WINSTON-SALEM (NC)
Baptist News Global
February 11, 2019
By Bob Allen
Christa Brown contacted 18 influential Baptist leaders in four states between July 2004 and May 2005, warning there might be a sexual predator among their ranks. Not one offered to help.
Today she has their attention. The Colorado woman and sexual abuse survivor is among sources quoted in a 6,000-word investigative story by two Texas newspapers reporting decades of sexual abuse by hundreds of church leaders and volunteers in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Sunday’s story, the first of a three-part expose by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, says about 380 Southern Baptist pastors, Sunday school teachers, deacons and church volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct since 1998.
More than 200 have been convicted or confessed as part of a plea bargain, and nearly 100 are currently in prisons across the United States. The papers found more than 700 victims in the past 20 years.
Some, like Brown, have been asking the nation’s largest Protestant body to consider prevention policies similar to those adopted by other faith groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church, for more than a decade.
“My heart grieves for the 700 documented victims in this report even as it splits wide open with the certain knowledge that these 700 are just the tip of the iceberg,” Brown said Feb. 11. “There are so many more whose stories remain hidden, who were bullied into silence in the past and who may never come out from that shroud of shame again.”
“My heart grieves for the 700 documented victims in this report even as it splits wide open with the certain knowledge that these 700 are just the tip of the iceberg.”
In her 2009 book, This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang, Brown tells how she broke down in tears during a piano lesson due to guilt from having had “an affair” with her youth minister. She was forced to apologize to the man’s wife and told never to speak of it again. He soon moved to another church, complete with the type of send-off celebration befitting a man of God.
When Brown’s daughter turned 16 – the age she had been when her own abuse began – she saw herself at that age. Imagining how she would feel if her child were victimized by an authority figure in a position of trust, she assumed Southern Baptist leaders would want to know if her abuser still had access to children.
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