KNOXVILLE (TN)
News Sentinel
Oct. 10, 2019
By Terry Mattingly
For decades, Southern Baptist leaders rolled their eyes whenever there were headlines about clergy sexual abuse cases. That was – wink, wink – a Catholic thing linked to celibate priests.
Then there were those mainline Protestants, and even some evangelicals, who modernized their teachings on marriage and sex. No wonder they were having problems.
This was a powerful, unbiblical myth that helped Southern Baptists ignore their own predators, said Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear during a recent national conference. The event was hosted by the denomination’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and the new SBC Sexual Abuse Advisory Group.
“The danger of this myth is that it is naive: It relegates abuse to an ideological problem, when it should be most properly seen as a depravity problem. … It fails to recognize that wherever people exist in power without accountability, abuse will foster,” said Greear, pastor of the Summit Church near Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.
“What part of society has not been affected? It happens on Wall Street, in Hollywood, on Capitol Hill, in academic institutions, sports programs, Catholic and Protestant churches, liberal and conservative,” he added. “I want to say something as an evangelical to evangelicals: We evangelicals should have known this. Didn’t Jesus say there would be wolves in sheep’s clothing that would come into the flock in order not to serve the flock, but to abuse the flock?”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.