Check-in policy implemented after Pawleys Island Baptist church sex-offender arrest
The Brookwood Church in Simpsonville, South Carolina, a Southern Baptist congregation of about 5,000 that operates a preschool, has disqualified registered sex offender Jerry Sidell from serving in any capacity. Sidell, 69, had joined Brookwood in 1999 and held roles including worship musician, keyboard player and member of a small men’s prayer group, despite a 1983 guilty plea in Georgia on five counts of child molestation and one count of enticing a minor for indecent acts.
Senior Pastor Bryan Jones told congregants at a Thursday night meeting that Sidell had been “forthright” with Brookwood leaders upon joining in 1999, disclosing his Georgia conviction and the resulting prison sentence. Without naming Sidell directly, Jones said church leaders had implemented boundaries addressing his participation, including a prohibition from working in or being present in spaces connected to the church’s preschool and student ministries, and a requirement that he disclose his past to leaders of any non-children’s ministry in which he sought to participate.
Yet Jones, who was named Brookwood’s senior pastor in late 2022, also suggested he personally had only recently learned of Sidell’s status as a registered sex offender. Jones told the congregation he reacted by meeting with Sidell and informing him he could no longer perform with the church’s adult musical band or be a member of the small prayer group of adults to which he had belonged.
Brookwood also enacted a new policy requiring “any” registered sex offender attending services to enter through a specific door, check in with the church’s security team, sit with a designated guard and be escorted from the premises at the end of the service. As Jones put it, he and his fellow Brookwood leaders believe in “grace and forgiveness,” but he added: “we felt … there are consequences for actions.”
The new policy was put in place in July or August, according to an individual familiar with Brookwood and Sidell, after authorities in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, arrested Warren Spence Perry on allegations he violated his probation by working at a school and children’s daycare run by a local southern Baptist church. Five other people connected to that church and school — about four hours from Simpsonville — were later arrested on suspicion of illegally concealing Perry’s involvement with children there. Perry, 70, pleaded guilty in 2023 to sexually exploiting a minor three years earlier. A proposed federal class-action lawsuit has been filed at the Pawleys Island church and school.
An individual familiar with Brookwood and Sidell told the Guardian that “Sidell’s sex offender status was not disclosed to many of the people” who served alongside him or encountered him at Brookwood’s ministries, and that “Sidell kept this information extremely private.” The individual said the church has roughly 5,000 congregants.
At Thursday’s meeting, Jones and fellow Brookwood pastor JC Thompson said their own children were Brookwood congregants. “We care about protecting our people,” Thompson said, adding that the church has security cameras throughout its campus. Another pastor, Matt Plunkett, said all church volunteers must take an abuse-prevention class. Jones at one point asked the congregation to pray for victims, and at another, in what the Guardian reported as a clear allusion to Sidell and media interest in him, Jones said: “Satan would love to disrupt what’s happening in this church. He would love to disrupt what God is doing in this church.”
The MinistryWatch Christian-church watchdog website first reported on Sidell in late August. A professional networking page under Sidell’s name described him as a Brookwood church musician since at least 2013. Sidell also founded Rusty Bucket Music, a venue in Gray Court, South Carolina, adjacent to Simpsonville, that according to social-media videos and images has hosted youth performers and patrons since opening in 2019. Videos show Jones and Thompson delivering prepared recorded discussions of biblical scripture at the venue. Rusty Bucket’s website and Facebook page had been taken down as of Friday.
A 1986 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, cited by the Guardian, reported that Sidell at one point told detectives he had molested nine boys he knew from his service as a youth minister at the nondenominational First Christian Church of Jonesboro, Georgia. He received six concurrent 10-year prison sentences. The parents of two of Sidell’s victims — a pair of brothers — sued Sidell for $2 million. The Journal-Constitution reported that the younger son secured a $500,000 jury verdict, but the award was eliminated entirely after Sidell was granted a new trial on a legal technicality. The plaintiffs then dropped the litigation and told the Journal-Constitution that members of their church had ostracized them for going public against Sidell.
Sidell is registered as a sex offender in both South Carolina and Florida, according to a U.S. Justice Department tool, with both registrations listing a Simpsonville home address about a mile and a half from the Brookwood church. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Brookwood did not respond either.
The cases involving Sidell and Perry come amid a broader, years-long reckoning over how the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) — the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. and the second-largest Christian denomination behind the Roman Catholic church, with about 12 million congregants — has handled sexual-abuse allegations. In June 2022, the SBC issued a 205-page document listing hundreds of Baptist leaders and congregants accused or found guilty of sexually abusing children. Neither Sidell nor Perry were named in that specific document. Other religious denominations in the U.S. and across the world besides the SBC and the Roman Catholic church — Christian or otherwise — have also spent years grappling with sexual abuse within their ranks.