Jules Woodson remembers the spark of hope she felt when a sea of yellow ballots went up across the hall on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in 2022. The vote in favor of abuse reform following a watershed abuse investigation was her sign that the messengers cared about victims like her and were willing to listen and make changes.
At this 12 months’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, the recommendations on abuse reform passed again, with one other wave of 1000’s of ballots, but she teared up for a distinct reason: disappointment over how little had been done.
SBC entities have pledged tens of millions to fund the cause. The convention has repeatedly voted in favor of abuse prevention and response efforts by overwhelming margins. Task forces appointed by the convention president have volunteered their time to develop training resources, a database of abusive pastors, and an office to oversee the continued work of abuse reform.
“For messengers for whom abuse isn’t on the forefront of their minds, they think, Oh, we’re doing good,” said Woodson, whose testimony of abuse by her Texas youth pastor launched the #ChurchToo and #SBCToo movements six years ago. “But there’s so far more to be done.”
The abuse victims and advocates calling for reform within the SBC are actually watching Southern Baptist leaders inside the convention attempt to navigate the sorts of denominational hurdles and roadblocks they faced for years from the surface.
“We’ve been told over and all over again, You can’t do that, you may’t do this,” said Mike Keahbone, a candidate for SBC president who serves on the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF). “You need to ask yourself, Why on the planet are we being fought so hard on this issue? … Either you don’t really think there’s an issue otherwise you’ve got something to cover.”
On Tuesday, the duty force celebrated a recent curriculum to assist SBC churches reply to abuse, however the long-awaited database stays empty, and there’s no “everlasting home” to oversee abuse reform once their work expires this week.
The messengers in Indianapolis voted to affirm those priorities and to pass the work of the duty force onto the Executive Committee, the body that handles SBC business outside of the annual meeting, and its recent president, Jeff Iorg.
“Abuse response and prevention efforts grow as we raise awareness, and so I’m thankful to see the wonderful work done on the essentials curriculum,” said Keith Myer, a Maryland pastor who has spoken up for the cause, in a press release to CT.
“I’m concerned that a set of relatively easy components in a whole protection system feel controversial and unachievable. A database is smart and solves the issue of communicating about bad actors across our 50,000 churches. A everlasting home for abuse gives churches and pastors someone to refer to after they encounter a crisis, and solves the issue of finding help after they don’t know what to do.”
ARITF chair Josh Wester explained that they learned in January that insurance liability concerns prevented significant, robust reform efforts—including the database—from being hosted by the convention itself. After the duty force suggested forming a recent nonprofit to launch the database independently, they now not had access to their funding. The entity heads who offered $3 million said it couldn’t be used outside the SBC.
Wester, a pastor from North Carolina, said the duty force did all they might and that members were “beyond frustrated” to not present the database they’d readied with over 100 names before hitting hurdles inside the SBC. “You only have the means to take the steps you may pay for,” he told reporters. “It has been an actual struggle for us.”
The task force has raised $75,000 on their very own to fund the independent Abuse Reform Commission. They’re confident the Executive Committee won’t let the database website go empty for an additional 12 months, and a few survivors feel particularly hopeful about Iorg’s leadership. He steps into the role after serving as president of the SBC’s Gateway Seminary in California and has voiced a commitment to assist.
Those pushing for reform knew the method can be slow—but it surely still feels discouraging that even the essential things and first steps they’d laid out aren’t happening yet.
Grant Gaines, a pastor from Tennessee, is worried about losing the importance of the moment as implementation continues to get delayed.
“The survivors told us from the start that is going to be hard and to expect roadblocks, even from people you want and trust,” said Gaines, who recommend the 2021 motion calling for an investigation into the Executive Committee’s abuse response.
The concerns over liability and funding that the ARITF got here up against over the past two years reflect some ongoing reservations in regards to the convention’s attempt to handle abuse—particularly because the dollar amounts proceed so as to add up.
From the stage, Wester needed to repeat clarifications that the abuse reform efforts don’t interfere with church autonomy and that abuse doesn’t need to be widespread for the convention to enhance its response.
“When it involves sexual abuse, the issue for the Southern Baptist Convention was never that we had abuse occurring at wildly disproportionate rates or that our convention was shot through with abusers,” he told the messengers. “Instead, the issue that we faced is grappling with the proven fact that the Southern Baptist Convention, having greater than 10 million members and nearly 50,000 churches, as America’s largest Protestant body, had no meaningful plan to assist its churches prevent or reply to sexual abuse.”
Motions made to only hire legal counsel that reflect the convention’s values, or to launch an inquiry to tally the entire spent on conducting an investigation into its abuse response, indicate that a faction inside the SBC still holds a lingering sense of regret over the fallout of the 2022 Guidepost Solutions report.
Iorg mentioned that they’ve paid at the least $2 million simply to cover indemnity costs after two people named within the report sued (former SBC president Johnny Hunt and former seminary professor David Sills).
“We need to equip the shepherds to guard the sheep from the wolves. It will be done—it could possibly be done inside polity, it could possibly be done well. And for a wide range of reasons, it kept getting pushed off and folks continued to get hurt,” said Bruce Frank, former head of the initial Sexual Abuse Task Force and a pastor in North Carolina. “Is $2 million a whole lot of money? Yes, it’s—but it surely is nowhere near what it has cost survivors.”
Task force members and advocates are grateful to see the continued support for his or her efforts from the convention floor—but frustrated that the passion from Southern Baptists on the meeting hasn’t overridden the challenges that emerge when attempting to enact change on the convention level.
Survivors decried entity leaders’ legal involvement with a Kentucky amicus temporary last 12 months that will limit their liability in sexual abuse claims, and a motion from the ground called for the SBC to censure convention president Bart Barber, Southern Seminary president Albert Mohler, and Lifeway president Ben Mandrell for approving the temporary. The messengers voted it out of order on Wednesday morning.
Entities inside the SBC have also been the topic of a Department of Justice investigation that began nearly two years ago and issued its first indictment last month.
Frank and Keahbone, each candidates who had been involved in abuse reform efforts, didn’t make the runoffs within the presidential race this 12 months. In a forum on Monday night, Keahbone referenced people “stepping in our way” and “working purposely on the edges to make certain [the database] doesn’t occur.”
Gaines asked the duty force in the event that they would reveal who’s liable for obstructing their work and the way, but up to now those involved haven’t named names. In remarks to the media, Wester said he didn’t wish to further “compound the issue by going into an excessive amount of detail.”
Two years ago, International Mission Board president Paul Chitwood, North American Mission Board president Kevin Ezell, and Send Relief president Bryant Wright had offered $3 million from Send Relief’s undesignated funds to pay for the SBC’s sexual abuse reform programs. A spokesman for Send Relief told CT that its leaders have “not rejected any requests for funding that fall inside the original intent of its commitment.”
“Send Relief is fully committed to the careful stewardship of the funds for sexual abuse prevention and response efforts inside the SBC, in collaboration with the Executive Committee,” the statement said. “Currently the [Abuse Reform Commmission] is outside the structure of the SBC.”
Myer worries that confusion in regards to the funding decisions could damage the sense of trust needed for broader cooperative efforts around the problem to be effective.
“When trust fails, you lose partners and resources,” he said. “If we are able to’t sort out something easy like saying, It is critical that we protect children and adults from being abused by wolves, how will we move on to more complicated matters?”
