Southern Baptist Missionary Group Must Reform Sex Abuse Reporting Practices

By Sarah Smith
Houston Chronicle
May 23, 2019

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Law-firm-Southern-Baptist-missionary-group-must-13883866.php

Anne Marie Miller, shown here as a teenager, later reported that her youth pastor molester her. By then, he was a missionary based in Hungary.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s missionary arm knew of sexual abuse allegations against one of its former top missionaries for over 10 years before his arrest — accusations that exploded last year and forced the organization to bring in a third party to investigate its handling of abuse.

Anne Marie Miller told the International Mission Board in 2007 that Mark Aderholt, then a missionary to Central Europe, had initiated sexual contact with her as a teenager. He resigned quietly from the IMB and went on to rise in the Southern Baptist ranks until Miller reported him to police and went public with her story in 2018. No one from the IMB contacted law enforcement during the course of its 2007 investigation.

The law firm retained by the IMB in the wake of the Aderholt scandal put out a release on Wednesday recommending sweeping changes to the organization’s policies for reporting abuse to law enforcement.

“IMB is a unique organization that places families all around the world, often in remote and isolated locations,” Gray Plant Mooty, the Minnesota-based law firm the IMB hired to conduct the investigation, wrote. “Unfortunately, that isolation has the potential to put children at greater risk of abuse.”

The review is ongoing. The IMB did not release any specific details on past failings, nor did it indicate that it plans to do so.

The update on the investigation comes as the Southern Baptist Convention gears up for its annual meeting in June, which will revolve around how the denomination deals with sex abuse in the wake of a Houston Chronicle investigation that found over 700 victims of sexual abuse by Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers over two decades.

Neither the International Mission Board nor Gray Plant Mooty responded to requests for comment.

Gray Plant Mooty recommended that the IMB adopt protocols to report allegations of child abuse to U.S. and foreign authorities “even when there is not a legal duty to do so” and involve outside counsel when the board gets a report of abuse.

The firm also recommended that the IMB create a full-time position to oversee abuse prevention and response and revise its current policies to clarify that IMB personnel can and often must report abuse allegations to authorities as well as mission board officials.

IMB President Paul Chitwood issued an apology on the organization’s website, pledging to “do better in the future” and implement all the recommendations. The IMB has already started reporting incidents of abuse by IMB personnel and affiliates to law enforcement, according to the statement.

The IMB’s silence allowed Aderholt to continue in the Southern Baptist world and eventually become the chief strategist of the South Carolina Baptist Convention.

Miller, now of Fort Worth, Texas, had just moved to Arlington and met Aderholt as a teenager looking to connect with a Christian community. Aderholt, who was 25 at the time, allegedly initiated sexual contact with her when she was 16.

After a two-month investigation, the IMB concluded that Aderholt had “more likely than not” engaged in “inappropriate sexual relationship” with Miller. Two months after his January 2008 resignation, he found employment at another Southern Baptist Church. His 2009 resume lists two top IMB personnel as references.

Aderholt awaits trial in Tarrant County on one count of sexual assault of a child and two counts of indecency with a child. His lawyer did not return requests for comment.

Miller found the study update and promise of reforms “encouraging” but said she still worries that the changes won’t go far enough.

“The IMB needs to look further into situations like mine to see if there was any abuse on the field,” she said. “I don’t think a girl in Vietnam or Hungary is going to be aware of this and see this and go, ‘Oh, I remember that guy from 20 years ago—he molested me.’ They need to go above and beyond to find and appropriately care for any other victims.”