Sexual Misconduct

[Haruo]

Just saw a headline from Fox News saying "hundreds of Southern Baptist leaders, volunteers" accused of sexual misconduct "in bombshell investigation". Don't know any more at this point.

[Rvaughn]

[Haruo]

Yeah, that looks like a big'un.

[Dave Roberts]

Having read 35 pages of this from the Houston Chronicle, all I can say is that the Roman Catholic Church now has major company for not prosecuting crimes involving church staff members and allowing them to slip quietly into the night. We knew it existed, but no one had before exposed the scale, especially in Texas.

[Sandy]

Wow. I read the Washington Post coverage and some of the Chronicle. . Christa Brown, at her blog Stop Baptist Predators already had a lot of this information. It is time for a bylaw or constitutional change. Churches can be excluded for calling a staff member who is GLBTQ or who is a woman. They should at least be excluded for hiring someone who has been arrested and convicted of abuse. Think about that for just a minute. If that had been the case, then First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, and Second Baptist Church of Houston would have all been excluded from SBC membership, meaning that Jerry Vines, Steve Gaines, Ed Young and Paul Pressler would never have been eligible to serve as messengers, and couldn't have been elected as trustees to multiple boards or officers.

[Tim Bonney]

I know it would be a huge polity change, and probably would never happen. But the ABC/USA has national standing for ordained clergy and a system for keeping track of them. They can also take away person's national standing for misconduct. While that doesn't remove their ordination, it is a huge red flag to regions and congregations not to call that pastor. Such a system could help the SBC a great deal. But I know it would be very difficult to create such an infrastructure when the SBC has never had one for clergy before.

[William Thornton]

[Dave Roberts]

[William Thornton]

[Tim Bonney]

[Rvaughn]

A lot of time and energy can be expended hammering against Baptist polity (local church autonomy), seeking to change or undermine it in order to fight clergy sexual abuse in Baptist congregations. Baptist polity has been in place as long as there have been Baptists. Most Baptists are unlikely to consider changing or abandoning local autonomy. When both sides dig in with why it must be done a certain way or why it can't be done a certain, that itself becomes the discussion rather than discussing a solution that will work well within Baptist polity. To come up with ways to deal with the problem within existing Baptist polity seems a better approach to me. Such a solution might be more widely implemented among other Baptists as well, many of whom have much less denominational structure than the SBC.

[Sandy]

[Rvaughn]

[Haruo]

To this outside observer the SBC's unwillingness to undertake what seem like very simple, reasonable, polity-appropriate changes in regulations aimed at making churches more accountable for watching their step with these matters very likely reflects an awareness, perhaps subconscious, on the part of many committed to the CR, that some of their own were guilty of these kinds of abuse, so that whether you see it as Christ-centered or as criminally self-centered, they were unwilling to do anything that might lead to the uncovering of the truth.

[Tim Bonney]

[Rvaughn]

[Sandy]

The SBC hasn't done anything for thirty years that wasn't approved in advance by a small group of leaders who ran the convention by virtue of the status they gained when they initiated the "conservative resurgence." The individuals who introduced resolutions or bylaw changes to rectify a problem that was easily solved, even in a denomination governed by congregational polity with independent, autonomous churches, were not pre-approved or part of the agenda that was driven by resurgence leaders. Basically, if Patterson hadn't addressed it in a letter, it wasn't happening. Pressler was a bit more temperamental, screeching publicly once that "these people aren't voting the way we want them to" but later on, they managed to resolve that problem. The first time any serious changes were proposed, Wade Burleson, one of the victims of a Patterson letter-writing campaign to oust him from the IMB trustee board, was the one providing the information and making the recommendations. All of his motions were "referred to the appropriate committee" which in SBC language means "It ain't a gonna happen!".

Some of these high profile cases involve some of the inner circle of SBC megachurches and resurgence-supporting pastors. Bellevue, First Jacksonville, Second Houston. All three knowingly hired, or did not dismiss in a timely manner, individuals who committed sexual assault, one of them on multiple individuals in the same church. If the convention added "condoning by hiring or harboring and refusing to dismiss individuals who have committed sexual assault" to the reasons for disfellowshipping a congregation along with condoning homosexuality, those three churches would not now be "in full cooperation" with the SBC. The date of the initial failure of Patterson to report or properly handle the rape case at Southeastern was prior to the convention when Burleson made his motion. So the independent, autonomous nature of SBC churches is not why the SBC has failed to act on this issue.

[Haruo]

What Sandy just said. This all got a fair amount of play on BL.com back in the period when Wade and Christa were active here. Unfortunately I don't think those years are accessible any more this side of Jordan.

[Sandy]

The convention and denominational structures that Southern Baptists have developed over the years have tended to inadvertently create a denominational-political hierarchy in which a few influential individuals have become "kingmakers" who operate along the lines of the Pope and College of Cardinals. That's not a unique creation of the Conservative Resurgence, by the way, it existed long before Patterson and Pressler and their cohort figured out how to get control of it. Whether it was prior to 1979 or since, the SBC leadership has not changed the way it acts. It does what it wants to do without explanation and most often not in a manner that makes much sense until you figure out who is being promoted, protected, or pushed for a position.

Protecting local church autonomy is a precious foundational principle which circumstances should not alter. If you have crossed the boundary into determining, at a denominational level, that churches which "condone homosexual behavior" by allowing LGBT persons to hold positions of spiritual leadership and ordaining them are "not in full cooperation" with the denomination, and that doing so is not a violation of their autonomy, then it is clearly not a violation of local church autonomy to dismiss a church which knowingly hires someone who has committed sexual assault. The problem is that some of the "up and comers" among the conservative resurgence who had "hitched their wagons" as I like to say to their specific kingmaker or bishop, had committed sexual assault. Apparently, by the time Wade Burleson brought this up and made his motion, there were reasons why resurgence leaders, including the "architects" themselves, did not want the convention to take any action and hid behind autonomy.

While it does seem that the SBC, at least on some levels, is getting more serious about this issue I still don't see much in the way of accountability being demanded. What it looks like is that the SBC's denominational leadership waited until it became a problem before taking any action. I still see blog posts that click their tongue a bit about the way rape cases were handled at Southeastern and Southwestern but the next paragraph is a defense of the person involved because their actions in defending inerrancy were absolutely necessary. Some alterations need to be made in stained glass windows on display at one of the seminaries before the convention's actions will be taken seriously.

[Rvaughn]

[Rvaughn]

[William Thornton]

[Sandy]

I've seen the proposal put forth by the two seminary professors that Rvaughn referenced here. That's the best proposal I've seen put forward and it clearly doesn't violate the independence or autonomy of the local church, but I think would be effective in addressing the issue.

So here's an interesting situation. The churches involved are not SBC, but this guy was a protege, with (as I like to use the old Texas expression) his wagon hitched to some big "finger in every pie" Southern Baptist conservative resurgence mega church pastors. The proposal put forward by Professors Yarnell and Whitfield will work well as long as those with defacto influence who think they operate outside the SBC rules for everyone else don't try to use their influence to protect their proteges and sycophants.
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