As SBC Confronts Abuse Crisis, Other Faiths Watch Closely
By Robert Downen
The headline made David Duncan ill. He was well-aware of the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal and, during his 13-year tenure as pastor of Houston’s Memorial Church of Christ, helped guide the church as it adopted safeguards to protect children from sexual predators. But the reports in the Houston Chronicle were different. They hit particularly close to home. The series, Abuse of Faith, found that hundreds of Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have been convicted or credibly accused of sex crimes in the last two decades. They left behind more than 700 victims, most of them children. The structure of the SBC, a collective of 47,000 autonomous and self-governing churches, enabled predators to move undetected and stifled reforms to prevent abuse, the investigation found. Duncan’s denomination has a similar organizational structure based on local church autonomy. And so, as the SBC’s abuse crisis came into public view, he came to a realization: No person or place is safe from predators. “It made me sick,” Duncan said. “I just didn’t want to believe that it could be that rampant, that widespread.” Leaders of other faith groups told the Chronicle that they’re also monitoring the SBC’s abuse crisis. Because the SBC’s decentralized structure is emblematic of many other Protestant faiths, the SBC’s problems could be a bellwether for church leaders across the country, experts said. “When you watch the Southern Baptist Convention wrestle with how to protect people from sexual predators, you’re watching something that’s really important to the rest of this highly individualistic and Protestant nation,” Terry Mattingly, a professor of religion at King’s College in New York, said during a recent podcast. “It’s important what Southern Baptists are doing. They could be creating a model.” Malcolm Yarnell, a professor of systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, said local autonomy is rooted in the same distaste for monarchy that birthed American democracy. Many early Americans rejected the top-down leadership structure of the Catholic Church. Theypreferred their religion to be personal and individualistic. The doctrine is still embraced by many Protestants across the country, some of whom blamed the Catholic church’s sex abuse scandal on its structure or requirements that priests be celibate. Yet Yarnell said he believes local church autonomy has masked the rate of abuse within the hundreds of thousands of decentralized churches that, unlike in the Catholic Church, typically do not keep detailed records of allegations faced bychurch leaders. “That has kept us from even seeing the problem,” he said. “And it’s only through the research, primarily of the newspapers, that we even understand we have a problem… And, well, the problem is huge.” Confronting abuse The belief in local church autonomy stymied attempts to institute broader safeguards to curb sex abuse more than a decade ago, when SBC leaders declined to develop a third-party database to track allegations against ministers, among other things. On HoustonChronicle.com: See our database of more than 260 Southern Baptist church pastors, leaders, employees and volunteers who pleaded guilty or were convicted of sex crimes Eleven years later, they’re again wrestling with those questions. Days after the Chronicle’s first report in February, SBC President J.D. Greear warned leaders that the findings likely account for only a fraction of the actual amount of abuse that occurs in SBC churches. The SBC has since adopted reforms that explicitly state that churches ledby sex offenders are ineligible for SBC affiliation. Multiple congregations left the SBC this year, including a Houston church that was pastored by a convicted sex offender. In June, thousands of delegates from SBC churches also empowered a committee to make “inquiries” into churches over their handling of sex abuse, after which the churches could be removed from the SBC. In Texas, Baptist leaderssuccessfullypushed for new legislation to prevent predators from moving from church to church by giving nonprofits immunity from lawsuits if they disclose former employees’ history of misconduct with one another “in good faith.” The SBC’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, also said it would be more active in seeking statute of limitations reforms, which many survivors said prevented them from filing criminal charges against their alleged abusers. The group also overhauled its annual three-day meeting this year to focus exclusively on abuse. Yet SBC leaders are also quick to say that these are first steps that will only be effective if millions of Southern Baptists are part of a sweeping cultural change. “Southern Baptists won’t have a future unless we are willing to acknowledge our tendency to protect the system over survivors,” Phillip Bethancourt, vice president of the convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said in October. “If the system is more important than the survivors, then the system is not worth saving.” Bethancourt also cited a recent survey that found one in 10 young Protestants have left a church because they thought abuse wasn’t being taken seriously or because they did not feel safe — an alarming finding during a time of decreasing membership among most Christian faith groups. Paying more attention Unlike Baptist churches, which each enact their own policies for hiring pastors, performing background checks and handling sexual abuse complaints, Methodist churches all follow universal guidelines to prevent sexual abuse and deal with the aftermath. But there are still lessons to be learned from the SBC crisis, said Becky Posey Williams, senior director for sexual ethics and advocacy for the United Methodist Church. “The Methodist Church would be wise to pay attention to the process that the Southern Baptist Convention has gone through, and use it as…checks and balances for reviewing where we are on this,” Williams said. “I shiver at the thought that any denomination would ever get to the point where they would say, ‘Oh we never have to review this again,’ ” she added. The Assemblies of God, which has 3.2 million members in U.S. and nearly 70 million worldwide, reissued guidance policies for churches, citing the Chronicle’s findings. “The report demonstrates that sexual misconduct is not restricted to Catholic priests, but affects all religious groups,” wrote Richard Hammer, the denomination’s longtime legal counsel. “The public revulsion at accounts of sexual misconduct by clergy and lay volunteers has reached a new and increasingly palpable level. The public is increasingly intolerant of the inadequate response by churches to incidents of sexual abuse.” Representatives from the United Church of Christ also said they’re monitoring the SBC’s abuse crisis — although for different reasons. The denomination been particularly active on ministerial misconduct, and its regional bodies can investigate allegations against ordained ministers. But local churches are free to hire anyone they want, regardless of the person’s faith background. “I’m always concerned when there’s lack of oversight on clergy credentials, whether it’s a local church of our denomination or a local church of any denomination,” said Heather Kimmel, general counsel. “A position of power has the propensity to attract individuals who will abuse that power, whether it’s financially, sexually or emotionally.” Boz Tchividjian, a lawyer and founder of GRACE, a nonprofit that equips churches to deal with abuse, said there has been a “significant uptick” in the number of churches that have reached out in the last year. “There are some church leaders who are reading the newspaper, watching the news and going, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t want to be that church, so let’s be proactive,’ ” he said. “I don’t care about the motivation if they genuinely change their culture. You have to change the DNA of the church, and that’s not going to happen overnight.” Measuring that change in America’s decentralized Protestant world is difficult, if not impossible. Activists say that survivors have been increasingly willing to come forward, which they credit to media exposure and online communities that can be a safe haven for those dealing with trauma. “This is endemic,” said Christine Fox Parker, who runs a nonprofit that assists victims of sexual and spiritual abuse. “There are no differences in denominations. This happens everywhere.” Yet she said there’s still a reluctance to act among those with the power to drive sweeping cultural changes. “Church leaders aren’t listening to survivors until the media tells their story for them,” she said. “They listen to the news and they listen to lawsuits. And it breaks my heart. Because God is listening. God is listening all of the time.” Contact: robert.downen@chron.com
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