Another church sex abuse scandal. This time, it’s the Southern Baptist

By Tim Morris
Times Picayune
February 12, 2019

https://bit.ly/2N3X17I

The Southern Baptist Convention was forced to confront a report of sexual abuse among pastors, ministers and volunteers. Photo by Nicole Honeywill

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. — James 4:17

One common evil in the sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist churches is the number of people in authority who chose to cooperate, compromise or remain silent in allowing the wrongdoing to continue.

Just six months after a grand jury report provided horrific details of sexual exploitation and abuse by members of the Catholic clergy and laity in Pennsylvania, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News published a joint investigation Sunday (Feb. 10) documenting similar offenses by pastors, ministers and volunteers within the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention.

As with the Catholic offenses, the worst atrocities are magnified by the church's indifference to the victims or its protection of the perpetrators.

A case in point is the story of Debbie Vasquez, who was just 14 when she was first molested by her Southern Baptist pastor in Sanger, Texas, a small town an hour north of Dallas. The abuse went on for years until she became pregnant at age 18.

The leaders of her church, she said, then forced her to stand in front of the congregation and ask for forgiveness without saying who had fathered the child. Church members were supportive, she said, but leadership shunned her.

More than 30 years later, Vasquez would make her way to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Indianapolis in 2008 to beg leaders of the denomination to implement prevention policies like those adopted by the Catholic Church. Clear rules so that victims would be heard and abusers removed from positions of authority.

The convention rejected almost all the reform proposals. The abuses continued.

The newspapers said they verified that about 220 Southern Baptist pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers and volunteers had been convicted of sex crimes or received deferred prosecutions in plea deals over the past 20 years. Their 700 victims included children as young as 3 years old.

Of the identified predators, “[m]ore than 100 are registered sex offenders,” the reporters said. “Some still work in Southern Baptist churches today ... including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc.”

Some church leaders blamed local church autonomy for limiting the national organization from enforcing tougher rules. But others pointed out that SBC governing documents ban gay or female pastors and that the denomination has ended its affiliation with at least four churches in the past 10 years for affirming or endorsing homosexual behavior.

The rules, however, do not specifically outlaw convicted sex offenders from working in churches.

The newspapers’ database listed four Louisiana church leaders and volunteers who face or have faced sexual misconduct allegations since 1998, including a youth minister at First Baptist Church in New Orleans, who was convicted in 2016 of 12 felonies, including molestation of a juvenile, indecent behavior with a juvenile and obstruction and is serving a 10-year prison sentence.

First Baptist leaders fired Jonathan Bailey as soon they discovered the improper relationship. They later learned he had been dismissed from a church in another state a few years earlier for similar behavior.

"We had no red flags on him," senior pastor David Crosby said at the time. "We do criminal background checks on every staff member and volunteer who works with children. We try to be very careful."

First Baptist no doubt would have benefited from a system that tracks and reports such behavior or never have hired him if the previous church had reported him to legal authorities instead of passing him on to another congregation.

Church leaders cannot be a part of covering up crimes to protect their own reputations or out of some misguided idea of guarding the church.

“There can simply be no ambiguity about the church’s responsibility to protect the abused and be a safe place for the vulnerable. The safety of the victims matters more than the reputation of Southern Baptists,” SBC President J.D. Greear said Sunday.

There will be opportunity to test that. If the church is truly open to believing and helping victims, the 700 is only the beginning.