Placeholder while loading article actions
Two days after an explosive report concluded that its leaders mishandled and covered up sexual abuse claims, Southern Baptist Convention leaders said at a public meeting on Tuesday that they should apologize to the survivors of abuse and that the great denomination must fundamentally change its culture.
The report released on Sunday sparked shock waves in the country’s largest Protestant denomination. He said leaders kept a secret database of alleged sexual abusers and found that a top leader was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the 13-member convention presidency. .
A lawyer for the SBC’s administrative arm, the Executive Committee, said it was working to make the list of sex abusers available to the public once the committee made sure that the names of the survivors were not disclosed. ensure that the names of the abusers are justified.
Christa Brown, a sexual abuse survivor who has worked on the issue for nearly two decades, said Tuesday she was “out of breath” after watching the meeting online when she saw leaders could publish their secret database. . In the years after she told SBC leaders that she had been abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches in several states, she found herself hostile when she called for reform. He renewed his long-standing call for a church-wide database on Monday when he proposed that the Executive Committee make its existing private list public.
“I think it’s a good first step. I’m glad,” he said.
Still, he said, he is waiting to see what else the SBC leaders do.
“I’m really grateful for what we’ve seen today. I’m also waiting and waiting for real actions and not just words,” Brown said. “No words, no lament, no thoughts or prayers, meaningful real actions that will help the survivors.”
Key Findings of the Southern Baptists Sexual Abuse Bomb Report
The 68-member board met at Zoom to discuss the results ahead of the annual convention meeting in Anaheim, California, next month. Willie McLaurin, interim chairman of the Executive Committee, offered an apology to survivors of sexual abuse.
“I want to tell you: now is the time to change the culture,” he said. “We have to be proactive in our openness, in our transparency from that moment on. That’s the decent thing to do, and it should end there. “
California Pastor Rolland Slade, chairman of the Executive Committee board, apologized and said, “We need to do better.”
“I know that for the survivor community, I can’t imagine the pain you are going through and the pain you have endured for decades,” he said. “But I beg you to be patient with us as we try to understand what is happening, what has happened.”
An Executive Committee lawyer, Gene Besen, said it was important to recognize the survivors named in the report. “This morning, when we meet for the first time, I want to emulate his courage and his strength,” he said.
Besen highlighted a particular moment, in September 2006, when a Convention leader wrote to Brown saying that ongoing communications between the Executive Committee and survivors “will not be positive or fruitful.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be more responsible for the cultural rot of this moment,” Besen said.
The board then filed a statement of apology. He was referring to the letter of September 29, 2006, sent by August Boto, then Vice President of the Executive Committee, to Brown. The statement said that the current leadership of the SBC rejects this feeling of contempt “in its entirety and intends to publicly repent for not rectifying this position and listen wholeheartedly to the survivors.” Collaborating with survivors of abuse is a “critical step toward healing our Convention.”
There was talk of revoking some of Boto’s retirement benefits, which is mentioned throughout the report, which was done by Guidepost Solutions.
Some members of the Executive Committee objected to the approval and submission of the statement because some members were not present and not everyone knew it would be sent. “The problem in the past is that we marked everything,” one member said, urging members not to move quickly on something without understanding all the implications. But this argument did not prevail and members voted to approve the apology. Brown said she was grateful.
“It’s emotionally difficult to instantly erase many, many years of petty cruelty and incivility,” Brown said. “I hope this is a first step, an initial step that really reflects a change in the way survivors will be treated in the future.”
Mike Holloway, a Louisiana board member, raised the question of whether anything that could happen in an individual church or seminary could hold the SBC accountable. This has been a major concern among Southern Baptists who believe that churches are independent of each other. This issue was not resolved at the meeting.
Because the Southern Baptist Convention is a non-hierarchical denomination, key decisions are made by a representative body called the Nashville-based Executive Committee. Guidepost Solutions ’eight-month research focused specifically on the Executive Committee, which distributes more than $ 190 million annually in a cooperative program that funds its mission agencies, seminaries, and other ministries.
Southern Baptist leaders cover up sexual abuse and keep secret database, report says
Leading faith leaders, including SBC presidents, serve on the board of the Executive Committee. However, the Executive Committee has a more administrative role and has no authority over individual churches or other institutions within the SBC, which have their patrons. According to the report, members of the Executive Committee board remained in the dark as a handful of leaders exerted their influence to lie to Southern Baptists, suggesting for decades that they could not create a database of abusers. while they were advised by a legal advisor they could.
The board of the Executive Committee, which is supposed to be made up of 86 clergy and laity from across the country, is in charge of organizing the big annual meeting that attracts pastors and lay people every year. More than a dozen board members resigned last fall after members voted to relinquish lawyer-client privilege, giving investigators access to records of conversations about legal issues between members and the committee staff.
The Guidepost report includes emails between Executive Committee leaders and employees in which members of the survivor community were ignored or “shunned, embarrassed and vilified.” The emails included in the report showed how leaders were more concerned about the responsibility the institution could face than protecting people from sexual abuse.
The report also found that a former SBC president was delayed in reporting allegations of child sexual abuse out of “sincere concern and compassion” by the accused minister, while another former SBC president was fired. a pastor accused of abusing young children without reporting abuse. to the police.
Brown said he hopes the SBC will develop a safe place where Southern Baptists can report clergy sexual abuse and get an independent investigation. The Executive Committee is working with Guidepost to create a hotline so that victims can share what happened to them and receive care.
“There is a long, long history of the SBC saying that to report abuse, they have to go to the local church of the accused pastor,” Brown said. “Going to the church where it happened will never work. It has done enormous damage to the already wounded. It’s like sending bloody sheep back to the wolf’s lair that saved them.”
Brown hopes there will be more discussion about how the SBC can repair the damage it has done to survivors.
“Repentance requires restitution,” he said. “There’s a lot of talk now about what the SCB can do to make it better in the future. That’s great. the damage of abuse, but the damage of all institutional failure ”.