Years of ignored warnings freed a children’s pastor to sexually abuse girls, lawsuit says

This article is part of “Pastors and Prey,” a series investigating sex abuse allegations in the Assemblies of God.

More than a decade before police found dozens of videos of naked children on the computer of longtime children’s pastor Tony Waller, girls at his Assemblies of God church in Arkansas repeatedly warned adults about what was happening behind closed doors, according to a lawsuit filed this week.

The sweeping civil complaint, filed by six women in Craighead County Circuit Court, accuses Refuge Church in Jonesboro, along with regional and national leaders of the Assemblies of God, of dismissing reports of Waller’s abuses — enabling him to groom, molest and secretly film girls for 15 years.

When they were still children, the women say, they told pastors about hidden cameras in a church bathroom. About Waller’s practice of making them strip naked and perform stretches. About the discomfort that shot through them when he put his hands on their bodies.

The earliest reports about Waller reached church leaders in 2000, according to the lawsuit. Again and again over the years that followed, the complaint alleges, church leaders took little action. A senior pastor briefly suspended Waller around 2004 after girls discovered a hidden camera pointing into a church bathroom, then promptly returned him to ministry, where he continued preying on children for another decade, the lawsuit says.

The abuse finally ended in 2015, when Waller’s wife went to police after finding images of naked children on his computer. A year later, Waller pleaded guilty to raping two girls and was sentenced to life in prison.

Stephanie Davis, who says her family went to a senior pastor after Waller drugged and secretly recorded her naked around age 12, said she filed the lawsuit to hold church leaders accountable and force the Assemblies of God to adopt stricter policies to protect children.

“Tony’s in prison for the rest of his life, and that’s good,” Davis said in an interview. “But he’s not the only one responsible for what happened to us.”

NBC News uncovered many of the allegations in the lawsuit last year as part of a yearlong investigation into sexual abuse in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. The reporting revealed a half-century pattern in which churches reinstated accused ministers, failed to alert police and quietly returned abusers to positions of authority. NBC News identified about 200 Assemblies of God pastors, church employees and volunteer leaders accused of sexual abuse over the past 50 years.

NBC News also found that the Assemblies of God repeatedly resisted imposing mandatory child protection measures — including background checks and requirements to report abuse — instead leaving such decisions to local churches.

Survivors described the same devastating cycle: children who tried to warn adults, pastors who minimized or ignored allegations, and church leaders who extended grace and protection to abusers, clearing the way for more children to be harmed.

Davis’ account was one of the starkest examples.

After NBC News’ investigation was published, more women came forward with stories of abuse by Waller and cover-ups by church officials, joining Davis’ legal effort to hold them accountable.

“The Assemblies of God caught this predator red-handed in 2004, holding his camera and his list of nude exercises in their hands,” the women’s lawyer, Joshua D. Gillispie, said in a statement. “Instead of calling the police or protecting vulnerable children, they actively chose to shield the denomination’s reputation and treat a child molester with tenderness and forgiveness at the expense of children’s innocence.”

In a statement, the General Council of the Assemblies of God, the denomination’s U.S. governing body, said it didn’t learn of allegations against Waller until 2015. “Mr. Waller was promptly reported to the appropriate legal authorities, investigated, and his ministerial credentials were dismissed,” the statement said. “This is consistent with the zero-tolerance policy in place at the General Council for decades prior to these allegations.”

The General Council has previously defended its efforts to protect children, saying that it grieves with all victims and that it strongly encourages affiliated churches to adopt abuse prevention measures.

Refuge Church, formerly known as Jonesboro First Assembly of God, didn’t respond to a request for comment. The church previously told NBC News that it implemented enhanced child safety policies after Waller’s arrest, including background checks, mandatory reporting and security cameras.

The church’s former longtime senior pastor, Mike Glover, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, directed questions to his lawyer, Glenn S. Ritter. In an email, Ritter said Glover “denied all accusations of negligence and fault.”

Glover hired Waller to serve as children’s pastor at Jonesboro First Assembly in 1999. Within a year, he began to receive troubling reports about the new pastor’s conduct, according to the lawsuit.

That spring, Jonesboro police and elementary school officials opened an investigation into Waller’s behavior around an 11-year-old girl whom he’d met through a church ministry, according to a police report reviewed by NBC News and cited in the lawsuit.

The report describes allegations that Waller frequently visited the girl’s school, bought her clothes, took her to a hotel parking lot late at night and had her spend the night at his home. In a separate incident, a teacher reported seeing Waller talking to girls on the playground at recess and said he evaded her when she tried to approach him.

Police didn’t pursue criminal charges at the time after the girl denied that Waller had behaved inappropriately toward her, according to the police report. School officials nevertheless barred Waller from campus.

Before closing the investigation in April 2000, a detective with the Jonesboro Police Department — along with a school resource officer and an elementary school principal — met with Glover to inform him about the reports concerning Waller and explain that he had been banned from the school, according to the police report.

Waller remained in charge of the church’s children’s programs.

In an interview last year, Glover, who left the church in 2007 and retired in 2024 after a half-century in the Assemblies of God, told NBC News he recalled the 2000 meeting with police but said the officer told him only that Waller had been spending too much time at the school, making people uncomfortable.

“There was never an accusation of inappropriate conduct with a child,” Glover said.

It wouldn’t be the last time he fielded complaints about the children’s pastor.

A few years later, around 2004, children in Waller’s church homeschool program began a strange daily routine. Davis, a sixth grader at the time, said Waller required girls to enter the bathroom one by one before gym activities, strip naked and perform stretches. He told them they needed to be unclothed so their movements wouldn’t be restricted, according to the lawsuit.

Davis obeyed, she said — until she and the other girls discovered a hidden camera pointing through a hole in the door.

In a separate incident not long after, Davis said, Waller gave her soda in a plastic cup that tasted odd and left her woozy. Panicked, she fled to the church secretary’s office and called her mother. Afterward, she said, her family brought the cup — sealed in a Ziploc bag — and their concerns about the bathroom camera to Glover.

One of Davis’ classmates, Elizabeth Dryer, says she and her mother also met with Glover around that same time to discuss the hidden camera and report that Waller had been groping the girl during physical play at the church, according to the lawsuit.

Afterward, according to the lawsuit, church leaders removed the hidden camera, patched the hole in the bathroom door and suspended Waller for two to four weeks before restoring him to ministry with continued access to children.

“They did nothing about it,” Davis said. “Absolutely nothing.”

Speaking to NBC News last year, Glover acknowledged meeting with Davis and her mother and suspending Waller, but he said the concerns centered on Waller leaving children unattended. Glover said nobody ever reported anything to him about a hidden camera or sexual misconduct.

“That didn’t happen on my watch,” he said. “He would have been long gone. That was never reported to me.”

‘Pastors and Prey’: NBC News investigates sex abuse in Assemblies of God churches

- Assemblies of God churches shielded accused predators — and allowed them to keep abusing children.

- Assemblies of God church leaders allowed a children’s pastor to continue preaching for years after he was accused of sexually abusing girls. He was arrested following NBC News’ reporting.

- An Assemblies of God college ministry glorified a sex offender and enabled him to keep harming students.

- Dozens of boys say they were abused in a Christian scouting program that vowed to raise godly men.

- Assemblies of God pastors call for change after churches fail to oust accused abusers.

About two years later, the pattern repeated, according to the lawsuit.

Another girl at the church says she discovered Waller secretly recording her as she undressed in her bedroom. Courtney Blackburn, who was 12 at the time, previously told NBC News that her mother, Rhonda Kelly, reported the incident to Glover and church leaders. Blackburn is not a plaintiff in the lawsuit, though her allegations are referenced.

Kelly said Glover later told her the church board had prayed about the situation and that God told them it was “a misunderstanding” — Blackburn was simply being overly sensitive.

Glover also disputed Blackburn and Kelly’s accounts, telling NBC News last year that he had no recollection of discussing the matter with them.

Once again, according to the lawsuit, Waller remained in ministry.

The consequences would ripple through a new generation of girls, according to the lawsuit and police records. Two younger women allege in the lawsuit that Waller groomed, molested and secretly recorded them in the same church bathroom between roughly 2008 and 2014.

One, Taylor Perrin, said Waller acted as a fun-loving father figure, playing hide-and-seek and dress-up, only to grope girls during games and film them, according to the lawsuit. The other, identified as Jane Doe, alleges that when she was about 12, Waller gave her a drugged drink inside a plastic foam cup then recorded himself molesting her — video footage that investigators later discovered on Waller’s computer, according to the lawsuit and police records.

In 2015, after Waller’s wife found incriminating images on his computer, investigators uncovered dozens of hidden-camera videos recorded inside the church bathroom and elsewhere, according to police records.

Two more girls, neither of whom is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, came forward amid the criminal investigation and accused Waller of molesting them for years beginning around 2006 or 2007, when they were 10 or 11 — allegations that led to his 2016 conviction. The sisters described being taken to the woods or lured into his church office, where he stripped them and raped them with his finger.

For Davis, the revelations brought horror and vindication. In the years since, she’s begun to turn her trauma into a mission.

The lawsuit is about more than exposing what happened at one Arkansas church, she said. Her hope is to force the Assemblies of God to adopt stronger nationwide safeguards and mandatory reporting policies so no other children endure similar abuse.

“These things could have been prevented,” Davis said, “if somebody had listened.”