Michael Brown, founder of the FIRE School of Ministry in North Carolina, has been accused of sexual misconduct by a former secretary whom he asked to call him “Dad.”

A woman identified by the pseudonym Erin accuses Brown of engaging in a years-long pattern of abuse including unwanted kisses on the lips, handholding and butt slaps, according to reporting by the Christian publication The Roys Report.

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On more than one occasion, ministry staff members walked in on Brown to find Erin sitting in his lap.

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The woman came forward more than 20 years after the incidents, which started when she was 18 and led her to leave the ministry at 21, after Brown served as a mediator in cases of sexual abuse and adultery among other Christian revivalist communities.

Brown is host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program and president, founder, and professor of practical theology at the FIRE School of Ministry in North Carolina. He has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

Three years ago he called Playboy magazine’s decision to put a gay man on the cover a “perversion” and hoped Americans would “learn to celebrate a healthy sexuality within the bonds of marriage, one man and one woman together for life, as intended by God.”

In 2011, he published a book called A Queer Thing Happened to America about the “extraordinary impact gay activism has had on our society, from elementary schools to college campuses, from the press to the courts, and from the world of business to the world of religion.”

The book’s Amazon description says that the book is a diatribe about how schools are trying to “indoctrinate children with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender ideology” with complaints about how men are going to work in heels and universities “endorse homosexual practice,” while anyone who fails “to affirm (or even celebrate) homosexuality and transgenderism” gets called “intolerant and bigoted.”

He has also said that he believes the LGBTQ+ movement will die out soon because “the gay revolution has within itself the seeds of self-destruction” and instructed Christians to “resist the gay activist agenda with courage.”

“Jesus hung out with the tax collectors and sinners, yes, but he didn’t teach them how to extort more money or sleep with more men,” he said on his radio show in 2015 about gay people, who he said had become bullies, according to the Christian Post.

“If you just speak that a child should have a mom and dad today you will be hated, vilified,” he claimed. He also compared homosexuality to polyamory and couples living together without being married

Brown denied Erin’s allegations while admitting to a “definite lack of judgment.” The school’s board of directors has launched a third-party investigation of Erin’s accusations.

“Both Nancy and I were shocked and horrified by the mix of accusations, allegations, false statements, and mischaracterizations,” Brown said in a statement, referring to his wife.  

“Nancy and I did have a relationship with the woman in question and considered her to be like a family member, and she conducted herself as one who viewed our relationship the same way. But she was not a family member, and aspects of my interaction with her, although totally non-sexual in every way, reflected a definite lack of judgment on my part,” he added.

The incidents took place in an environment that explicitly forbids the kind of conduct Brown engaged in.

Brown’s school has strict modesty dress codes and rules about dancing, including at weddings, with restrictions on unchaperoned dating and “very little grace” for those who didn’t meet standards, according to a female student at one of Brown’s ministries.

School leaders asked students to publicly confess sexual sins at services in front of the entire student body for offenses like swimming in a pool with someone of the opposite sex, said a former FIRE staff member.

“It was just like, ‘Purify, purify, revival fire, be holy as God is, live this perfect, blameless, stainless life,’” said one of Brown’s former students.

Erin said she came to a realization she had to leave the ministry after she was told to housesit for Brown and was asked to sleep to in the couple’s bedroom. There, she found an unsent letter Brown had written about a chaste adulterous relationship he’d engaged in with another staff member.

“The letter basically stated that they were having a talking relationship and how they would dream about having sexual relations with each other and what they wanted to do with each other, how she wanted to wrap her legs around him, how he played into it,” Erin said.

She began to see Brown’s behavior with her in a new light.

“It was the realization that what was happening between us was wrong, even though, when it would happen, I would know it was wrong, I didn’t know it was wrong,” Erin said. “When I found the note, I was like, ‘This is wrong. Everything’s wrong.’”

Following Erin’s abrupt departure, other staff members confronted Brown over the behavior they had witnessed.

He called the accusations an attack from Satan.

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