HOUSTON (TX)
Houston Chronicle
Oct. 6, 2019
By John Tedesco
For years, victims’ advocates have called for sweeping changes in how the Southern Baptist Convention responds to sexual abuse in its churches.
Last week in Grapevine, Baptist leaders said it’s time to listen. But critics are skeptical that their rhetoric will result in meaningful change.
More than 1,600 Southern Baptists gathered in Texas for the SBC’s “Caring Well” conference, which aimed to help the largest coalition of Baptist churches in the United States do a better job preventing abuse and assisting victims.
The conference was organized in response to a February investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News that revealed hundreds of Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers had been accused of sexual misconduct in the last two decades. They left behind more than 700 victims, a number that leaders agree is only a sliver of the problem. Speakers at the conference emphasized that sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches existed long before the newspapers’ investigation — but many churches ignored the warnings.
“Southern Baptists won’t have a future unless we are willing to acknowledge our tendency to protect the system over survivors,” said Phillip Bethancourt, the vice president of the convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which organized the conference. “If the system is more important than the survivors, then the system is not worth saving.”
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