CHICAGO (IL)
Agence France-Presse
February 12, 2019
By Nova Safo
The United States’ largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is facing a sexual abuse crisis after a bombshell report revealed hundreds of predators and more than 700 victims since 1998.
The report by 2 Texas newspapers found some 380 church leaders and volunteers have faced public accusations of abuse, mostly of children as young as three years old.
Some of the accused continued to work at Southern Baptist churches, the newspapers said.
In response to the report, church officials acknowledged the number of victims could actually be higher and urged survivors to come forward.
“One of the things I’m encouraged by are the number of pastors that are actively engaged right now,” in the report’s aftermath, convention leader Russell Moore told AFP on Tuesday.
The revelations threatened to engulf the denomination — with some 47,000 churches and 15 million members mostly in the southern US — in the same type of scandal that has roiled the Catholic Church.
A more comprehensive response was likely to come from the Southern Baptist organization next week when president JD Greear “is scheduled to give an update on a sexual abuse study he commissioned last summer,” said spokesman Roger Oldham.
LAX OVERSIGHT
Unlike the Vatican, the Southern Baptist Convention is a loose network of churches allowed to run autonomously, ordain their own ministers — who are not required to be celibate — and hire staff and volunteers based on each church’s own standards.
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