HOUSTON (TX)
Associated Baptist Press
“It’s not a problem for me to point out these issues with Catholic churches or Penn State, just don’t point the finger at my own Southern Baptist Convention,” SNAP representative Amy Smith says of pastors at First Baptist Church in Houston.
By Bob Allen
A woman who advocates on behalf victims of clergy sex abuse says she was sidelined by her Houston mega-church for planning an awareness event at next week’s Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.
Amy Smith, Houston representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, has been active for years in trying to expose what she believes is a systemic problem of abuse and cover-up in Southern Baptists’ free-wheeling polity in which each congregation hires and fires its own ministers.
Because of that, she was surprised on returning home after a few days out of town to find phone messages from a pastor she does not know from First Baptist Church in Houston who urgently desired to talk to her.
Smith said Doug Bischoff, “next generation” minister at the church she and her husband have attended for 18 years, took offense at her May 23 blog post announcing an “awareness event” outside the George R. Brown Convention Center when the SBC convenes its 2013 annual meeting June 11-12 in Houston.
Since she and her husband “don’t see what I am doing as a problem,” Smith said, they were told “that it’s for the best if we step down” from teaching in the church’s youth ministry. Asked how he found her blog, Bischoff reportedly told her husband that his boss, Pastor Gregg Matte, showed it to him.
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