Source Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1ErjG6KQLb/
Author: Beneath the Collar
Brookwood leadership wants to stand on the position that they did nothing wrong and everything right. But the actual history tells a very different story.
The Multi-Decade Timeline: Jerry Sidell arrived and started attending Brookwood back in 1999—during founding pastor Perry Duggar’s tenure—and church leadership has publicly confirmed they knew about his 1983 child molestation convictions from day one. When Pastor Bryan Jones took over in 2023, that silence continued straight through to the present. Under neither administration was the congregation ever publicly told they had a convicted child molester among them. Sidell was convicted of sexually assaulting two boys—he admitted to nine. This spans more than two decades across different leadership.
The Real Catalyst for Removal: Sidell’s removal only happened after the Pawleys Island situation came to light. But make no mistake about the motivation: the two churches aren’t connected, and leadership didn’t suddenly grow a conscience or decide to prioritize safety. In my view, they panicked because Pawleys was exposed as having the exact same dangerous reality—a church hiding a registered sex offender’s access to children—and they rushed to dump Sidell purely to cover their own asses before that identical secret blew up.
The Real Focus on the “Leak”: Clearly, information was leaked from inside Brookwood to instigate their exposure. Behind the scenes, leadership’s primary frustration hasn’t been accountability or remorse toward the congregation—it has been intense anger over the fact that internal church communications got “leaked.” Think about that for a minute—you only get that furious about a “leak” when your entire strategy relied on keeping the situation hidden from the people who trusted you.
You cannot manage, enable, and quietly shelter a convicted sex offender for nearly three decades, throw a fit when the secret gets out, and then hide behind vague corporate statements while keeping the congregation in the dark.
