INDIANAPOLIS (IN)
Tennessean [Nashville TN]
June 10, 2024
By Liam Adams
Southern Baptists are descending on the Midwest to make decisions that will ripple throughout Christianity nationwide.
The Southern Baptist Convention is gathering in Indianapolis for its two-day annual meeting starting Tuesday to take up key legislation for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Some of the highest profile items include a measure to enshrine a ban on women pastors, the long-term future of abuse reform, and a resolution opposing in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
Southern Baptist voting delegates, called messengers, will elect a new SBC president out of six candidates, and former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will make an appearance. But before those events, the SBC Executive Committee is set to meet on Monday, which typically sets the tone for the business that follows in the subsequent days.
Follow along for live updates.
SBC Executive Committee faces mandate for long-term abuse reform
A nearly expired SBC task force is urging the denomination to work toward a permanent mechanism for preventing and responding to clergy sexual abuse and is hoping the SBC Executive Committee will lead the charge.
Ahead of the executive committee’s meeting on Monday at the start of the SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis, the SBC Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force released a sobering report about the current progress and future needs for abuse reform.
“The process has been more difficult than we could have imagined,” said the abuse reform task force in a report it published last week. “And in truth, we made less progress than we desired due to the myriad obstacles and challenges we encountered in the course of our work”
The SBC Executive Committee, which is the denomination’s administrative arm, might discuss components of the report in its meeting on Monday. The abuse reform task force will then present its report to the full convention on Tuesday, likely determining the parameters of the executive committee’s future actions on long-term abuse reform needs.
The abuse reform task force identified in its report five of those key long-term needs: expert assistance for churches dealing with abuse cases; access to abuse prevention resources for small and medium-sized churches; full-time staff support for the SBC Credentials Committee, which reviews reports of churches accused of mishandling abuse; survivor care; and full-time staff at state Southern Baptist conventions and regional associations to assist churches.
“The single most important step the SBC can take toward reform is establishing one source any pastor or church leader can reach out to for help,” the task force said in its report. The task force was careful not to prescribe a single framework for that long-term mechanism. A few ideas it suggested were a new SBC-affiliated agency, called entities, or a subsidiary of an entity.