A COMMITTED Christian must get special permission before he visits any church in the country because he abused a nine-year-old boy in York 20 years ago.

York Crown Court heard Daniel Shaw, now 43, stayed with a local family who had a nine-year-old son when he spent three months at Acomb Christian Fellowship working with young people in the early 1990s.

Nicholas Adlington, prosecuting, said Shaw indecently assaulted the boy on five occasions in the child’s bedroom.

Shaw’s barrister, Chris Tehrani, said: “At this particular time the defendant was struggling to come to terms with adulthood, his sexuality and in particular his religion and the impact of his sexuality on his religion.”

One of the 12 elders of Shaw’s current church in West Yorkshire sat in court and other church members gave character references for Shaw when he was sentenced for five charges of indecent assault.

Mr Tehrani said the church, which Shaw was not linked to at the time of the 1990s incident, had carried out a “full investigation” and decided Shaw had not behaved inappropriately while acting as a volunteer with its own youth work.

He was still part of the church but had stopped doing youth work. The church has 800 to 900 worshippers.

Judge Shaun Spencer QC said Shaw’s crimes “indicated a betrayal of the trust on the family who offered you hospitality”.

He made a five-year sexual offences prevention order that bans Shaw from attending any church without the informed consent of its child protection co-ordinator, stops him staying in the same home as any child and having unsupervised contact with any child.

Shaw, now of Colders Lane, Meltham, near Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, pleaded guilty to five charges of indecent assault.

He was given a community order with three years supervision, 150 hours unpaid work and told to go on a sex offenders’ treatment programme.

Shaw has also been placed on the sex offenders’ register for five years.