“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?” Matthew 23:29–33

Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, charged the Presiding Ministers of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches with the impossible: They had to vindicate Doug Wilson from charges of malfeasance in two cases fraught with malfeasance. More specifically, they had to justify Doug Wilson’s support of serial pedophile Steven Sitler living in the same home as the child for whom he entertains “deviant sexual fantasies.”

Steven Sitler is a fixated pedophile who molested 25+ children countless times over a seven-year period, and exactly 10 years after his discovery his wife gave birth to his son.¹ From that day forward Mr. Sitler’s legal team pressed the Court to give him 24-7 access to his child, with Doug Wilson’s support. The Court acquiesced sometime before June of this year — while the Presiding Ministers were still drafting their report. And the CREC Review Committee had to account for this in such a way as to protect CREC founder Douglas Wilson. So they did the Kansas City Shuffle.

The Kansas City Shuffle is a confidence game predicated on misdirection. The con artist misdirects the mark to look somewhere else in order to pull off the con. Here the Presiding Ministers did not admit that Steven Sitler was living in the same home as his child and they did not want their mark (the rank & file membership of the CREC) to know this fact. So they wrote lots of irrelevant stuff to pad the page count but they did not state the only fact that mattered: The fixated pedophile was living under the same roof as the child who arouses him. They didn’t mention this once.

Watch the misdirection:

It is crucial that all CREC churches develop policies and practices designed to protect children from predators as much as possible. . . . (PMR 13)

The CREC Presiding Ministers wrote these words at the very time that they knew a Kirk child needed protection from a sexual predator. They misdirect more:

We also urge the CREC Council to adopt an official statement or memorial expressing a denominational commitment to provide adequate and well-equipped pastoral care to victims of various forms of abuse; of course, the statement should show how the gospel applies to both victims and to their abusers. . . . (ibid.)

The CREC Review Committee recommended an official statement or memorial recognizing the need to give pastoral care to victims even as Steven Sitler was living with a child in desperate need of pastoral care.

Now to be very clear and redundant: The pedophile petitioned the Court to live with his son as the Presiding Ministers began conducting their review and the pedophile moved into the same home as his son while Presiding Ministers were still conducting their review. And the Presiding Ministers wrote their report in such a way as to pretend that this never happened.

“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?”

¹ Steven Sitler was discovered on March 10, 2005, and Katie Sitler gave birth to their child on March 24, 2015 (PMR 37) — ten years to the month.