The Predator In The Pulpit
Throughout the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ, the Bible describes numerous times where children were present for his preaching.
A congregation including children is consistent across the old and new testaments and is something that is still appropriate to practice in churches today.
It is a great blessing to have family integrated services, Sunday school classes, and other Bible-oriented activities for children in or around a church building.
While that is true, there remains too many of the sort who would use those opportunities for spiritual development and turn them into opportunities to commit permanent, damaging sexual deviancy.
We can see in Luke 17 how scripture points us to the severe punishment Jesus prescribes to those who cause an offense to a child:
“2 It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”
The reason why we need to understand the gravity of the situation in God’s eyes when someone offends a child or multiple children is so that we don’t develop a root of bitterness in our own walk with the Lord when the time comes where the tares are finally distinguished from the wheat.
Looking statistically at predatory behavior within churches (and that’s using that term loosely), the Evangelical Council for Abuse Prevention shares these damning numbers in their reporting.
Additionally, according to the same source, “only 12% of child sexual abuse is ever reported to the authorities” and a range of up to 80% of those who were preyed upon don’t share their story until adulthood.
This could be for a number of reasons, of course, but ultimately the root of the situation is fear.
Fear of what the community at large might think, fear of what family might say when they speak up, and even a fear of what they think God will do to them if it impacts or disrupts a popular ministry.
But in facing this truth, we must not back away from dealing with the wolves.
In fact, Jesus promised that there would be wolves in sheep’s clothing all around those who believe in the biblical gospel.
Those same wolves are also called false teachers or false prophets because the things that they teach are heretical, hell-bound theologies that do not rely solely on the finished work of Jesus Christ.
Of the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, nothing is more important than trusting that you are saved by grace through faith alone and that Jesus paid the full price for your redemption with His blood.
From this position of sanctification, the believer can continue the mission assigned to them by Jesus to tell others about the love of God and what is done for them according to the scriptures.
They don’t do this to earn, maintain, or even improve their standing before the Lord because if you’ve been sanctified by the blood of Christ, it is finished — to deny that your sanctification is finished is to deny that you are forgiven.
And to deny that same restoration of access that we receive through faith alone is to stand in a place of assumed authority instead of what the scriptures say — this is a dangerous place for even a wolf to be.
The thing about wolves is that they travel in packs, there’s an order to things, and there’s always a purpose or a destination for the group.
However, when wolves meet sheep, bad things are bound to happen. This is even more the case when there is a mixed multitude and magnified beyond that when the wolf is in the pulpit.
When this happens, good things tend to get tainted because the heart motivation is corrupt at the core.
Good things like Bible reading, sharing the gospel with others door-to-door, and even church attendance and tithing all become things twisted from the pulpit to triangulate the congregation and encourage one-upping your brother or sister in Christ instead of doing those things from a place of love.
While winning souls to the Lord is never a bad thing, when scandals happen in the wrong church those good things are used as a false balance that is manipulated in such a way to make the wrongdoer infallible if they’re popular enough.
And if you put a predator in those conditions, they will thrive and the window of opportunity they see for themselves is worth the carefully constructed social mask that they know they must perform with to gain access to victims.
For the congregant, it becomes of the utmost importance to not mistake the things that come off as confidence and charisma for character.
As in any performance-based ritual culture, churches that house these wolves can’t handle a challenge to their traditions without killing something in the process.
Maybe they kill the zeal of the believer that spoke up, or attack them with things shared in confidence to minimize the error in the church— but ultimately, the wolf’s goal is your soul.
If you speak up against those who trust in themselves and their own efforts to get them to heaven, we know from stories like that of Cain and Abel that one side is willing to always resort to violence to settle their rage against grace.
Resting in the finished work of Christ is just too easy for them.
So when they see the favor of God in your life without the amount of works they’ve been relying on for self-righteousness, they are provoked to evil — and now, we’re marking a wolf many have thought was a shepherd.
Stephanie Loewen grew up in Northern California attending Regency Baptist Church under Pastor Stephen Nichols.
As a child in the fundamentalist environment there, she was not exposed to the same things other children and young adults would see and experience out “in the world”, so to speak.
Movies, books, and other influences that might impact the development of other children were simply not a factor for her over an extended period of time until about the age of 11, when she met Roger and Abraham Jimenez.
The two young boys were at least four years older than her, and had moved to the area after being kicked out of a previous environment for bad behavior near San Francisco.
Both Roger and Abraham were named by Loewen publicly in an interview aired three years ago that has still never received a public response from Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California despite the severity of the accusations levied against the Jimenez brothers.
According to Loewen, she first experienced intense attention through handwritten notes and pointed compliments from Roger Jimenez while he was 15 and she was 11.
Due to what she describes as “daddy issues”, she enjoyed the attention initially even though she knew that it was beginning to cross into inappropriate territory and that her innocence was what the brothers were after.
As a result of what she describes as “grooming” by Roger Jimenez, he also attempted to coerce her to go to Venezuela with him and to run away in another country through his family connections.
Beyond this, she also shares that Roger pressured her into kissing him as her first kiss and him also touching her back area followed by him tearing her down with his words about how impure and unholy she now was for her future husband.
Loewen goes on to describe that both Jimenez brothers used the facade of a friendship with her brother to gain access to her in private environments for the purpose of attempting inappropriate sexual behavior.
She alleges Roger and Abraham did this repeatedly with other families at Regency Baptist Church and in groups where there were girls available to them by proximity as young as nine years old.
Shortly thereafter, Loewen describes that there was both a meeting with Pastor Nichols about the inappropriate relationship with Roger Jimenez and that Pastor Nichols blamed Roger’s conduct on her being too tempting for him, even at 11 years old.
Abraham Jimenez then preyed on her in similar ways while he was 17 and she was now 12 that following year.
Following Abraham’s pursuit of Loewen, her family moved away from the area for several years before moving back around 2005 — she describes Pastor Roger Jimenez is now in a leadership capacity at a new church and is now in his 20’s while she is now 15.
Upon her return to Northern California, Loewen says that Roger began trying to flirt with her and gain control over her again, including attempts at an inappropriate physical relationship.
“I’m not eleven anymore,” Loewen recalls saying to Roger Jimenez at this time.
Loewen also alleges that up to just one week before Roger Jimenez married Joann Jimenez that he was having inappropriate sexual relationships with other young girls, including a girl who “had not graduated high school yet.”
In her interview, the topic of the celebrity status that Roger Jimenez had attained while in the New IFB came up because of the fact that his infamy began during protests against his praise of a shooting in Orlando.
Loewen expressed disbelief when talking about how she doesn’t see how someone who preyed on her like Roger Jimenez could suddenly change and now preach so strongly against [sodomites] and pedophiles.
Jimenez presented himself in such a way within the New IFB circles that he came across as the more calm, cool, and collected one opposite of his co-founder to the movement, Steven Anderson.
Pastor Roger Jimenez would also host the annual Red Hot Preaching Conference for the New IFB out of his church building where other pastors from connected or like-minded churches came together for a four-day conference and preached on hot-button issues as well as current events.
The New IFB collapse began in late 2024 as several churches and pastors, including long-time friends of Steven Anderson and Roger Jimenez, broke fellowship publicly after Pastor Anderson was accused of hellish levels of psychological, emotional, and physical torture in his own home by his four eldest children.
Despite having a friendship that both say was 20 years and counting, Jimenez refused to condemn or condone Anderson’s behavior.
In reaction to the allegations, Anderson doxed his brother and called for people from his church to harass, stalk, and intimidate him — Anderson also prayed from the pulpit for his own children to die because of their testimony.
Given the gravity of this behavior, it is understandable now why Pastor Jimenez wanted you to not know about his own skeletons in the closet from times past — because he too, like Steven Anderson, by definition, is disqualified.
