Tumult surrounding the Robert Morris scandal at Gateway Church outside of Dallas has reached all the way to the Colorado mountains.
Brady Boyd, a friend and mentee of Morris while serving together from 2001-2007 at Gateway, went on to serve as long-time lead pastor at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Boyd resigned his position on June 18 after being asked to step down amidst court proceedings in the Morris case.
Morris, a past evangelical faith advisor to President Donald Trump and former lead pastor at Gateway Church, resigned from his position in 2024 after admitting to having engaged in a sexual relationship with Cindy Clemishire from 1982-1987, when Morris was in his twenties and Clemishire was 12-16 years old. In March, Morris was indicted with five criminal charges of sexual misconduct. The non-denominational Gateway Church was ranked among the 10 largest congregations in the United States, with an average weekly attendance of 25,805 in 2023 and has reportedly lost thousands of members since. New Life Church reported a weekly attendance of 15,000 the same year.
Court documents revealed that Gateway Church elders knew of Morris’ prior misconduct for years, including while Boyd was serving as an elder at Gateway and while Boyd was being interviewed by New Life Church in 2007.
Boyd addressed the New Life Church congregation on June 8 explaining that he had known that Morris had moral failings in his past but that he did not know until recently the details of Morris’ misconduct with Clemishire. Boyd also apologized for making Morris part of a board that oversaw New Life Church, and he expressed that he felt deeply deceived and betrayed by Morris in this situation.
Despite his apology, church elders and officials at New Life determined that Boyd was not fully trustworthy before the congregation and that some of the information he shared with the congregation was “inaccurate.” Congregants described feeling a betrayal of trust. Boyd was subsequently asked to resign by New Life elders.
A plan to transition leadership to now-Senior Pastor Daniel Grothe was already underway. However, these were not the circumstances in which the church planned for the transition to occur.
“I hate this. This is not how we wanted this to go,” Grothe lamented in his first message to the New Life congregation as their new senior pastor.
Boyd had served as New Life Church Senior Pastor since 2007, reviving and guiding the congregation out of both a headline making sex scandal involving previous pastor and National Association of Evangelicals President Ted Haggard and a deadly shooting that occurred at the church the same year.
Boyd helped launch and foster initiatives to help the disadvantaged in Colorado Springs and led the congregation out of millions of dollars in debt. Across eighteen years, Boyd left a peaceful and prosperous legacy in Colorado’s second-most populous city, something not overlooked by the congregation.
“We love and thank God for the Boyd family, and for Brady’s service to New Life Church,” Elder Scott Palmer stated.
“Their family is an absolute gift to us,” Elder Daniel Grothe expressed.
New Life Church elders displayed no animus toward Boyd. Rather, they sought to act with a display of grief, gratitude, and confident hope in Christ.
Church scandal and trust issues come hand in hand with these problems, often destructively affecting the church community as a whole and within the faith of individual members.
The Morris scandal has had detrimental, lingering effects on the Gateway Church community. Reports show that the Dallas megachurch has since enacted mass layoffs as tithes decreased.
Although Boyd’s service alongside Morris was years after sexual abuse of Clemishire, in Boyd’s response to the news of Morris’ abuse, he betrayed the trust of the New Life congregation, and addressing betrayal of trust is necessary.
Repentance, underwritten by grace, mercy, and love, must be enacted publicly. This, however, means that the reputation of an individual and the church is at stake which is too important to take lightly or handle without extreme care and reflection before taking action.
Events at Gateway and New Life reveal the importance of understanding the seriousness of scandals within Christian churches. The word “scandal” describes the situation at Gateway; it can even be used to describe the situation at New Life. The Christian understanding of the term “scandal” is rooted in the Greek term skandalon which can mean “trap,” “snare,” or “stumbling block.” St. Thomas Aquinas describes scandal as “a word or action evil in itself, which occasions another’s spiritual ruin.”
A well-known pastor displaying moral failings including dishonesty and betrayal can easily be a stumbling block for followers of Christ.
In Matthew 18:6 Christ says, “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
This verse is relevant in the context of responding to scandals involving church leaders, as the gravity of a sin is heightened by the, as Aquinas puts it, “degree of excellence in the one committing it.”
How ought a church respond to the betrayal of trust by a pastor? It is vital that the church treat everyone involved in this situation with dignity while limiting misplaced suspicion and discouraging doubt in Christ and our shared faith.
Aquinas permits public criticism of prelates who demonstrate moral failings, especially when their actions jeopardize the faith. However, he stipulates that such criticism must be delivered “not with impudence and harshness, but with gentleness and respect.”
It must also be stressed that our faith is not in any merely human person or spiritual leader. The one in which we put our faith is Christ, not fallible men.
New Life Church, in their response to Boyd’s dishonesty, models how to handle scandal tenderly, with gratitude for the work of Christ that was done under Boyd’s leadership and with a continued hope in Christ as the church moves forward. While it is still a fresh occurrence, New Life Church can be looked to as a model of how to faithfully address scandal within the church.
More from IRD:
Uncertain Future: The National Association of Evangelicals After Ted Haggard
Reflections on Fallen Church Leaders
Comment by David on June 30, 2025 at 4:08 pm
Personality cults can quickly come to a bad end. There might be the virtue of Methodist itineracy where pastors are not there so long for this to develop. I know of several megachurches which fell on hard times when the original charismatic pastor left, retired, or died. Putting all your eggs in one basket can be dangerous.