David Clohessy and Barbara Blaine

Imagine a school bus driver who says he’s “found God” and is rehired by a school district despite an accident in which his drunkenness injured his young passengers.

Imagine a lifeguard at a municipal pool nearly strangling a child to death, being convicted for assault, then being rehired because he claims God has “healed” him.

No one would argue that these offenders should never be allowed to work anywhere else ever again. Many people favor a “second chance” of some sort for most who commit a crime.

But is there anyone who’d argue that such offenders should be given their old jobs back, driving a bus full of kids or watching a pool full of kids? Surely not.

Yet that’s precisely what’s happening in some of our churches.

A month ago, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal, a Kentucky congregation ordained a once-convicted child molester, Mark Edward Hourigan, just three years after he’d been released from prison.

Three weeks ago, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a Minnesota Baptist church music director pleaded guilty to raping a teenage girl who sang in his choir—“a nearly identical scenario to one for which he was convicted 13 years earlier in St. Paul,” according to one newspaper account.

Two weeks ago, Church of the Nazarene officials were urged to reach out to possible victims of a former youth minister who was sent to be a youth pastor and summer intern at a California church, despite having been convicted of a child sex crime.

For more, read here.