HOUSTON, Texas — Some members of a congregation in Houston, Texas are calling for their pastor to resign after he admitted to making multiple sex tapes while serving in the ministry when a woman came forward about the matter.
“He’d been preaching multiple times about fornication, about shacking up. And to find out that you’ve been making sex tapes throughout your whole adult life—[as] recently [as] two or three years ago—and you’re a man of God at the highest point in a church,” member Lecobeun Lewis told local television station Fox 26 earlier this month.
He says that he won’t return to Salem Missionary Baptist Church, led by Hosea Stubblefield, 32, until Stubblefield steps down.
“I had been working with him for over a year before he became our pastor. I was sitting in different pastor sermons and it was just disgusting knowing I was betrayed,” Craig Davis, who serves as a deacon and trustee of the 100-member church, also remarked.
He asked Stubblefield to leave the church after learning that he had been making the tapes. Davis said his daughter had also been in a relationship with the minister, who just recently divorced.
Stubblefield, who confessed to the congregation and has also confirmed his sin to the media, refuses to resign. He says that his sins are a matter of the past—that while he had made five to ten tapes over a period of ten years, his last one was two years ago.
He also contends that none of the tapes were made while serving at Salem Missionary Baptist. Stubblefield has been at the location for the past year, but has worked in ministry for 12 years.
“I’m not saying it was right, and I do apologize about it and it was a mistake that was made in my past,” he told reporters last week.
However, some see more than one problem with the scenario.
“If it was two years ago, it shows he was committing adultery, because he was married and he just got divorced [from] his wife,” Davis said.
Some also contend that Stubblefield is not being honest—that he was engaging in fornication even recently.
A woman who only identifies herself as “B. Coll” took to her blog to claim that she had been in a sexual relationship with Stubblefield, but broke it off when she allegedly discovered in September that he had tapes with other women. She posted some clips to her blog, but later took them down.
“Here I am thinking I’m the only woman he’s dealing with in a physical capacity and how dumb of me to believe that! Not only is he putting the lives of these women at risk, because there are tons more, but he uses his position of power as a pastor to do these things,” Coll wrote. “He gets up on Sundays and preaches against every sin he’s committing in these videos.”
Her blog, and the videos that were posted therein, are reportedly what resulted in Stubblefield’s confession to the congregation.
Stubblefield says that he had deleted the recorded files, but they were recovered somehow without his knowledge. He is considering filing criminal charges against those who obtained the videos and has kicked them out of the church.
“They were deleted on the computer and the files were recovered and kept against my knowledge for seven months to basically use against me,” he asserted to Fox 26.
And while he refuses to step down from the pulpit, Stubblefield professes to have learned from the matter.
“Watch what you do today because it could haunt you tomorrow,” he stated. “Just make sure you are as accountable as you can be for your actions at all times.”
1 Thessalonians 3-5 reads, “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication, that every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor—not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God.”
1 Corinthians 6:18-20 also instructs, “Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body, but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
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