result of the assault, which could have been prevented had church officials properly screened Jarrell before his employment.

The woman is suing the church for compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorney fees and court costs.

It will be interesting to see if the courts think this case has merit.

Many of you have been following this series that is investigating abuse inside religious organizations. Here’s the latest episode on Fairhaven.

According to public records, Charles “Chipper” Snow IV has pleaded guilty to the charge of Criminal sexual conduct with minor (victim under 16 yrs of age) and has been sentenced to three years of probation.

One can only hope that the folks at Southwest Licking Community Baptist Church will keep their word and revoke his ordination given his admission of guilt.