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	Baptist Churches Take Responsibility to Prevent Clergy Abuse By Kate Shellnutt Houston Chronicle August 13, 2011 http://blog.chron.com/believeitornot/2011/08/baptist-churches-take-responsibility-to-prevent-clergy-abuse/ When religious leaders get accused of sexual misconduct, it makes headlines. This week alone, there was news of a former youth pastor in Pasadena admitting to videotaping teenagers in the shower and a Southern Baptist minister confessing to molesting boys while an intern at a Plano church decades ago. Christian bodies like the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations operate as authorities over local churches and can put programming and policies in place to deal with leaders accused of abuse. In the Southern Baptist Convention, though, churches are self-governed, which can make it harder to keep an abusive pastor from moving from one congregation to another, as the Plano pastor did. His case has caused some leaders to suggest Southern Baptists create a database of clergy accused of abuse, the Associated Baptist Press reported. The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, like the national convention, say they don’t have the authority to assemble such a database, but continue to equip churches with the most powerful resource they have against abusive pastors: background checks. Only in the past 20 years have background checks become standard practice for Southern Baptist churches, and some lay leaders are still hesitant about questioning the word of a man of God, but it’s an absolutely necessary step for church staff, said Gary Ledbetter, spokesman for the Southern Baptists of Texas. “Any prospective staff member with a lick of sense is not going to be offended,” he said. The state convention identifies the best companies to perform these checks and recommends that its 2,200 churches run checks on every staff member. Ledbetter says incidents come up a couple times a year, which is fairly infrequently for the size of their body, but also way too frequently, since any case of abuse is unacceptable. Houston’s First Baptist Church, a megachurch with 6,000-plus attendees and about 50 staff members, conducts background checks on everyone who works at the church, even volunteers. “We do turn people down if something comes up,” said Steven Murray, the church’s spokesman. The training for staff and volunteers includes specific regulations involving their interaction with minors and requires at least two adults to be in the room at once, for accountability. The church also regularly re-runs background checks on them.
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