Question: Who should I contact if I were or knew of a victim of abuse in an SBC church or at the hands of a minister serving in an SBC church and wanted something done?
It’s not that I don’t support the idea that offending churches should be more often and rapidly excluded from “membership” in the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s just that the Credentials Committee is extremely limited in what they can do. Their ultimate action would be to recommend to the SBC Executive Committee as a whole that a certain church “in friendly cooperation” with the Southern Baptist Convention be disfellowshipped. That’s it. Such action may indirectly impact the minister involved if he is still at the local, autonomous, independent church where the offense occurred.
Dee Parsons is the sole Wartburg Watcher these days and is in my view the most thorough and indefatigable advocate for those who have been abused in churches or by clergy or church staff. While I may disagree with her at times, if I had a church abuse story and had been ignored by the church, dodged by SBC associations or state conventions, or put off by any SBC leadership I had contacted, I’d call her. She has the ability to pursue an abuse story aggressively. There is power in this. Besides, I think she surrounds herself with vicious bull-pugs just to stay in the proper mind for fighting these battles.
I agree, though, with Susan Codone and Megan Lively in their article yesterday, The Credentials Committee: A Call for Patience and their statement,
The SBC Credentials Committee released its first set of guidelines yesterday. For the most part, these guidelines seem appropriate for a committee guarding the credentials necessary to be a Southern Baptist church.
The church that hires, supervises (or fails to supervise), holds accountable (or neglects to do so), and fires their clergy staff should aggressively and actively pursue wrongdoing in their congregation and by their ministerial staff and volunteers. Authorities should be called. No clergy should get quietly passed along to the next church to repeat their offense.
The Credentials Committee is an obscure administrative creation of the SBC. They have no power to investigate anything. There is no action they can take against any SBC minister. They can only push forward the expulsion of a church. After deliberation and action (and, while the ‘new’ Credentials Committee’s protocol may lead to action faster than before, action can be expected only a few times each year), an offending church would be named. Baptist Press would publish the matter for Southern Baptists and others to know. It’s designed to be a deliberate process. The Committee cannot compel any church to do anything.
The Committee is passive, seems to me, in the sense that they are prepared to receive submissions of church misbehavior. The SBC President made his own submission last year, publicly naming ten churches and asking for “due diligence” on them. Nothing is stopping anyone from making submissions (third party submissions to the Credentials Committee are accepted, though not anonymous ones), including members of the Committee, SBC leadership, abuse advocates or survivors.
My sense of things from the deep SBC hinterlands is that the Caring Well initiative (now used in some fashion by around 750 SBC churches) will help in the long haul. After all, the task of SBC entities and leadership is to persuade and influence churches and clergy, not to control them. SBC churches aren’t just autonomous, most of them are fiercely autonomous, but can be led to better practices.
Lest it not be said: Any SBC minister or layperson who has reasonable cause to suspect child abuse or neglect should report it to the proper authorities. That should be the first contact, not Dee Parsons or any SBC committee. Presumably, the Credentials Committee process would lead to authorities being contacted in such cases.
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Dee Parsons isn’t the only online advocate but is the one who is the most active, persistent, and thorough. Amy Smith will link abuse cases (she has even been known to cuss a little, something I feel like doing myself at times), and Christa Brown was the earliest to speak up about abuse in the SBC. While I don’t see any of these being involved in any formal way with the SBC’s efforts to address the issues, I’ve wondered if there would be some benefit in having conversations with them, or others.
I’ll gladly co-sign the above.
William,
“ Lest it not be said: Any SBC minister or layperson who has reasonable cause to suspect child abuse or neglect should report it to the proper authorities. That should be the first contact, not Dee Parsons or any SBC committee. Presumably, the Credentials Committee process would lead to authorities being contacted in such cases.”
Help me understand Your last sentence. Given the ones immediately preceding it. Shouldn’t the authorities be notified FIRST? By the accuser themselves or someone else with first hand (meaning having being told by accuser, or an actual witness) knowledge?
I would sure hope that no one uses the credentials committee or the Wartburg watch as any kind of substitution for actually contacting the police regarding first hand knowledge of abuse.
In fact, without that there’s little that can be done by either the Credentials Committee or the Wartburg watch.
Just a quick reply. Read my last post about a young man who had an horrific experience in his SBC’s church youth group. The very first thing we discussed was having him do a police report which he did. You will see that report posted in his story.
All advocates make this a priority. We even have a way that a person can make in online report if they no longer live in the area. That will be sent to the local police department involved. Sadly, as you will see in an upcoming post, some churches attempt to prevent such a report from being made.
The credentials committee forms have a forced choice pairing of questions. The submitter has to check that either they did or did not contact authorities. If the committee gets a submission where authorities should have been contacted but (according to the submission form) have not been then I presume that whomever at the EC or on the committee itself who reads it would either make a report or cause one to be made. That’s my presumption because I can’t imagine that the EC/CC would start this and not have an understanding and plan in place that they may need to report in some cases.
Gotcha. Thanks, William.
Good night! I am sitting here nursing a cold and dealing with some serious illness in my family, while worrying about getting Christmas stuff together. This is something that I never thought I would see,. I’ve always enjoyed your blog and get much information as I read it. Sometimes it’s hard to understand the politics and functioning of a large entity like the SBC. That’s what I get here.
All I can say is thank you. I really do care for the victims. I made it my Prime Directive 10 years ago. It has been hard-especially when people accuse me of wanting to hurt the church. I love the church but I hate abuse. Barbara Dorris from SNAP gave me some advice before I started writing. She said something like *Whatever you do, always keep the face of the victim in front of you. It will help you to sift through the confusion.* She was right.
So, Tulip and Princess Buttercup join me in saying thank you from the bottom of our hearts. This was the best early Christmas present ever!
William, I am not necessarily disagreeing with your post. However I am convinced this issue will only be corrected when Pastors and churches do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do…i.e. report to authorities and care for the victims. Anything else is just a band aid. I agree we should be patient with the CC but IMO their process needs much reworking. Expelling churches will protect the integrity of the SBC which has value but will do nothing to deal with the issue. Having had experience with a staff member in his area several years ago I can say dealing with it is gut wrenching and emotionally draining, but what to do is not rocket science…again report to authorities care for victims and their families.
Who do you call? The POLICE!
Why do we do all this effort to come up with all kinds of avenues to punish abusers… and never call the police?
None of us involved here at Voices, William included, or even the folks at the CC for the denomination think the police shouldn’t be called.
Absolutely, call the police (or, if appropriate, the child welfare/abuse hotline. Here in Arkansas, that’s actually the legal direction and the better choice, many areas do not have specialized sexual abuse investigators for children, but DHS does, so follow state law and call that one. I digress).
But the follow up is what next in the church? While the police investigate, while trials are awaited, while plea bargains come/go, while statutes of limitations (which should be changed and extended substantially) expire—what do you do with the church? There are cases of pretty clear guilt that still await criminal adjudication. How do you warn of a pastor who is still in charge of a church while that’s pending? Or who claims he’s vindicated simply because the Statute of Limitations has run out—or because, well, at the time, the law did not prohibit adult youth ministers from having sex with 17-year-old youth? (These days, we call that rape, but check the legal definitions from the 80s….many places, it was not considered as such.)
That is a place we continue to fail in Southern Baptist life. There are ministers still in pulpits. There are churches in our denomination that have applauded the abuser and then we still count them as “important churches.” So we have to talk about what else to do, because even after calling the police, there are non-criminal issues to address.
But always, always, always CALL THE POLICE (or legal authority).
Mark Smith is correct. And if the victim is under 18, call CPS. Do these things first, then do whatever else you need to do.
After seeing this just now from Houston First Baptist preached in October of this year (Thank you Sheila Gregoire), Dee is right, we have a long way to go to “Caring Well”, in fact we are not there. I am again incensed. How many more churches, SBC affiliated or not are preaching this same message?
https://twitter.com/sheilagregoire/status/1185235110905421824
Advice: If you hear a sermon like this, DO NOT CLAP AND LAUGH, don’t sit there and take it. Walk out as Sheila wisely suggests.
The laughing and clapping bothered me as much as the sermon did. It means that one agrees. How many members does this church have that agree? Add that to the numbers of those adding to the pain of survivors. This is not Caring Well.
I think you and Sheila are projecting onto those sermon clips a lot that is not there.
I am sure that those sermons are not meant to be disrespectful to anyone. The message is coming through to women loud and clear, however. Only us men seem to miss it. We need very much to listen to these women as if our daughter’s futures depended on it.
Thank you Strider.
Mark: It’s there. I have listened to more videos, full sermons and I see another Ergun Caner. He is playing to the audience, doesn’t follow what scripture teaches at all, referring to it only occasionally in a one verse out of context way, makes his whole talk on one or two taken out of context verses while playing for the laughs of the audience. IOW not one word of what he says is true, it’s harmful to both marriages and women in general, he is not legit. Yet many churches are still preaching this type of message, and meanwhile Eggrichs is selling books, lesson plans and going to speaking engagements all over the SBC churches. One I believe will be at a SBC church in Orlando and others all across the country. This is very damaging and the very thing I am so glad my church does not endorse. This is what SBC churches should run from with a fervor.
It’s sermons like this that cause women, children, to be seen as sexual objects, not people and the abuse begins.
We get rid of one or two men that speak about women in this way, further isolating us, blaming us, not respecting us, and we hire another one that is a celebrity and sending the wrong message, not one of the Bible and still we claim to be Bible believers? I used to tackle such subjects in writing for many years. I was hoping when Ergun left, this would leave, it’s still here in 2019. Thank God for people like Dee. May her tribe increase.
What I would love to hear is sermons like I hear on Sundays. One where using all of scripture, the book of Ruth for example, sermons on women are taught, respect for women is taught. God’s love for women as well as men is taught. That is teaching the Bible as it is written, not taking one or two passages out of context and teaching what Eggrichs , along with many ministers from their pulpits are promoting both in books and speaking engagements.