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.
