By DEEPA BHARATH, HOLLY MEYER and DAVID CRARY, Related Press
Leaders of the Southern Baptist Conference, America’s largest Protestant denomination, stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy intercourse abuse over virtually twenty years whereas searching for to guard their very own reputations, based on a scathing 288-page investigative report issued Sunday.
These survivors, and different involved Southern Baptists, repeatedly shared allegations with the SBC’s Govt Committee, “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some throughout the EC,” stated the report.
The seven-month investigation was carried out by Guidepost Options, an impartial agency contracted by the Govt Committee after delegates to final 12 months’s nationwide assembly pressed for a probe by outsiders.
“Our investigation revealed that, for a few years, a couple of senior EC leaders, together with outdoors counsel, largely managed the EC’s response to those studies of abuse … and have been singularly centered on avoiding legal responsibility for the SBC,” the report stated.
“In service of this purpose, survivors and others who reported abuse have been ignored, disbelieved, or met with the fixed chorus that the SBC may take no motion attributable to its polity relating to church autonomy – even when it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no discover or warning to their present church or congregation,” the report added.
The report asserts that an Govt Committee staffer maintained an inventory of Baptist ministers accused of abuse, however there isn’t any indication anybody “took any motion to make sure that the accused ministers have been now not in positions of energy at SBC church buildings.”
The newest checklist consists of the names of tons of of abusers considered affiliated in some unspecified time in the future with the SBC. Survivors and advocates have lengthy known as for a public database of abusers.
SBC President Ed Litton, in a press release Sunday, stated he’s “grieved to my core” for the victims and thanked God for his or her work propelling the SBC to this second. He known as on Southern Baptists to lament and put together to alter the denomination’s tradition and implement reforms.
“I pray Southern Baptists will start making ready at the moment to take deliberate motion to handle these failures and chart a brand new course after we meet collectively in Anaheim,” Litton stated, referring to the California metropolis that can host the SBC’s nationwide assembly on June 14-15.
