Watermark Community Church has been back in the news again recently when it was discovered that they had a registered sex offender on staff. (Yes, you read that correctly – a registered sex offender ON STAFF.)
His name is Chuck Adair.
Amy Smith at Watchkeep first reported on this last month. Read her post here.
Chuck Adair is currently on staff at Watermark in the Watermark Resources department as a Re:Generation coach, and is also a teaching pastor at Grace Place Church in Duncanville.
Adair was convicted in 1996 of sexual assault of a child and served over 9 years in prison for his crime. he was released in 2005. According to the Texas Sex Offender Registry, Adair will remain on the registry for the rest of his life. I struggle to understand the logic behind a church having lower standards than secular businesses/organizations by allowing a convicted child sex offender to have any ministry position. Our taxpayer funded school systems prohibit child sex offenders from volunteering or employment, yet a church, where there are many vulnerable minors, seems to have no problem putting children at risk.
Why would Watermark Church & Grace Place Church do this, you may ask? Well grace, of course. According to the Watermark Community Church elder statement released on January 6, 2025, the church made the decision to put a registered sex offender on staff for this reason:
“Watermark is aware of Mr. Adair’s status as a registered sex offender and his previous completion of his required community supervision/parole.. While Mr. Adair has no legal restrictions preventing him from visiting our campus, in light of his past transgressions, Mr. Adair has long agreed with Watermark’s leaders that he should not be permitted to provide childcare or volunteer in any ministry to minors. Guided by care and common sense, these boundaries have been upheld throughout his involvement at our church. Mr. Adair’s past has disqualified him from ministering to minors, but it has not disqualified him from the grace of God or participation in the body of Christ through service to other adults–including through our recovery and prison ministries.”
Here’s where I have a BIG problem with Watermark’s decision. They are taking the word of a convicted sex offender over the safety of children. OF COURSE Chuck Adair will agree to any conditions/boundaries placed on him. According to Jimmy Hinton (whose own pastor/father is a convicted child sex offender) sex offenders are REMARKABLY COMPLIANT. They follow the rules to build trust. Watermark elders are fools if they think they can put sufficient boundaries in place to keep a sex offender from potentially preying on more victims.
In the same vein, Grace Place Church issued this statement:
“Mr. Adair has no legal restrictions preventing him from any of the activities which occur at either Grace Place Properties or the Grace Place Church,” the church said. “Both the Grace Place Church and Grace Place Properties families believe in these principles and are active in forgiving and encouraging those who seek restoration.”
Why is it unwise to allow sex offenders to have access to vulnerable persons in faith communities? Jimmy Hinton covers that in these two great posts:
The Best Predictor of Future Behavior is Past Relevant Behavior
Like him or love him, Dr. Phil has some keen observations when it comes to human behavior. I love this quote (above) because a lot of times it’s sadly true. You only need to look at consistent bad behavior in the past to gauge how best to deal with a person. Chuck Adair has provided MORE than enough red flags in his past to warrant concern in the present & for the future. Let’s look at his PAST BEHAVIOR.
Last month, a former youth group member who knew Chuck Adair back in the 1980’s, was a guest on the YouTube channel Culture Proof. To conceal her identity, her face was not shown, and she was referred to as Robin. K.
Robin had known Chuck Adair since he started in ministry in the early 1980’s, and she had a lot to say about his behavior over the course of many years. I’ll quote from the video.
According to Robin, Adair, a 24 yr old married bible school graduate, started working as a youth pastor at Skillman Church of Christ in approximately 1984. In the video interview, Robin stated she was in middle school when she met Chuck Adair in the youth group. Now, as an adult with her own children, she has come to some realizations about what happened back then.
“You know I didn’t realize for a long time that I was a victim and that all of us who were there were victims, and that includes you know, all of the youth kids, the parents, the parishioners at the church, and maybe even the leaders, because he was such a good manipulator.”
This is a very common tactic for abusers – they groom everyone around them. They are charming, likable and polite. You can’t help but like them. This is very intentional.
“I was very close to him, like he was a brother to me. I loved him so much, we all loved him so much. We all thought he was so great.”
Something that stood out to me in Robin’s description of Adair was that he was like a brother to her. Robin was in middle school, and Adair a grown man in his mid-twenties. Why should she be endeared to Adair in this way? The abuser is revealing something about himself – his emotional immaturity. He relates to children/adolescents better than he relates to adults.
“Even though we were watching him be inappropriate, like pulling girls into his lap and being really handsy with the girls, you know we just kind of thought that was just him, and I was not one of the girls who was pulled into his lap. I was not that type of girl.”
Here we have a first hand account that Adair started out in ministry engaging in inappropriate behavior with minors.
Also, abusers will attempt to normalize inappropriate behavior. It might be seen as ‘playful’ or ‘quirky’, like Robin described. Abusers also carefully choose their victims. They will also groom people (that they do not abuse) to come to their defense if accusations arise.
“….but he used me, to well, later on after he was in prison, he used me to get people on his side, which is difficult and I didn’t – I was unsuccessful – but there’s a long history with him.”
Robin goes on to describe Adair’s role at their church, and some of the behaviors/activities that were red flags. (Also see this article, written in 2012, detailing other inappropriate behavior by Adair.)
“He was my youth minister all through high school. I lived across the street from the church and I walked over there all the time. We had youth activities throughout the week. He did not have any adult friends. We were his friends; the kids were his friends.”
“…we went on trips with him. We went on ski trips every year, we went on mission trips, we went to Puerto Rico, we went to Connecticut, New Mexico, South Padre Island every summer. He was being inappropriate with girls in our youth group.”
According to Robin, Adair had LIMITLESS opportunities to abuse. she said this about one of his victims from the youth group:
“One of the girls did testify against him and that was the first that I had realized how far it had gone.”
Describing more of her time in the youth group at Skillman Church of Christ, Robin recalls,
“I became really close with him in high school. I mean I was with him all the time, and that’s how he used me at trial because I testified that he had never put his hands on me, but you know he was able to do what he was doing because there were people like me around who he wasn’t doing it with.”
The host of the podcast then said, “Because then the appropriate relationships become the cover for the inappropriate relationships.”
BINGO
Robin again recalls Adair’s emotional immaturity:
“I was talking to one of my friends yesterday who was in the youth group with me and we were talking about how she said his abuse, he was abusive when he would have tantrums. He wasn’t getting his way, he would tell us he was going to leave or kind of play on us that way like we couldn’t upset him…..he was very childish and would, you know, stomp off and be upset and slam doors.”
When they were on youth group trips, Robin said Adair would be bold in his inappropriate behavior. He would pull girls into his lap and snuggle up with them – in plain sight. His behavior was never called out. “Predators will make the kids feel comfortable, they’ll make the parents feel like ‘there’s nothing to see here.'”
Robin left for college in 1989. The next summer while she was home on break, Adair told Robin he was leaving to go work for a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She said it was very abrupt, and that now after looking back on it, it seemed like something might have happened at Skillman Church of Christ.
While at the church in Oklahoma, Adair engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a college student that had been in the youth group Adair was leading. In this article posted at the Daily Kos, the church was Garnett Rd. Church of Christ. Two years later he left to go work at Golf Course Road Baptist Church in Midland, TX. This is where he met & began to groom a 13 year old by the name of Kristen Berryhill (Berryhill has identified herself publicly).
Robin found out about the incident at Golf Course Rd. Baptist Church when she was told that Chuck had resigned from his youth pastor position because of impropriety with a child.
“I called him and I was like, ‘What is going on?’ and he said that the girl was stalking him, that the dad had come and put a gun in his face and that he was ok. Missy* was gonna stay with him and everything was going to be ok.”
Of course we know that wasn’t true, because after it was discovered that Adair was still in contact with the victim, he kidnapped her and fled to Nevada.
“…and then he was on America’s Most Wanted, because he set up a kidnapping. They had left the shower running and it looked like somebody kidnapped the girl…I got that information from him.”
Let’s recap – Adair started grooming a young teen in the youth group under the guise of ‘counseling’. When she was 15, the abusive relationship was discovered and Adair resigned from the church. The victim’s father hired a private investigator to find out if Adair was still in contact with his daughter. When it was confirmed that he was, Adair STAGED A KIDNAPPING and absconded with Berryhill to Nevada.
Adair was 35 years old.
*Adair’s wife Missy did, in fact, divorce him.
Arrest & Trial
After 11 days on the run, Adair was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada. He went on trial in 1996 and in July of that year, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Without the media attention from America’s Most Wanted, it’s scary to think how much longer he could have been on the run with his underage victim.
While in jail, Robin continued to have contact with Adair.
“After he was arrested, he called me. He would call me collect on a regular basis from prison and he told me that he was bipolar and mentally ill and that was why, you know, he ran off with the girl, which pulled on my heartstrings, because I had been so close to him. I didn’t know about the other two girls at this point, and so he was playing the victim.”
Adair claimed to have had a mental illness, which caused him to kidnap a 15 year old and take her to Las Vegas. Glad the jury didn’t buy that story. Does Adair still claim to suffer from bipolar disorder? Does he take medication? My mother had bipolar disorder and I can assure you that it is a condition that they have to deal with their whole lives.
Robin continues,
“I trusted him and believed that, you know, that he was mentally ill, so he asked me to get people to testify for him, and I tried. I couldn’t – nobody wanted to testify for him, and so I did, and then one other girl in our youth group. The reason, you know, that he used us for, was just to be girls who said that he had never touched us, that we were with him a lot, but never put his hands on us.”
This was Adair’s ‘built-in” defense system. Again, another common tactic that abusers engage in so that they will have people who will defend them when their abuses are exposed.
“At the trial is when I saw one of, you know, a girl from my youth group who was a year younger than me – and then a hysterical girl from the church in Oklahoma, and they both testified that he had victimized them. The one in Oklahoma is the one that he mentioned in the first Dallas Morning News article where he called it an affair, and I’m just like, ‘an affair? No, that was not an affair, no that was not’ and she was hysterical…that was the first time that I realized maybe there was more to the story, but he just kept playing me and my mom actually went and testified for him. There were a couple of people from our church, Billy Fay & Harold Curtis..and they’ve been staunch supporters of him.”
Adair’s victim (Berryhill) was legally emancipated from her parents at age 17. When she was 18, she married Adair while he was in prison – by proxy. ADAIR’S FATHER STOOD IN FOR HIM! She divorced him 2 years later.
After Adair was released from prison in 2005, Robin said he returned to Skillman Church of Christ. At that time, Robin was married with young children and still attending church at Skillman.
“I started seeing things in him that made me concerned. He really downplayed what he had done, even when he had an ankle bracelet on, and he had free rein there – there were absolutely no boundaries on him at all. Then he started teaching bible school and he told me that he was going to be a minister in that church again, and I was like, ‘no your’e not, no you’re not’.”
Robin’s relationship with Adair soured when he was told that he could not be present during the youth group meetings that Robin & her husband were leading.
“My husband and I were teaching the youth group on Sunday nights, and Chuck would come in with his ankle bracelet on, to the gym where the teenagers were, and I told him, ‘You can’t come in here.’ and he did not understand why and he got upset with me. I went to the elders and I went to the lead pastor and I said, ‘Listen, I know him. I know him. This is not safe; you’ve got to put some boundaries on him and he cannot be a leader in this church.’ These are the people that have known me my whole life and they basically just kind of brushed me off, and then we took our family and left that church.”
Robin said that within a couple of years, Chuck Adair was the executive minister at Skillman Church of Christ. I found this digital archive webpage that states Adair is the lead minister in 2016.
“I was blown away, like I couldn’t even believe that had happened and there was a preschool there and so what they were telling the preschool parents was after the article came out, was that ‘Well he married, he married the girl’.”
After the church suffered some setbacks, a couple of former elders’ wives reached out to Robin.
“Several years later, 2016 or 2017, a couple of the elder’s wives, the elders who resigned, they came to me and apologized because they had finally seen his true colors and he was asked to resign or something. That’s when he went to Duncanville (Grace Place) and Watermark.”
Robin said Adair is downplaying the abuse, preaching that he had a problem with lust as a way to minimize the seriousness of his crimes. She says Adair seeks out positions of power.
“Now he’s in prison ministry and that puts him above, kind of, above those people (prisoners). I think he always has to feel like he’s in control in a position of power when he’s in the prisons or ministering to the people in Re:Generation.”
Adair’s has stated that he is a married father of two, but Robin asserts this description is misleading.
“It’s just such a spin because when you read that, you don’t know the whole story. You think that he has been married for years long enough to have adult children, that he has raised a family and he’s a family man and that he’s trustworthy, he’s a minister. He’s never had children, and those children were adults when he started dating their mom…it’s just trying to portray an image that’s not true.” (Adair is on his 3rd marriage)
Robin had some very sobering final words concerning Chuck Adair:
“It took me being and adult and a mom, and you know a volunteer in the church, to realize…and listening to him and him trusting me with information..and just to be present for his pattern and that’s why I wanted to speak to you because people need to know that it’s not just now, this has been going on, this has not ever ended. This started from the beginning of his career and it has continued. He has continued to manipulate churches and people in churches and it’s just been his career.”
Shockingly enough, Robin added that one of the Watermark elders who issued the statement concerning Adair was once a member of the youth group at Skillman Church of Christ, during the years Chuck Adair was employed as a youth pastor.
“Rob Thomas, he’s an elder at Watermark, and I mean he was in youth group with us – he knows, he knows what Chuck has done and he knows how dangerous Chuck is.”
What say ye, Rob Thomas?
How Many Red Flags Does it Take?
There have been so many cases in the news lately of church leaders grooming and abusing pre-teens & teens. Just last week two independent investigations were released, each involving ministry leaders abusing minors:
International House of Prayer (IHOPKC) – Read the Firefly report on Mike Bickle (and other staff), who are credibly accused of clergy sexual abuse.
Frontier Alliance International (mission organization) – Read the GRACE report on Dalton Thomas Lifsey, who is credibly accused of clergy sexual abuse.
A podcast released last week by Sons of Patriarchy, detailed allegations of sexual abuse of minors by OPC pastor Boyd Miller, who is STILL preaching at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Georgia.
In all of these cases, the predatory patterns of these guys is very similar to how Chuck Adair pursued his victims. These men exhibited a lack of maturity, restraint & most importantly – accountability. They would not stop on their own; they had to BE STOPPED. (except in the case of Boyd Miller, who keeps getting the green light to keep his pastoral position.)
I wrote a post a few months ago about Village Church pastor Matt Chandler’s father, Steve Chandler. It was a companion post to a podcast “Whistleblowers: The Village Church Denton“. In that podcast, former TVC members Chris & Anna shared their story of how they discovered that Steve Chandler had confessed to sexually abusing a child (he confessed in a church recovery group) and the church allowed him to remain on staff. He was also leading several recovery groups. This is eerily similar to what Watermark Church is doing with Chuck Adair. They are propping up a confessed (and in this case, CONVICTED) sexual abuser as a ‘trophy of God’s grace‘ (a term used in the TVC statement concerning Chandler), which I find incredibly arrogant.
As I referenced in my post about Steve Chandler, the church continues to be very naive’ regarding sexual abusers and how extremely manipulative they are. I’ll pull some quotes from that post to emphasize the point:
In the book, “Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists & Other Sex Offenders’, Dr. Anna Salter writes:
“It is precisely our lack of knowledge and understanding that gives predators their edge….. What these experiences have taught me is that even when people are warned by a previously founded case or even a conviction, they still routinely underestimate the pathology with which they are dealing. Niceness and likability will override a track record of child molestation any day of the week……“If offenders are just victims, then no one has to face the reality of malevolence, the fact that there are people out there who prey on others for reasons we simply don’t understand.”
Dr. Diane Langberg, a renowned expert in the field of abuse, wrote an article, “How Should the Church Respond to Abusers?” In it she writes,
“To see abuse as simply a wrong action that needs to be stopped (though it certainly does) is to minimize and externalize what is a cancer of the soul and does great damage to the abused…..To abuse a vulnerable child (or adult) is to alter the course of their life. The shape of their life and their sense of self has significantly changed. Those heinous actions are spillage from the heart of the abuser and exposure of the cancer deep within. When the church shows “grace” in response to a few approved words and some tears, we have done added damage to the victim, risked the safety of other sheep and left the abuser with a disease that will rot his/her soul…..Sexual abuse is a cancer; a practiced sin with an underlying, often hidden infrastructure. The abuse is the fruit of that substructure. Roots go down deep into practiced deception which becomes metastasized sin. Abuse is the external exposure of that internal, life strangling system. A response of mere words and emotions is hardly sufficient.
When churches have asked what I recommend when dealing with someone whose has sexually abused children my response is – do not allow him/her to attend church….Do we really think that if we permit an abuser of children into the sanctuary that we can guarantee the safety of the vulnerable? And do we not understand that even if nothing overt occurs, that deceptive heart and mind is feeding off the little ones sitting in the pews, strengthening his/her own sin patterns while looking good?
And this very sobering post from X by Dr. Langberg:
There is no shortage of data and resources available concerning sexual offenders, yet churches TIME AND TIME AGAIN assert their ignorance of not knowing that abusers purposely ingratiate themselves into trust positions in faith communities. Something tells me that a lot of it isn’t ignorance though – it’s a willful choice to elevate a supposed ‘redeemed’ abuser to stroke their own ego, than a genuine concern for vulnerable minors in their congregations. “Look how great we are to show grace to this wretched sinner.”
Pure, unadulterated, ARROGANCE. Arrogance to believe that they possess the resources to deal with a skilled predator.
In my opinion, it appears Chuck Adair honed his manipulation skills in prison, got out and ran as fast as he could back to a church who would fall for his lies. He had a built-in network of supporters just waiting for him to return. While there, he had the audacity to tell former youth group member Robin that he would be a lead pastor again! He didn’t understand why he couldn’t go to youth meetings…I mean the red flags were flying full mast after Adair got of prison. He didn’t learn a thing. After he did make it to the lead pastor position, it appears he was ran off from Skillman Church of Christ.. It looks like he may have had another ace up his sleeve – a former youth group member at Skillman was now at Watermark – Rob Thomas. The good ‘ol boys club strikes again.
I am in the process to trying to obtain the court case records from Midland, TX. According to Robin, there are three KNOWN victims of Adair.
What About Background Checks?
Yes, what about them?
I guess they really don’t mean much in some churches. Convicted sex offenders AND credibly accused sex offenders have been allowed to serve/teach/preach in churches. In 2020, I wrote a story about Jeremy Grinnell, who was a teaching pastor at Bella Vista Church in Rockford, MI – and an assistant professor of systematic theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. His crime? Surveilling an Unclothed Person (peeping Tom). He was stalking his former office assistant.
After his conviction, he was back to preaching & teaching – didn’t even skip a beat. If you input his name in the search bar on YouTube, you can see how many times he was preaching sermons while having a criminal conviction on his record. It happens all the time. Actual pastors with criminal records for sex offenses being allowed to lead/teach at churches! A very brief Google search pulled up these pastors who were leading churches and/or ministries WHILE HAVING A CRIMINAL RECORD ON FILE!
DON LOGAN – Eternal Church, Fort Mill, SC
STEVEN WILSON – Gateway Church, Southlake, TX
BOBBY PRICE – Camino Church, Charlotte, NC
Say it isn’t so!
I recently reached out to a church to inquire about their child protection policies. I received the standard boiler-plate response of “we do background checks, etc”, but knowing what I now know, I pressed in a little more. Here was my follow up question:
“If there are allegations made of abuse, and it involves a staff member or ministry worker (adult or youth), how would this be handled?”
And the church’s response:
That’s a great question. If we did have a question or an allegation arise, we would first review the camera footage and watch and listen to what actually happened. If we were able to review the footage and clear the individual, we would. However, if for some reason we felt like the incident was actionable we would follow the required reporting procedures with the state of Texas. While we love and appreciate every one of our volunteers, we take the safety of our children very seriously. I hope this answers your question. “
Pefect example of how churches are so ill-informed on how to handle abuse allegations and why so many things get swept under the rug. It is NEVER EVER the church’s job to investigate sexual abuse allegations. Call the police immediately! Never leave it in the hands of the church staff to investigate. They are not qualified nor equipped to conduct investigations.
Dr. Diane Langberg is a hero of mine. She wrote a couple of posts a few years ago in regards to how the church should deal with sexual abusers. I will defer to her professional opinion on this matter 100% of the time. Bottom line – child sexual abusers have no right nor should be permitted to attend church services where minors are present. Period. They have violated the bodies and minds of precious children, who will be forever scarred by the crimes committed against them. The consequence of those crimes (for the perpetrator) is loss of access, loss of opportunity and segregated worship/bible study where no minors are present.
Links to Dr. Langberg’s posts referenced above: