No Longer Behind Closed Doors: Southern Baptists Highlight Abuse Issue This Week

The nation's largest Protestant denomination is putting the issue of abuse front and center this week. 

The Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) Sexual Abuse Advisory Group and its Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) are hosting a historic event Oct. 3-5 in Dallas. The Caring Well conference is designed to help the SBC's 47,000 churches learn how to prevent abuse and support survivors.

The ERLC, which functions as the denomination's public policy arm, originally planned to devote its annual fall conference to another theme, "Gospel Courage," but switched in April to focus on abuse as the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements intensified.

After the #MeToo movement began in late 2017, SBC President J.D. Greear launched the advisory group in July of 2018 to develop strategies and resources for the denomination to protect its members from predators. Southern Baptists allocated $250,000 for the initiative.

Then in February 2019, Southern Baptists faced a wake-up call: a Houston Chronicle report "Abuse of Faith" that detailed accusations of sexual misconduct against hundreds of Southern Baptist clergy and staff in the last 20 years. It identified more than 700 victims.

Greear told CBN News that he cringed when the report came out. 

"When I first heard about the Houston Chronicle investigation my gut response was to pray, 'Lord, protect our reputation. Help the Gospel not go backwards and help people not to skew information,' and it was one of those moments when I felt the Spirit of God say to me, 'That's not what I want you to be praying. I'll guard your reputation. I want you to be willing to do whatever it takes to provide safety, a more safe environment for victims and the vulnerable'," he said.

This week's conference is an attempt to educate the denomination's churches on what it looks like to provide a safe environment. It features well-known abuse advocates like attorney Boz Tchvidjian, who leads GRACE, a non-profit that consults with faith-based groups on the issue. Prominent abuse survivors like Bible study teacher Beth Moore and attorney Rachael Denhollander, who was the first person to publicly file a sexual assault complaint against now-convicted Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, will also speak.

On a recent book tour for her new memoir What is a Girl Worth? Denhollander told CBN News that she'd like to see the SBC make several key changes.

She'd like pastors and leaders who are not equipped to handle teaching on abuse or reports of abuse to acknowledge their incompetence. "The very first thing we need to see is a spirit of humility. The ability to say 'I am not equipped to handle this. I am not an expert in the field of abuse'," she said.

Denhollander says the SBC should also repent specifically for cases of mishandled abuse.  

"Right now the SBC has not. They have done a lot of corporate and general repentance and I'm grateful for that," she told CBN News. "There has been no specific admission of what went wrong. There has not been a pastor or a church they have pointed to and said 'this is not ok.' And until they can reach that level of specificity the corporate repentance doesn't do very much."

After the Chronicle report, Greear called for greater scrutiny of 10 churches in regards to the way they had handled reports of sexual abuse, but just days later the SBC Executive Committee announced that "no further inquiry" was needed for seven of the 10 churches that Greear identified.

Abuse advocate Jimmy Hinton told CBN News he has mixed views on the conference. He characterized the SBC as having major credibility issues in the survivor community and criticized it for promoting pastors like Matt Chandler whose Village Church has been sued over alleged abuse by a youth minister at the church.

Still, Hinton praised the denomination for some of the speakers it invited to the conference. "I think they will speak powerful truths," he said. "And I think those words will be a game changer for some in the audience."

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