Matt Queen was a seminary professor and administrator at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Southwestern is one of six theological schools affiliated with the nation's largest Protestant and Evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. He was the L.R. Scarborough Chair of Fire theology professor, occupying an endowed chair named after the school's most revered President, and also served as one of the school's provosts.

He is one of many in a long line of suck-up sycophants who haunt the hallways of the denomination's seminaries, mission boards, publishing house and executive committee, trying to hitch their wagons to the small, elite group of insiders who run the denomination. Queen's connections to the theological leader of the "Conservative Resurgence," Paige Patterson, the denominational political movement aimed at making the SBC more fundamentalist and conservative, and thus more Republican right wing, apparently came about while he was a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, during Patterson's tenure there as President.

Southwestern's recent history has been one of having been plagued by Patterson's mishandling and attempted cover-up of allegations of sexual abuse occurring on campus at both seminaries under his leadership at the time. According to the Baptist News Global piece linked above, Queen's involvement included "falsifying records, providing false information to law enforcement and trying to mislead investigators" who were looking into allegations of sexual abuse made by female students. He pled guilty, and was sentenced to a year of probation, six months at home with an ankle monitor. The trustees at Southwestern seminary fired him.

Queen had a job waiting for him when his sentence was up. Not working in a funeral home, or selling insurance or real estate, or cars at a dealer, like most fallen pastors wind up doing when they are no longer spiritually qualified and eligible for a ministry role. No, the job waiting for Queen was a high dollar associate pastorate at a large, well-known Dallas area congregation, being associate pastor of Plymouth Park Baptist Church.

The pastor of Plymouth Park, Matt Henslee, had been one of those voices consistently asking for leniency when it came to Queen. In fact, Henslee downplayed the whole issue with regard to Queen, calling what he did a "mistake," and going so far as to ask the judge for lenency so that Queen could continue to serve as a minister. When that didn't happen, and Southwestern showed some integrity by dismissing Queen, Henslee apparently convinced his congregation to bring him on staff at Plymouth Park.

The judge, expressing the view of a secular state, was pretty clear.

"It wasn't a 'mistake,' it was a plan. And you carried it out until it became clear to you that it simply wasn't going to fly."