UNITED STATES
Associated Baptist Press

By Bob Allen

A Christian radio host says it’s time for evangelical churches to wake up to an “epidemic” of sexual abuse of children going on in their midst.

Janet Mefferd“I don’t know how long evangelicalism can ignore this problem,” host Janet Mefferd said Oct. 18 on her syndicated radio show from Dallas, heard daily on over 100 stations across the nation. “I really don’t.”

The segment included an interview with Susan Burke, the attorney representing three anonymous women in a lawsuit alleging a cover-up of sexual abuse by Sovereign Grace Ministries, a Calvinist church-planting network with close ties to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Mefferd said she wasn’t talking just about the Sovereign Grace lawsuit, because those allegations are unproven, but about the “appalling” number of hits that can be generated any day by typing terms like “sexual abuse” or “sexual…