A 45-year-old Grovetown man is accused of sexually exploiting and soliciting a 14-year-old girl from his church by contacting her online and eventually sending her an inappropriate picture.

Jason Alexander Shumaker of Taylor Circle was charged Tuesday with solicitation of minors and sexual exploitation of children.

The frightening situation erupted over the summer when the girl’s father discovered that Shumaker had been texting his teenage daughter since July 13.

According to a report, the suspect knew his daughter from Woodlawn Baptist Church on Columbia Road in Grovetown.

According to a sheriff’s report, the father told police that the text messages, full of getting-to-know-you questions and compliments, were “creepy.”

In his messages, he told the girl that his friends call him “Jay,” but he did not give his real name and hid his identity by texting from a fake number. In the texts, he also revealed that he usually sat on the left side of the church.

The father believed the messages were an attempt to build trust and a relationship with his daughter and were “borderline inappropriate,” a report said. While the messages, shown to an investigator in July, did not immediately appear criminal, they escalated by Aug. 13, when Shumaker sent the girl a picture of his erect penis, an arrest warrant said.

Before the pornographic image was sent, officers investigated the case by forwarding the text messages to a Woodlawn pastor, Johnny Rockefeller. The pastor identified Shumaker as a possible suspect and said the man was “relatively new to the church” and had been going for about seven or eight months. Pastor Rockefeller described the suspect as being in his early 40s, married and a father of two, who often wears a smock to church and sits on the left side during services.

The sheriff’s investigation led to the arrest this week and Shumaker was released on bail.

An arrest warrant for sexual battery of a minor states that Shumaker sent messages to the minor from July 13 to August 13 “in a pattern of conduct intended to entice the minor to commit a sexual offense.”

In Georgia, a person is guilty of solicitation of a minor if he or she “knowingly and intentionally engages in a particular pattern of conduct or communication in person, through a third party, through the use of an electronic device, computer, social media or text messaging, or by any other means to gain access to, compel the consent of, prepare, persuade, induce, or coerce a minor to commit a sex offense or trafficking for sexual servitude.”