I made the following motion during the first introduction of new motions in the Tuesday morning session. Here is the full text.
My name is Todd Benkert, Messenger from Oak Creek Community Church in Mishawaka, Indiana
I move to request the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to hire an outside organization to oversee an audit and assessment of sexual abuse within the SBC.
The organization shall be authorized to receive and assess, over the next three years, both reports of sexual abuse and allegations of mishandling abuse, from voluntarily participating churches, victims, and witnesses. Because participation in the assessment is strictly voluntary, the assessment will not be exhaustive, but rather aim to provide broad-spectrum data and analysis on rates of abuse allegations, mishandling of abuse allegations, and patterns related to said allegations.
I further move that we ask the ERLC to include the organization’s preliminary findings in their 2022 and 2023 annual reports and submit a final report including the organization’s recommendations for our churches, entities, and denominational structures for the 2024 annual meeting.
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After we find out the disposition of the motion at the Committee on Order of Business Report (second) at 6:10pm this afternoon, I will publish another post here to explain the procedure, what happened and why, and what will happen next. I want survivors especially to understand everything that is happening and why we have written the motion as we have.
For an explanation of the rationale behind this motion, please read my article:
To read the response from SBC abuse survivors to this motion and other Convention items, read their statement:
