I read about the cicada tsunami all winter and heard and saw my first of the red-eyed, hard shell devils back in April. Apparently, they have gone back underground. We can expect them again in 2037. I think my noisy friends will emerge after I’m dead, my life expectancy being a few years short of their 17 year cycle.
The SBC has been dealing with the issue of abuse for years. Two grand task forces were created, one of which is still active. Multiple millions have been spent. The SBC and SBC Executive Committee have a bushelful of lawsuits to defend, including one from a former SBC president. The celebrated, long awaited “Ministry Check” website, the name for a database of convicted (and eventually credibly accused) sex abusers is “coming soon.”
The latest task force, Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, was unsuccessful in creating the abuse database and handed it back to the often dysfunctional SBC Executive Committee. Other products have been created that may be helpful to SBC churches but not a database of abusers.
The Executive Committee has a new CEO, Jeff Iorg. Perhaps in time he will solve the problems of the abuse database. I’m not optimistic that there will ever be a database that includes convicted, confessed, and credibly accused abusers. If I am right then the sooner the EC says that we cannot carry out this portion of the messengers’ wishes on the database, the better we will be able to move forward with what we can do.
Our way of handling things is to go the way of the cicada, handle things underground, behind the scenes, behind closed doors with a handful of people and then make the grand announcement. I’m not against that for this issue. I’m perfectly comfortable with the EC under new leadership taking a fresh look at it all. I just don’t see any reasonable solution. I have little confidence that silence from our leaders is evidence that serious progress is being made.
The last grand announcement was by the ARITF when they had created a private entity to handle the database. That landed with a thud.
The task of creating a database of the type messengers wants has always seemed impossible in spite of how overwhelming the messenger stampede to vote for it. Messenger votes at an annual meeting are not inerrant.
The old database links that the EC had, those were to existing public abuse databases, were better than what we have now, which is nothing.
Someone can convince me otherwise.
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