An evangelical pastor who led his church as "cult" has been jailed for six years after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two female members of his congregation.

The judge who sentenced Howard Curtis, 73, today condemned a “gross abuse of trust” by the former senior minister at Coulsdon Christian Fellowship (CCF), who was convicted of eight charges at Croydon Crown Court in March. 

During his trial the court heard how Curtis, now of Bloxworth Close, spanked naked parishioners for his own sexual gratification between early 1980s and July 2013, when he was arrested and stepped down from the church in Chipstead Valley Road.

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He had claimed the abuse formed part of mental health treatment inspired by a doctrine known as Christian Domestic Discipline and said one parishioner had submitted to spankings because God said it “would release a frigid spirit from her".

But a jury found him guilty of six sexual assaults and two assaults on March 24 after a retrial, which followed the collapse of an earlier trial last year.

Judge Peter Gower told him this morning: "These are serious offences involving, as I have indicated, a gross abuse of the trust that was invested in you and of your position within the church. 

"This was sexual abuse for your own sexual gratification.

"It involved a gross breach of trust by a man whose station within the church put him in a position of very considerable power, who was not, the evidence revealed, answerable to any other person.”

Curtis spanked one of his victims on between 10 and 20 occasions, during one of which she suffered severe bruising.

He had told her the sessions would improve her sex life with her husband.

Curtis was cleared of two counts of child cruelty, two counts of indecent assault, one count of causing grievous bodily harm, a further charge of sexual assault and one count of assault by penetration.

His lawyer Julia Flanagan, in mitigation, said the minister had been "thought highly of" by many parishioners.

She added: “He is in many respects a spiritual man, and a religious man, and in many respects he is a good man."

Speaking after the sentencing hearing, the former minister’s wife Marilyn Curtis, 70, insisted her husband's motives for the abuse had been strictly religious. 

She told the Croydon Guardian: "I just want to say that I love my husband dearly. 

"I know that what he did was for a spiritual motive, not sexual.

"He is mortified that people are against him, because he never intended any harm to anyone."

But earlier Judge Gower had said: "It is clear to me from what [the victims] say in [their] statements and from what emerged in the course of the evidence that your controlling, bullying and, as the jury found, criminal conduct has had a lasting effect upon them."