A former Gateway Church employee who had been on staff for years reached out to me to share two incidents alleged to have occurred. Both incidents are disturbing and illustrate that Gateway is not a safe place. The first incident involves a security incident that Southlake police responded to in 2022. I have reached out to the Southlake Police Department requesting any records of this incident. I will update my post if I receive further information.
Incident 1
On Sunday, 2/27/2022, at Gateway Church – Southlake Campus, there was an incident during a “Night of Worship” event, which occurs once a month. At approximately 5:30 PM (event started at 6:00 PM), while children were being checked into their classrooms, a man dressed in army fatigues entered the children’s area. The children’s area consists of multiple long hallways with classrooms on each side. He entered the hallway where the infant and toddler classrooms are located, shouting and holding a wooden mallet. He began banging the mallet on a locked, unoccupied toddler classroom door, screaming that his daughter was inside.
One of the Southlake Campus children’s pastors tried to calm the man down. A security guard intervened and began pushing the man toward a lesser-used hallway within the children’s area. The man in fatigues started hitting the security guard in the head multiple times with the mallet, and they began wrestling. The guard was bleeding significantly from his head. The Pastor found help, and other security guards and pastors restrained the man until Southlake PD arrived. After his arrest, police found the man was carrying a gun.
To my frustration, there was no mention of the incident from the pulpit in the auditorium (where parents were attending church), and the event continued as scheduled. Police used yellow crime tape to keep anyone from entering the portion of the hallway where the assault occurred. Staff were instructed to inform parents that a “medical emergency” had occurred and to stay clear of that portion of the hallway.
The following Tuesday, during an all-staff meeting, Executive Pastor Todd Lane mentioned that an incident had occurred but did not provide details about the severity of the incident. Pastor Todd mentioned that the security guard would soon be released from the hospital and was going to be okay. As others have attested, the hiding and ‘sweeping under the rug’ mentioned in other stories to keep the church appearing faultless was absolutely expected and par for the course.
From that time forward, the campus stationed children’s church workers at the entrance to the kids’ classrooms to only allow individuals with a child pick-up tag to enter. This was a necessary change, but it was absolutely insane that the church did not alert parents to the incident that necessitated the change.
For several weeks, I monitored social media for the church and Southlake PD. This story was never mentioned again. I believe the security guard was a hero and may have saved lives that night. It was a very scary incident.
Incident 2
This incident was childish and showed incredibly poor judgment by the children’s church staff. It happened at the Gateway North Fort Worth (NFW) Campus, possibly on Easter Sunday 2014 (4/20/2014). One of the children’s pastors donned a rabbit costume, putting the body of the costume on backward and inside out. He walked out on stage in front of the 5th-6th grade classroom. One of the children’s workers snapped a photo (attached), and it was passed around among staff as a joke. The photo made its way to Pastor Robert and the Executive Pastors, who instructed that all copies of the photo be deleted from staff laptops and phones. It was never spoken of again and never addressed with the parents at the campus. According to the staff member in the costume, the whole situation was an accident. As a church, even when dealing with an inconsequential incident like this one, the lack of transparency and cover-up is such a shame.
