re: 22 arrested in child sex sting in Pensacola

14, 22

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David Donald Hoppenjan, 52, a pastor at the First United Methodist Church of Pace. According to his arrest report, Hoppenjan allegedly traveled to two locations with the intention of having intercourse with a 14-year-old boy.

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Damn...

John staples post here fwiw

All of them could be an avy

Houston version:


Article

pics

With screen names-

Scary..there's that many losers willing to do that shite.

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The over/under is 5 for how many post on TD.....go.

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Tjgator is definitely one..

That's true.

quote:

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David Donald Hoppenjan, 52, a pastor at the First United Methodist Church of Pace. According to his arrest report, Hoppenjan allegedly traveled to two locations with the intention of having intercourse with a 14-year-old boy.

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I've met him, and let me just say this, sort of preemptively:

I'm presently in seminary and going through the process to get ordained in that conference, Alabama-West Florida, of the UMC (to teach, not be appointed to serve in a church). The amount of psychological testing and otherwise vetting that the UMC does before allowing candidacy for ordination is top-notch. People get denied. The "claim to fame" of the process that they still talk about is Jim Jones being refused and effectively kicked out, obviously before he went off the major deep end. But clearly it doesn't work all the time. There are messed-up people out there, and unfortunately the church can be an attractive place for those kind of people to go to. I wish it was realistic to catch all of them beforehand, but it's near-impossible when background checks and the like require a criminal history to flag somebody.

I'm only 23 right now, so Lord-willing I've got a decent amount of time left before I kick the bucket. That will hopefully mean a decently-long life as clergy in the UMC. I cannot stand the fact that I know that I'm going to come in contact with other people like this moving forward. But the thing is, there's no way this dude made it into 52 years, the last 12 or so in "ministry," doing this kind of thing without anybody noticing, or at the least any red flags popping up. Clearly, however, no one ever spoke up or did anything about it. I'm This kind of thing has to change. People need to start speaking up. I get more and more scared to death at the prospect of raising my future kids in this world because of messed-up people - people like these guys, people like the Columbine guys, people that are severely messed-up in the head, and just how awful society can be in general.

I feel absolutely awful for the kids, all the kids that he has been around, and nothing makes me feel more inadequate for ordination than the pure anger and rage that starts to build up when I hear about this sort of thing.

Sorry for the long post, I just can't stand how people (not in this thread) have taken the immediate response of blaming the Church in all this. It's a human institution. Humans, all of us, are pretty screwed up in one way or another. Unfortunately, that's life, and there's not much in the grand scheme of things that we can do, but we all should and need to be doing what little we can.