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The Selective Outrage of Southern Baptists

Watch Keep
May 23, 2013

http://watchkeep.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-selective-outrage-of-southern.html?m=0

The SBC annual meeting is June 11-12 in Houston. The SBC pastors' conference is June 9-10, same place. Jack Graham, pastor of megachurch Prestonwood Baptist Church and former, two-time SBC president, is a featured discussion panel leader on the topic of "leadership." We are planning an awareness event outside the convention to stand for those abuse survivors who don't have a voice or whose voices are being callously ignored by pastors and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Perhaps you may have a few minutes to simply come stand with us outside the convention in honor of those survivors who don’t have a voice? Details TBA...

I was interviewed by Bob Allen for a story in the Associated Baptist Press last week about a resolution proposed by a Baptist pastor for the upcoming SBC meeting and it includes my statements:

Sexual-abuse resolution proposed - Associated Baptist Press

Victims’ advocate Amy Smith, Houston representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Lumpkins’ concern applies not only to organizations with informal SBC ties, but also to “celebrity leaders” within the denomination.

Smith has been talking publicly for two years about former SBC President Jack Graham’s handling of a credibly accused sexual predator at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas in 1989. Smith, at the time a student intern at the church, claims that Prestonwood fired John Langworthy for inappropriate sexual contact with youth, but did not call the police as the law required.

Langworthy went on to serve two decades as a music minister at Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, Miss. After resigning as associate pastor of music and ministries, Langworthy confessed to the congregation on Aug. 7, 2011, of “sexual indiscretions with younger males" while serving churches in Mississippi and Texas in the 1980s.

After video of Langworthy’s confession appeared on the Internet and in TV news reports, six men went to police claiming they were sexually abused by Langworthy when he babysat for families he met through serving in Baptist churches while a student at Baptist-affiliated Mississippi College between 1980 and 1984.

Langworthy pleaded guilty Jan. 22 to five felony counts of gratification of lust, but avoided prison time in a plea bargain offered in part because prosecutors feared they might lose the case on a technicality due to ambiguity in Mississippi’s statute of limitations for sex crimes.

A blog that monitors reports of sexual abuse by Baptist clergy recently posted a photo of Langworthy dining with his family at a local restaurant.

Smith says since Langworthy’s conviction in Mississippi, other alleged victims have come forward in Texas, including one who never told anyone about the abuse for 24 years. She believes that since Langworthy fled Texas to avoid arrest and never returned that he could still be charged with crimes there.

Smith said she disagreed with Lumpkins on one point -- that the damage being done to Southern Baptists’ reputation is “indirect.”

“From the numerous survivors of child sexual abuse by Baptist ministers that I have had contact with, the tarnishing is direct,” she said.

It's now been 4 months since the criminal conviction of child sex offender and former Baptist minister John Langworthy. Not a peep from Jack Graham at Prestonwood Baptist where Langworthy worked on staff for several years and confessed to sexually abusing boys there, one who came forward to Mississippi prosecutors. Not a peep either from prominent leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention like Al Mohler who are very comfortable being outspoken in decrying the actions of Penn State and Sandusky.

Greg Belser, pastor of Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, Mississippi, has also refused to decry Langworthy's child sex crimes. In fact, he and the elders embraced Langworthy with hugs and prayers for grace after Langworthy's public confession (VIDEO embedded below) from the pulpit on August 7, 2011. This public display of support for a convicted child predator is not only disgusting, it is continuing to place kids in the community of Clinton, Mississippi in danger today. Langworthy's wife Kathy remains on the music staff at Morrison Heights.

 

 

 

 

 




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