A $25 million lawsuit filed in 2022 against Cornerstone Fellowship Church and Pastor J. Chris Morgan has been dismissed by Judge Jeffrey W. Shaw of Mathews Circuit Court.
According to the judge’s order on the matter, the dismissal, with prejudice, was the result of a joint motion by the plaintiff and the church. Shaw ordered that it be stricken from the docket of active cases and “placed among ended causes.”
The plaintiff was a young man who was sexually abused in 2018 at the age of 15 by a former youth pastor at Cornerstone, Kenneth Scott Marshall. Marshall was convicted in September 2019 of one felony count of forceful sodomy by intimidation against a 15-year-old boy with a disability. In February 2020, he was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison, and the civil suit was filed four months later.
The suit alleged that Morgan was aware of Marshall’s prior criminal history and drug use but took no action to investigate his fitness to be a youth pastor. It stated that the church had a “d...