A volunteer Southern Baptist task force charged with implementing abuse reforms within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination will end its work next week with out a single name published on a database of abusers.
The task force’s report marks the second time a proposed database for abusive pastors has been derailed by denominational apathy, legal worries, and a desire to guard donations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s mission programs.
Leaders of the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF) say a scarcity of funding, concerns about insurance, and other unnamed difficulties hindered the group’s work.
“The process has been harder than we could have imagined,” the duty force said in a report published Tuesday. “And in reality, we made less progress than we desired on account of the myriad obstacles and challenges we encountered in the middle of our work.”
To date, no names appear on the Ministry Check website designed to trace abusive pastors, despite a mandate from Southern Baptists to create the database. The committee has also found no everlasting home or funding for abuse reforms, meaning that two of the duty force’s chief tasks remain unfinished.
Because of liability concerns in regards to the database, the duty force arrange a separate nonprofit to oversee the Ministry Check website. That latest nonprofit, often known as the Abuse Response Committee (ARC), has been unable to publish any names due to objections raised by SBC leaders.
“At present, ARC has secured multiple reasonably priced insurance bids and successfully accomplished the vetting and legal review of nearly 100 names for inclusion on Ministry Check at our own expense with additional names to be vetted pending the successful launch of the web site,” the duty force said in its report.
Josh Wester, the North Carolina pastor who chairs ARITF, said the Abuse Response Committee—whose leaders include 4 task force members—could independently publish names to Ministry Check in the longer term but desires to make a good-faith effort to deal with the Executive Committee’s concerns.
Task force leaders say they raised $75,000 outside of the SBC to vet the initial names of abusers. That list includes names of sexual offenders who were either convicted of abuse in a criminal court or who’ve had a civil judgment against them.
“To date, the SBC has contributed zero funding toward the vetting of names for Ministry Check,” in line with a footnote in the duty force report.
Earlier this yr, the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission designated $250,000 toward abuse reform to be utilized by the ARITF. Wester hopes those funds might be made available to ARC for the Ministry Check site. The SBC’s two mission boards pledged nearly $4 million to help churches in responding to abuse but have said none of that cash will be given to ARC.
The lack of progress on reforms has abuse survivor and activist Christa Brown shaking her head.
“Why can’t a billion-dollar organization provide you with the resources to do that?” asked Brown, who for years ran a listing of convicted Baptist abusers at an internet site, StopBaptistPredators.org, which aggregated stories about cases of abuse.
Brown sees the shortage of progress on reforms as part of a bigger pattern within the SBC. While church messengers and volunteers like those on the ARITF want reform and work hard to deal with the problem of reforms, there’s no help from SBC leaders or institutions. Instead, she said, SBC leaders do barely enough to make it seem like they care, with none real progress.
“The institution doesn’t care,” she said. “If it did care it could put money and resources behind this. And it didn’t do this. And it hasn’t for years.”
SBC leaders have long sought to shield the denomination and particularly the lots of of thousands and thousands of dollars given to Southern Baptist mission boards and other entities from liability for sexual abuse. The 12.9 million-member denomination has no direct oversight of its churches or entities, that are governed by trustees, making it a billion-dollar institution that, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist outside of just a few days in June when the SBC annual meeting is in session.
As a result, abuse reform has been left within the hands of volunteers akin to those on the duty force, who lacked the authority or the resources to finish their task.
As a part of its report, the ARITF recommends asking local church representatives, often known as messengers, on the SBC annual meeting in the event that they still support abuse reforms akin to the Ministry Check database. The task force also recommends that the SBC Executive Committee be assigned the job of determining easy methods to implement those reforms—and that messengers authorize funding to get the job done.
Church messengers could have a probability to vote on those recommendations through the SBC annual meeting, scheduled for June 11-12 in Indianapolis.
The task force’s report does include not less than one success. During the annual meeting next week, messengers will receive copies of recent training materials, often known as “The Essentials,” designed to assist them prevent and reply to abuse.
This is the second time previously 16 years that attempts to create a database of abusive Southern Baptist pastors failed. In 2007, angered at news reports of abusive pastors of their midst and fearful their leaders were doing nothing about it, Southern Baptists asked their leaders to look into making a database of abusive pastors to make sure that no abuser could strike twice.
A yr later, during an annual meeting in Indianapolis, SBC leaders said no. Such a listing was deemed “unimaginable.” Instead, while denouncing abuse and saying churches mustn’t tolerate it, they said Baptists should depend on national sex offender registries.
Because there is no such thing as a denominational list of abusive pastors, local church members need to fend for themselves when responding to abuse, said Dominique and Megan Benninger, former Southern Baptists who run Baptistaccountability.org, an internet site that links to news stories about Baptist abusers.
The couple began the web site after the previous pastor at their SBC church in Pennsylvania was ousted when the congregation learned of his prior sexual abuse conviction. Before long, he was preaching at one other church.
“We were just, like, how does this occur?” Megan Benninger said.
When the couple posted on Facebook about their former pastor, leaders of their home church reprimanded them, telling them in an email that they mustn’t have made their concerns public. Not long afterward, the couple decided to establish an internet site that might collect publicly available details about abusive pastors.
“Our goal is to share information so people can resolve whether a church is secure or not,” said Dominique Benninger.
To arrange their site, the Benningers modified an e-commerce web site design in order that as an alternative of sharing details about products, it shares details about abusive pastors. The website became a database of third-party information, which is protected by the identical federal laws that protect other interactive computer services, like Facebook.
The Benningers don’t do any investigations but as an alternative aggregate publicly available information to make it easier for church members to seek out out about abusers. That kind of data is required, they are saying, so church members could make informed decisions.
The Benningers have recently placed a hold on adding latest names to their database while Megan Benninger is being treated for cancer. They wonder who will pick up the slack if the SBC’s proposed database fails. They are also skeptical about claims that having a database would undermine local church autonomy—which is a key SBC belief.
“You are only warning them that there’s a storm coming,” said Megan Benninger. “How is that interfering with anyone’s autonomy?”
Members of the abuse task force say the denomination has made progress on abuse reforms lately but more stays to be done.
“We consider the SBC is able to see the work of abuse reform end in lasting change,” the duty force said in its report. “With the duty force’s work coming to an end, we consider our churches need assistance urgently.”
Brown, creator of Baptistland, an account of the abuse she experienced growing up in a Baptist church and her years of activism for reform, is skeptical that any real change will occur. Instead of creating guarantees and never keeping them, she said, SBC leaders should just admit abuse reform just isn’t a priority.
“They might as well say, this just isn’t value a dime—and we usually are not going to do anything,” she said. “That can be kinder.”
