ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606100026
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.
SOURCE: TONY FREEMANTLE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
A JURY WILL DECIDE if a church that performed 23 unauthorized baptisms is guilty of wrongdoing.
Four years ago, Annie Peterson gave her 8-year-old daughter, Martha, permission to attend a carnival at a neighborhood Baptist church for an afternoon of games and contests and what was touted as the ``world's biggest water fight.''
Little did she know as Martha boarded the bright yellow bus and headed up the hill to Cornerstone Baptist Church that her daughter would return drenched in baptismal waters, afraid of eternal damnation, or that the next several years would be devoted to a contentious lawsuit that lays bare the cherished principles of religious freedom and parental rights.
This summer, a jury in an El Paso County courtroom will decide if Cornerstone Baptist Church did anything wrong to Martha and 22 other children. The church invited them for a carnival but subjected them to a sermon about the hellfire awaiting those who do not accept Jesus as their savior, then baptized them without their parents' knowledge. Some children were sent home without the church even recording their names or telephone numbers. None of them ever heard from the church again.
While the church steadfastly and unrepentantly maintains that it was simply exercising its right and duty to save the children from an eternity in hell, the parents of the 23 plaintiffs in the lawsuit believe Cornerstone stepped on their parental and religious rights.
``I'm a born-again Christian; and when I accepted Jesus into my life, I was baptized in the waters,'' Annie Peterson said. ``Yes, I evangelize and try to save souls too, but you don't just corral a bunch of kids, trick them into thinking they are going to a carnival, give them a half-hour sermon and then dunk them in a pool.''
The parents' lawsuit contends that in 1991, 1992 and 1993, Cornerstone Baptist picked up children in neighborhoods throughout Colorado Springs to attend carnivals at the church. Children were solicited directly and through fliers and were promised food, drinks, fun, candy, balloons, prizes, carnival games, a water fight and squirt guns.
Nowhere, the parents contend, did the church mention baptism.
Once at the church, the lawsuit says, pastor Dean Miller and other defendants ``harassed, threatened, intimidated, frightened and shocked all of the plaintiff children ... with threats of the devil, the sting of bees and other such intimidating imagery.''
The children were then ``herded, led, directed, enticed, tricked and inveigled into a room ... where they were directed to remove their clothes,'' leaving them ``naked in that room in front of a host of strangers.''
After being given robes to wear, the children were taken to another room, the lawsuit says, where they were ``submerged in a dunk tank under the guise of baptism; in the alternative they were, in fact, baptized.''
Among the children were Melissa and Chelsie Buckner, the twin daughters of Paulette Lamontagne, who permitted the then-8-year-olds to attend a Cornerstone carnival in May 1993.
``I came home from work that evening, and we were sitting around the dinner table just talking about the day, and I asked them about the carnival,'' Lamontagne said. ``They said, `We were baptized.' I said, `What do you mean you were baptized?' I was shocked.''
Lamontagne said she immediately called Cornerstone to ask what had happened to her children, who had been baptized as infants, and was told by a staff member that the church had a duty to all those, regardless of age, who accepted Jesus Christ as their savior and wished to confirm this through baptism. Despite leaving messages, she said, she never received a call back from Miller.
``Basically, they laughed at us,'' Lamontagne said. ``These guys are preaching family values, and then they do something like this.
``What did this have to do with the family?
``I was raised as a Catholic, and baptism was always a big family affair. Just recently we had a First Communion for a nephew in Chicago, and 14 of us flew out there for it. What [Cornerstone] did had nothing to do with family.''
Cornerstone, an independent, fundamentalist church, would not comment on the lawsuit. But in motions filed in the case, its defense seems clear: What it did as a legally recognized church was protected under the First Amendment.
Apart from that legal argument, the church insists that its carnivals and aggressive pursuit of converts are protected by a greater power: the word of God. In 1993, after the lawsuit was filed, Miller told a Denver reporter that there was nowhere in Colorado Springs his fleet of buses would not go to obey the ``command of Christ.''
Prior to the incidents that spawned the lawsuit, Cornerstone's volunteer staff of runners and bus drivers were required to obtain written permission from parents to baptize children at the carnival. But, Miller said, in the early 1990s the rules were relaxed because ``it slows us down.'' The parental consent rules were later reinstated, and the ministry continues.
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