Last year, messengers to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention authorized an internal investigation of the convention’s Executive Committee (EC). The motion the convention adopted created a task force and directed the president to name sex abuse experts who would hire and oversee an outside, independent expert to investigate “any allegations of abuse, mishandling of abuse, mistreatment of victims, a pattern of intimidation of victims or advocates, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives” by members of the EC staff or board of trustees, going back to 2000. It also authorized them to recommend best practices.
Next week, the Southern Baptist Convention meets in Anaheim. Delegates (called “messengers”) will face two proposals relating to sex abuse. All evangelicals interested in healthy ministries should take note of what’s going on in the SBC.
As things stand today, the proposals ask for blank checks, secured only by leaders’ promises of a blue sky. But Southern Baptists should not vote for anything they don’t understand, and should not accept legal responsibility for a half-baked “process” that is not yet just and not yet complete.
How We Got to This Point
Last year, messengers to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention authorized an internal investigation of the convention’s Executive Committee (EC). The motion the convention adopted created a task force and directed the president to name sex abuse experts who would hire and oversee an outside, independent expert to investigate “any allegations of abuse, mishandling of abuse, mistreatment of victims, a pattern of intimidation of victims or advocates, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives” by members of the EC staff or board of trustees, going back to 2000. It also authorized them to recommend best practices.
The report and recommendations come to the task force, which would prepare and submit a final report and recommendations before the 2022 annual meeting. The president appointed his task force of Baptists (and some non-Baptists), called the SBC Sex Abuse Task Force (SATF), which contracted with Guidepost Solutions.
Two weeks ago, Guidepost’s report and recommendations were released. The report described a deeply dysfunctional organization. It presented the SBC’s lawyers as paralyzed by litigation risk, refusing to meaningfully engage information brought to them by abuse victims and advocates.
The report also presents the EC trustees as never asking hard questions, preferring for staff to solve any problems quietly and out of public view. The report also included a bombshell sexual assault allegation against a prominent pastor who was a former SBC president, and (until the report) a high official at the SBC’s domestic missionary entity, the North American Missions Board (NAMB).
Except for the bombshell about the NAMB leader, most of the incidents and individuals had been previously disclosed online or in print. Some people welcomed Guidepost’s recommendations, and others praised the narrower, and materially different, recommendations of the SATF issued on June 1.
But there was also widespread criticism of the recommendations as not biblical, not Baptist, and not just. Guidepost proposed that the SBC should maintain an “offender information system,” a public list of those “credibly accused” of sexual abuse and those who “aided and abetted” them. As Matthew Schmitz noted in the Wall Street Journal, this standard “trample[s] the rights of the accused.” In the American Reformer, one of us compared the process to federal Title IX tribunals imposed by the Obama administration on colleges, another “process” that was famously criticized by legal experts for lacking adequate fairness.
Independent Contractor Celebrates Gay Sex
Then, just after the report’s release, Guidepost kicked off a public celebration of LGBT Pride Month, announcing on Twitter that it was an ally of progress and equality, directly opposed to the declaration of the SBC’s “Baptist Faith & Message” that homosexuality and same-sex marriage is sin. Guidepost’s CEO is a graduate of Baylor University, a historically Baptist school, and it had purportedly hired a number of “Baptist subject matter experts,” but Guidepost evidently declined to reverse course.
Clearly, the Task Force has been caught off-guard, first by the Guidepost recommendations, then by its flagrant opposition to the convention’s theology of sex, marriage, and what constitutes an abuse of sexuality. Once touted as experts that understood Baptists, Guidepost is now excused as a mere private investigator.
Also, rather than forward Guidepost’s recommendations, the task force claims they were always tasked with reproducing recommendations to suit the SBC, even though only a few days separate the report’s release and the SBC’s annual meeting. Even the SATF’s recommendations appear tentative; the initial recommendations were published on June 1. A week later, the task force substantially revised them and deleted prior drafts from their blog.
So it is concerning that the task force is resorting to the same dysfunctional habits that Guidepost criticized in the old guard. The task force is letting legal risk aversion limit the experts’ recommendations. And it is trying to get carte blanche authority from messengers to do the sausage-making for them, out of public view.
Messengers should not give their SATF friends a blank check, any more than the EC trustees should have given their lawyer friends a blank check. Even good people with good intentions are poorly served by unaccountable systems.
An Extrajudicial Process for Judging Accusations
Enter Matthew Martens, a Washington, D.C., lawyer for death row inmates and a former clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Martens is a gifted advocate, but, by his own description, not an SBC insider nor a messenger to any prior convention, so perhaps he is not as familiar with the culture of dysfunctional SBC experts asking to be trusted to do the right thing in the back room.
Writing for the SBC’s in-house news service, Martens says SBC messengers should approve the SATF’s Recommendation II, including blanket authority to “create a ministry check website.” This appears to be a much-reduced version of the “offender information system” recommended by Guidepost.
The “MinistryCheck” site proposes to keep a permanent record of pastors, denominational workers, ministry employees, and volunteers who have been “credibly accused” (a minimal standard that the accusation is more likely than not true) of sex acts that violate local laws. If a judge or jury has not decided the question, the SATF proposes that outside lawyers could be hired, in some cases by the SBC, to write opinion letters after an investigation.
