UNITED STATES
Associated Baptist Press
By Bob Allen
Southern Baptist leaders in a movement that goes by names including the “New Calvinism” and “young, restless and Reformed” voiced support for a friend and colleague accused in a Maryland lawsuit of collusion in what is being called American evangelicalism’s biggest sex scandal to date.
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., joined Presbyterian minister Ligon Duncan in a statement of support for C.J. Mahaney, one of several defendants accused of permitting and covering up the sexual abuse of children in churches affiliated with Sovereign Grace Ministries, a Calvinist church-planting organization based in Louisville, Ky.
“We have stood beside our friend, C. J. Mahaney, and we can speak to his personal integrity,” the trio, who with Mahaney started a biennial preaching conference called Together for the Gospel in 2006, said in a statement on the T4G website.
Dever, Duncan and Mohler said they have wanted to speak publicly on Mahaney but waited until after Maryland Judge Sharon V. Burrell dismissed most of the lawsuit on a technicality. She ruled that nine of 11 plaintiffs did not sue within three years after turning 18 as required under Maryland’s statute of limitations.
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