Southern Baptist Leaders Release Secret Sex Abuser Database (06.09.22)

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Plain Bible Teaching Podcast

This week we’re going to be talking about the sex abuse scandal within the Southern Baptist Convention. After mentioning this briefly a couple weeks ago in our monthly news roundup, I wanted to spend some more time talking about it because there is a lot to discuss. So we’re going to consider some lessons in our episode today.

STORY – Southern Baptist Leaders Release Sex Abuser Database They Kept Secret for Years

“Southern Baptist leaders on Thursday evening released a list of alleged church-related sexual abuse offenders that denomination heads had kept secret for more than a decade. The Executive Committee for the Southern Baptist Convention said earlier this week it would publish the names after it issued a third-party investigation that suggested a widespread coverup by top leaders who ignored and even ‘vilified’ people who came forward with stories of abuse.

“The database, which an SBC attorney said includes people who have been criminally convicted of abuse and those who have confessed to abuse, is expected to show what top leaders knew behind the scenes while telling Southern Baptists they could not create a list of accused abusers because the denomination is not hierarchical and churches operate independently from one another.

“A description at the top of the document reads: ‘This is a fluid, working document.’ It consists of more than 600 entries, the date the person was reported and information largely pulled from news articles, compiled from 2007 until 2022. ‘It is incomplete. It has not been proofed. It has not been adequately researched. It is not Southern Baptist specific,’ the document reads. It notes that, after June 2008, ‘only alleged/convicted names of abusers and [titles] of articles were catalogued.’

“The release of the database comes 15 years after Christa Brown began sounding the alarm that Southern Baptists needed to keep such a list to prevent abusers from transferring from church to church. She first told SBC leaders in 2004 that she had been abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches in multiple states. But the report published Sunday by the SBC said she was met with hostility when she suggested the idea in 2007.” (The Washington Post)

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