NASHVILLE (TN)
Dallas Morning News [Dallas TX]
February 28, 2025
Half measures and foot dragging won’t do.
Any good Baptist preacher will tell you that repentance means more than just feeling sorry for one’s shortcomings. It means doing something about them — turning away from evil and heading in the other direction. But the Southern Baptist Convention seems to be having trouble practicing what it preaches.
Eighteen years after an ABC 20/20 investigation found evidence of “preacher predators” in the denomination, six years after the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News detailed complaints against 300 church leaders by more than 700 victims, and almost three years after an audit ordered by the SBC’s own executive committee found that church leaders had ignored, belittled and intimidated survivors of sexual abuse, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination is still dragging its feet.
This month, at a meeting of the SBC executive committee in Nashville, committee president Jeff Iorg said a long-promised public database of abusive pastors is on hold.
Instead SBC leadership is focused on helping churches use other databases of abusers and training church staff and volunteers in things like background checks, Iorg said.
Sadly, the denomination is failing in that regard, too. A 2024 report from Lifeway Research found that only 58% of surveyed SBC churches conducted background checks on personnel who work with children, 38% offered training in reporting sexual abuse, and 16% offered training in caring for abuse survivors.
It’s hard to understand why, after so many credible reports of abuse, in the midst of a massive cultural shift away from faith that has been driven, in part, by stories of abuse in this and other denominations, those numbers are so low.
Half measures won’t do. SBC leaders should be pushing as hard as possible to stand with victims and prevent more mistreatment. The press, both religious and secular, should be writing stories about the dangers of overcorrecting, about the herculean efforts of church leaders to turn the ship. But they are not because there has been no such effort.
At the denomination’s annual meeting in 2022, leaders made a show of remorse for the sin in their midst. They passed resolutions denouncing, “in the strongest possible terms every instance of sexual abuse, those who perpetrate abuse” and declaring, “We prayerfully endeavor to eliminate all instances of sexual abuse among our churches.”
But real repentance would have meant actually following through on the resolutions. Baptists ought to know that.