WEDNESDAY, MAY 25 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Southern Baptist board issues apology to abuse survivors
News show “20/20” that docu-
mented abuse in Protestant
churches included the SBC, which
led to a resolution on protecting
children from abuse and a motion
to consider building a database of
accused abusers. Although law-
yers told convention leaders they
could pursue such a database,
leaders told Southern Baptists for
decades that they couldn’t due to
the denomination’s non-hierar-
chical structure. Churches that be-
long to the SBC are considered
autonomous from one another.
Several sex abuse allegations in
2018 brought more attention to
the issue, including the firing of
former SBC president Paige Pat-
terson from his seminary position
over how he handled two women’s
claims. In 2019, the Houston
Chronicle released an investiga-
tive report revealing 700 sex abuse
victims over 2 0 years, w hich l ed t o
a convention-wide focus on sex
abuse with calls for reform and a
conference focused on sex abuse.
In 2021, a leaked letter alleging
leaders mishandled sex abuse
claims sparked a convention-wide
call for an investigation, which l ed
to the report, prepared by Guide-
post Solutions.
Christa Brown, a sex abuse sur-
vivor w ho has w orked on the issue
for nearly two decades, said Tues-
day that she w as “breathless” after
watching the meeting online and
seeing leaders discuss publishing
their secret database. In the years
after she told SBC leaders that she
was abused by a youth pastor who
went on to serve in other Southern
Baptist churches in multiple
states, she was met with hostility
when she would call for reform.
She renewed her longtime call for
a churchwide database Monday
when she proposed that the Exec-
utive Committee make its existing
private list public.
“I think that is a good first step.
I’m glad for it,” she said.
Still, she said, she’s waiting to
see what else SBC leaders do.
“I’m grateful for what we saw
today, truly. I am also waiting and
hoping for real action and not just
words,” Brown said. “Not words,
not lament, not thoughts and
prayers — real meaningful action
that will help survivors.”
The 68-member board met over
CHURCH FROM A1 Zoom to discuss the findings
ahead of the convention’s annual
meeting in Anaheim, Calif., next
month. Willie McLaurin, interim
president of the Executive Com-
mittee, offered an apology to sex-
ual abuse survivors.
“I want to say to us: Now is the
time to change the culture,” he
said. “We need to be proactive in
our openness, in our transparency
from this moment forward. That’s
the absolute bare minimum we
must do.”
California pastor Rolland
Slade, chair of the Executive Com-
mittee’s board, said: “For the sur-
vivor community, I can’t imagine
the pain that you’re going
through, and the pain that you
have endured for decades, but I
ask you to please be patient with
us as we try to grasp what’s going
on, what has happened.”
A lawyer for the E xecutive C om-
mittee, Gene Besen, said it was
important to acknowledge the
survivors named in the report.
“This morning as we meet for the
first time, I want to emulate their
courage and their strength,” he
said.
Besen emphasized a particular
moment, in September 2006,
when a Convention leader wrote
to Brown, saying continued com-
munications between the Execu-
tive Committee and survivors
“will not be positive or fruitful.”
“Nothing could be further from
the truth. Nothing could be more
responsible for the cultural rot for
this moment,” Besen said.
The board then put forward an
apology statement. It referenced
the Sept. 29, 2006 , letter sent by
August Boto, then the Executive
Committee’s vice president, to
Brown. The statement says the
current SBC leadership rejects
that dismissive sentiment “in its
entirety and seeks to publicly re-
pent for its failure to rectify this
position and wholeheartedly lis-
ten to survivors.” Engaging with
abuse survivors is a “critical step
toward healing our Convention.”
There was also discussion of
revoking some retirement ben-
efits for Boto, who is named
throughout the report.
Some members of the Executive
Committee objected to the state-
ment being approved so quickly.
“The problem in the past is that we
rubber-stamped everything,” said
Mike Holloway, a board member
from Louisiana, a s he urged mem-
bers to not move quickly on some-
thing without understanding all
the implications. But members
voted to approve the apology
statement a nyway. B rown said she
was grateful.
“It is emotionally hard to in-
stantaneously erase many, many
years of raw meanness and incivil-
ity,” Brown said. “I hope this will
be a first step, a beginning step
that will truly reflect a change in
how survivors will be treated in
the future.”
The Guidepost report was nar-
rowly focused on the Executive
Committee, just one of the many
institutions under the Southern
Baptist umbrella. The committee
distributes more than $190 mil-
lion annually i n a cooperative p ro-
gram that funds its missions agen-
cies, seminaries and other minis-
tries.
To p denominational leaders,
including presidents of the SBC,
serve on the Executive Commit-tee’s board. But the committee
doesn’t have authority over indi-
vidual churches or other institu-
tions within the SBC, and each h as
its own board of trustees. Accord-
ing to the report, Executive Com-
mittee board members were kept
in the dark while a handful of
leaders misled the Southern Bap-
tists, suggesting for decades that
they could not create a d atabase of
sex abusers despite being advised
by legal counsel that they could.
The board of the Executive
Committee, which is supposed to
be made up of 86 clergy and lay
members f rom across t he country,
is responsible for putting on the
big annual meeting. More than a
dozen board members resigned
last fall after members voted to
waive attorney-client privilege,
which gave investigators access to
records of conversations on legal
matters among committee mem-
bers and staff.
Guidepost’s report includes
emails between Executive Com-
mittee leaders and employees inwhich members of the survivor
community were ignored or
“shunned, shamed, and vilified.”
Emails showed how leaders were
concerned more with the liability
the institution could face than
with protecting people from sex-
ual abusers.
Patterson, who is named
throughout the report as someone
who mishandled s ex a buse claims,
declined to comment on it.
The report also found that a
former SBC president once de-
layed reporting allegations of
child sex abuse out of “heartfelt
concern and compassion” for the
accused minister, while another
former SBC president allowed a
pastor accused of abusing young
boys to be dismissed without re-
porting the abuse to police.
Brown said she hopes the SBC
will develop a safe place where
Southern Baptists can report cler-
gy s ex a buse and obtain i ndepend-
ent investigations. The Executive
Committee is working with
Guidepost to create a hotline forvictims to be able to share what
happened to them and receive
care.
“There’s a long, long history of
the SBC saying to report abuse,
they have to go to the local church
of the a ccused p astor,” B rown said.
“Going to the church in which it
happened will never work. It’s in-
flicted enormous, egregious harm
on the already wounded. It’s like
sending already bloody sheep
back to the den of the wolf who
savaged them.”
Brown hopes that there will be
more discussion about how the
SBC can repair d amage i t has done
to survivors.
“Repentance requires restitu-
tion,” she said. “There’s a l ot of talk
now about what the SBC may do
moving f orward to do better i n the
future. That is all well and good.
But in addition to that, there m ust
be a reckoning with the past and
the harm that has been d one — not
only the harm from the abuse but
the harm from the whole institu-
tional failure.”HOLLY MEYER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Southern Baptist Convention headquarters in Nashville. Leaders said that they will release a secret list of pastors accused of abuse.WE BRING THE
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