Baptist News Global: Twelve Steps the SBC Should Take Now to Address Clergy Sexual Abuse
The linked article is authored by three survivors of clergy abuse in a Southern Baptist church and the fourth, David Clohessy is the former director of SNAP, Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests.
The three Southern Baptist survivors of abuse who helped author this article have concluded, after three years of trying, the Southern Baptist Convention is still not successfully dealing with this crisis. While all three of them have spoken out about their own abuse, and the difficulties they encountered in their various churches following the revelations of what happened to them, the denomination itself did not step up with any real appearance of action until The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News broke the story in 2018.
While those investigations were met with a reaction of surprise, and horror at what had happened, they threw the convention body, made up of "messengers" who are delegates elected by each affiliated church, into a flurry of actions that have led to a private, outside investigation by a neutral legal firm, a set of recommendations including development of a ministry to recovering victims as well as a proposal to establish a data base of credibly accused abusers so that they will not be able to move from one church to another, under the cover of "local church autonomy." More than half of those who have been involved in sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church went on to serve in at least one other church, and have multiple abuse accusations from members of several churches.
Resistance at Every Step From the SBC Bureaucracy
The governing structure of the SBC is a holdover from the remnants of the old Confederacy. Each church is an independent, autonomous body, and can effectively cooperate with, or ignore, the denominational structure as it chooses. Each church calls their own vocational ministers and is responsible for ordination, sets its own doctrine and theology in place, and governs its own business and ministry. It is affiliated with the denomination for the purpose of cooperating in a missions enterprise and in theological education provided for its pastors and missionary personnel. Theoretically, the executive committee, and the denomination's officers, have no ecclesiastical authority over any church.
Theoretically.
In practice, they have, since a movement known as the "Conservative Resurgence" came to power in 1989, become much more ecclesiastical in demanding that churches accept narrow interpretations of Biblical doctrine in order to remain "in friendly cooperation," and churches are manipulated by the threat of being disfellowshipped, or kicked out of the denomination, if they deviate too much from what is accepted. The claim is that this isn't "ecclesiastical authority" doesn't hold water. Being in friendly cooperation is a manipulative threat held over the "independent, autonomous" congregations to coerce their agreement. In the past, that threat usually caused churches to get back in line. But in recent years, more of them have chosen to leave than to comply, some of them quite publicly and even proudly take the exit ramp.
Failing to adequately and biblically deal with ministers who are credibly accused of sexual abuse within a church is a reason for the credentials committee of the SBC, the group with the authority to investigate and remove recalcitrant congregations, to declare a church "not in friendly cooperation." But that is far less likely to happen than a church being kicked out for calling a female to serve in a ministry position with a job description that makes her a "pastor."
Ever since the two Texas newspapers made millions of Southern Baptists aware of the scandal going on in their denomination, their investigation limited to a small segment of the denomination turned up a scandalously huge number of reports of clergy abuse in local churches, there has been resistance from the bureaucratic side of the denomination, and the supporters of its leaders, to taking any kind of action that would acknowledge there was a problem and that something needed to be done about it. Instead, what has happened is that those victims of abuse in SBC churches who dared speak up have been vilified, in some cases had the circumstances turned around onto them, making them responsible for getting raped and abused, refusing to provide any comfort or ministry as a result of what they endured, and in several high profile cases, publicly shaming and blaming the victim for coming forward, and accusing them of being agents of Satan bent on attacking "God's men" in the pulpits of churches.
And there are those in the bureaucracy who are moving heaven and earth to prevent the denomination from acknowledging that there is a problem and doing anything about it. The delegates to the annual meetings, known as "messengers" from the local churches, in the first couple of years after the revelations of the scandal were made public, took several votes to over-rule the bureaucrats by sheer majority votes. This resulted in the resignation of about a fourth of the executive board, along with the executive director of the board at the time. But that change hasn't yet produced the kind of results victims were hoping to see.
In this conservative, Evangelical denomination, where right wing politics has infiltrated the doctrine, theology and practice of many churches, victims are turned into attackers, and any victims advocates within the denomination are labelled as "woke liberals," whose intentions are to use the #metoo movement to infiltrate churches with feminism and liberal theology. These anti-Christian accusers and their attitudes and accusations make attending annual SBC gatherings an endurance contest by victims who keep showing up in the hopes that their presence will prompt real change.
So far, their perspective on what has been achieved is less than nothing.
Victims Have Some Proposals for the SBC to Hear and Consider
The SBC bureaucrats have a real problem listening to people who know more about something from experience than they do. They act like they have been given "immaculate perception" when it comes to denominational matters and their actions are equated with the inerrant, infallible scripture in which they claim to believe. There's an arrogance that becomes very ugly and un-Christlike resistance to anything that appears to challenge their power or influence. The victims of abuse in Southern Baptist churches, many of whom show up at the annual convention to continue to remind and encourage messengers to do the right thing, and work to stop this abuse, have endured grievous attacks that make their presence almost unbearable for them, as many of them have publicly testified.
To use a biblical term from the book of Revelation, I believe that this sexual abuse issue, and the manner in which the leadership of this denomination is handling it, is causing God to "remove their lampstand" from its place. The SBC is experiencing monumental, unprecedented membership and attendance decline, more than 25% in less than a decade, more than the fractured United Methodist Church has experienced. I think there are two things responsible for this, one of them is their close association with a worldly insurrectionist politician who worships a god of materialistic greed, and their treatment of those among them who resisted and told the truth, and the other is the manner in which they are handling this sexual abuse crisis.
Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. Jesus, the Christ, Matthew 24:40.
What they've done to Jesus is throw him under the bus.
No comments:
Post a Comment