I finished reading the 288-page Sexual Abuse Task Force report by an independent third party (Guidepost Solutions) commissioned by the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I’m saddened and overwhelmed by the findings but not surprised. As the #MeToo movement began in 2017, my wife told me that it would expose churches. I heard her but chose to be agnostic. The next year or two corrected me. My error calibrated my expectations for the task report that came out last Sunday.
SBC Sexual Abuse Task Force report did the following:
- It exposed credible evidence of a former SBC president sexually assaulting another pastor’s wife.
- It revealed people in the Executive Committee (EC) mishandled abuse allegations and mistreated victims by ignoring them and stalling.
- The EC did not inform SBC churches that some in positions of pastoral authority have been accused of sexual abuse.
- The EC did not notify the larger EC Trustees group of these reports, though the board of trustees is responsible for overseeing the EC.
- Victims and advocates were dismissed, and their motives impugned.
- Select individuals on the EC resisted sexual abuse reform initiatives.
- Finally, this inner circle within the EC sinfully justified their actions by reasoning they were “protecting” local churches, sustaining SBC entity autonomy, and avoiding potential legal liability for getting involved.
For a good summary of the report and explanation of the Southern Baptist Convention and Executive Committee composition and structure, read this overview by Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition.
The report is horrific and heartbreaking. Far worse is the reality that men and women, boys and girls, are living in daily. They carry the pain of isolation and they have been dismissed by churches that should have helped them. This is egregious. It is unacceptable.
The problem for us Christians and pastors associated with the SBC is that the gargantuan size of the failure not only breaks our hearts but paralyzes our minds. Angry, confused, and burdened—the overwhelming emotions can freeze us to inaction and further negligence.
So what should we Christians and pastors do? How should we respond? I thought about this for a week before writing about it. I feel angst and am overwhelmed, not only as a pastor of a church where the average of 1 in 3 female church members have been abused but also because my wife is a survivor (and one of my heroes). The reflections here are for my church family, pastors, and others in cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention, though much of it will be applicable and relevant to all Christians.
We should respond with righteous anger, self-examination, mourning, and change. If you are not part of the Southern Baptist network of churches, please do not disassociate yourself from this issue. Please remember that we who are true Christians in gospel-preaching local churches are all part of the universal church and when one member of the body hurts, the whole Body hurts.
Like the Apostle Paul, we are concerned for all churches (2 Corinthians 11:28). When one group of local churches representing the universal church shamefully sins and fails, our one true and universal Lord is dishonored.
So be righteously angry. Examine yourselves. Lament, and mourn for fellow gospel-preaching churches and church networks failing to handle sex abuse reports faithfully. Be agents of change in speaking to the SBC, other churches, and other church networks as God gives you the opportunity.
Righteous Anger
We must look directly at the failure of the SBC Executive Committee and call it sin. Evil. Feel the abhorrence and detestation. “Detest what is evil; cling to what is good” (Romans 12:9). Even more, God calls us to be angry. “Be angry and do not sin” (Ephesians 4:26).
It is true that the Bible says, “Refrain from anger and give up your rage; do not be agitated—it can only bring harm” (Psalm 37:8). But read Ephesians 4:26 again. He’s not merely telling us to avoid sin. He commands us to be angry while not sinning. In other words, it is a sin to not be angry when you should be angry. It would be sinful for me as a father to not be angry if my child was being abused. My indifference would not be righteous humility but sinful apathy.
How can we know if our anger is godly? Is it centered on the holiness and glory of God? Are we angry that God is violated and belittled? Righteous anger echoes God’s anger. God is not indifferent to sexual abuse. God is not apathetic to leaders and organizations mishandling abuse reports and mistreating sex abuse survivors and their advocates. God burns with holy and righteous anger (e.g., Psalm 78:58-59, Exodus 32:10-11, Revelation 16:19). Anger is fitting and right when considering that these precious ones who bear God’s image, many of them children, have been violated and robbed of their innocence.
Be righteously angry and abhor the evil exposed in this report (which is a fraction of the sex abuse evil that has occurred and is occurring in churches all over this country and all over the world). Shame on the handful of leaders who mishandled the sex abuse reports, hindered reform, made excuses based on church polity, and mistreated, dismissed, and misrepresented survivors, victims, and advocates. How despicable and Satanic! They have set their minds on human concerns rather than God’s concerns (Matthew 16:23).
May their idolatry for protection from legal liability perish with the unrepentant because they thought they could justify neglecting survivors for years without consequence or guilt. Their heart is not right before God, as expressed in these evil deeds. How terrible it will be for them if they do not repent in contrition and bear fruits in keeping with repentance! What sorrow awaits them! Woe to them! Come, Lord! Judge and destroy and end these evils! We hate this! You hate it more. We know little and feel little. You know all evil and perfectly hate it all.
There is a time to be angry. And that time is right now. Full stop.
But we must continue reading: “Be angry and do not sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, and don’t give the devil an opportunity” (Ephesians 4:26-27). How do we not sin when being angry at the sins and failings of the EC? Besides making sure it is God-centered and God-like, we must not let anger rule us and rot into bitterness, resentment, or self-righteousness. Prolonged righteous anger becomes not only unrighteous but also easy access for the devil to “take us captive to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:26).
How do we do righteous anger well?
Check Yourself
The path forward requires self-examination. We, too, are sinners, aren’t we? Now that doesn’t mean we never hold others accountable or call out their evil. It doesn’t mean we have sinned in the same way or to the same extent in our actions. It does mean we must take the log out of our own eye before we take the speck out of our brother’s eye. The Lord Jesus said, “Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye? Hypocrite! First, take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:4-5).
Self-examination
So I must remove the splinter from my own eye first. Do I see the failures of these people as a reflection of the similar kinds of evil in my heart (cf. Jeremiah 17:9)? Do I see sexually immoral lusts in my heart and life? I do. Do I see a proclivity in me to care more about optics than reality, reputation than integrity? I do. Do I make foolish excuses and use biblical truths in the wrong way to justify sinful inaction and passivity? Didn’t Satan twist Scripture to persuade Jesus to jump off of the pinnacle of the temple (Matthew 4:5-6)? Am I prone to excusing myself? I am.
The sins and failures in this report are of the same substance as the sins in my heart. God help me. Forgive me for lustful thoughts (Matthew 5:27-30) and for desiring to hide in my sin (John 3:19-20, James 5:16, Hebrews 3:12-13). Cleanse my heart from self-justification and self-centered self-preservation. Help me! Lord, help us!
Check Your Church
Checking ourselves also means checking our churches and checking our leadership. Do I confess my sins to the Lord and the appropriate brothers and sisters where I no longer control the information and consequences of my sins? Do my fellow pastors? Are we honest and vulnerable with one another, our spouses, other church members, and Christian friends? Have we made our church a safe space to confess sin and, at the same time, hold others appropriately accountable?
What about our church’s practice and policies on protecting our children from abuse and manipulation? Is our policy as effective as it could be in protecting our kids? Do our people know how to report abuse and to whom? Are our pastors and volunteers appropriately aware of these policies? Do we practice what we plan? Where can we improve?
Examining ourselves, repenting from our own personal sins, and using the failures of others to repent and humble ourselves before the Lord helps us exercise righteous anger. It also helps us channel that anger in a righteous direction so it doesn’t linger too long and corrupt our souls with self-righteousness.
Check your church, and let your church check you. But we must do more than check ourselves.
Mourn and Lament
We must mourn. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). Let us mourn and lament over what this report has revealed about our EC and about our convention of churches. Let me be clear: The majority of trustees, many of the EC staff, and millions of members of SBC churches have not mishandled abuse allegations and mistreated survivors and their advocates.
But the report reveals that some members of the EC utterly failed. And those who failed did so as the Executive Committee of our Southern Baptist Convention. So while I’m not personally responsible for mishandling these reports and mistreating these survivors and advocates, I am part of the corporate institution, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is responsible for the sinful mistreatment and mishandling. We are responsible. And I am inseparably part of the we. So is my church family.
Corporate Responsibility
We are corporately responsible because we are associated with the corporation. We give money to the cooperative program through our state convention. We give to two local Baptist associations. We send messengers to the SBC every year, and we vote. We have a church member serving on the board of Lifeway and another on the board of Gateway Seminary. We have sent IMB missionaries to the mission field. And even if your church doesn’t have all of these connections, giving to any SBC entity and intentionally cooperating means you are formally associated with the Southern Baptist Convention (see SBC’s Constitution, Article III for details).
So if you are associated with the SBC, you are corporately responsible and accountable for the failures exposed in this report, just like I am. Again, our sin is not that we directly mishandled reports and mistreated reporters. Though the gross negligence was only some of the Executive Committee staff and general counsel and not all of the staff or even a majority of the trustees, it was one of our entities that hindered righteous accountability, communication, and action fitting to the horrific amount of information the few possessed.
So we mourn because we, as a convention of churches, failed to see this sooner and hold our leaders accountable. Our staff. We failed to hear and believe and act on the credible testimony of our sexual abuse survivors earlier. We failed. We sinned as a convention corporately.
If you think you can distance yourself completely from this failure but also think you have a vote or voice from within the convention for change, then you show you are part of this institution. I’ve heard some pastors say they are leading their churches to leave if nothing changes. That’s fair. Just understand that we, including their churches, got us here to this point. We must own that.
Call to mourn and repent
So let us mourn over the sins of the specific EC staffers who sinfully mishandled the reports and mistreated the survivors and advocates. Let us also grieve over the failure of the rest of the EC staff, the EC trustees. Let us bow in contrition over our failure as a convention of churches. Let us weep. Let us cry out to God for forgiveness and mercy and help.
“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (James 4:8-10).
Furthermore, in our grief and mourning and lamenting, let us speak directly to the survivors who courageously reported these crimes:
We haven’t listened to you as we ought to have listened. We should have believed you and acted. We should have called for this independent study years ago. We should never have adjourned any of the past conventions without a formal independent investigation. We should have heard your recommendations and calls for reform. We multiplied your pain. Our ignorance, confusion, and slowness pressed on you more than we can understand. And we are culpable for our ignorance and slowness in light of what you have credibly communicated and reported.
We are sorry. We have sinned against God and all of you. We must ask God for forgiveness. We must ask you for forgiveness. I can’t speak for the whole convention, but if I could, I would express: We sinned against God and you by not listening to and believing you and acting on that knowledge sooner. We have no legitimate excuse. We ask for your forgiveness. We want to repent and desire to begin to make this right in this 2022 convention.
You are made in God’s image. You are beautiful. You are worthy of respect and dignity and our attention, love, and service. You were worthy then, and you are worthy now. It is we, as a convention, who are not worthy of your love and patience in light of our failure to hear and believe you and act accordingly.
As Richard Sibbes has said, “There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.” May God have mercy on us. Let us, as a convention, even in this 2022 convention, ask God to forgive us for our corporate failure as a convention. And if our convention doesn’t move toward this confession and repentance corporately, then I encourage you to confess it to God personally and with your churches the way Daniel personally confessed for his corporate responsibility though he was not individually guilty (Daniel 9:4-7).
Before our Southern Baptist brothers and sisters run off in despair, I would like to encourage us with two things: God’s grace and the evidence of his grace in our moment.
First of all, remember that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). He gave his life as ransom for all of us who repent and trust in him for our salvation (Mark 10:45). He died for our sins and our personal connection to our corporate sin. Praise God for grace that is greater than our sin.
Secondly, let’s humbly recount God’s grace to us at this moment as a convention:
- We (the 2021 convention) overwhelmingly commissioned this independent report to expose not only the EC’s failures but our failure as a convention. An outside party did not force this action upon us. By God’s grace, we chose to come to the light (John 3:19-20).
- The EC eventually voted to waive attorney-client privilege as they followed the decision of the SBC convention. Praise God!
- We, as a convention, elected J.D. Greear to be president, and he helped push the ball forward to this point of exposing our failures.
- We, as a convention, elected presidents and confirmed their committees on committees through the years. We confirmed the committee on committees’ committee on nominations. Then we confirmed the trustees the committee on nominations put forward through the years. And the trustees of the ERLC chose Russell Moore to be the ERLC president, and he, along with J. D. Greear, helped move the convention to the point of exposing the failures of the EC and SBC.
- Lastly, though our SBC may be divided on 2019’s Resolution 9 and 2021’s Resolution 2 and a few other things, we don’t seem to be divided on changing the policies and practice of caring well for sex abuse survivors and holding sexually abusive church leaders accountable. Let us praise God for that seeming unity and wait to see if 2022’s convention will prove that we are moving in the right direction.
If we are righteously angry, checking our self-righteousness, and lamenting and mourning for our corporate failure we must not be content. We must act and see to it that we actually move forward.
Change
Stay or Leave?
Should we stay or leave the convention? That depends. First of all, I encourage you to have an open conversation, maybe an open forum, with the members of your church to discuss, lament, pray, and process the horrific reality of our failure. I’ve collected several of my church’s questions and will be addressing them.
You need biblically and prayerfully discern the wisest breakpoint for cooperation with the SBC. I don’t think right now is the time. Why? The failure of the convention up to this point happened on our watch. It happened while we were here. So let’s remain here and fix our mess. Then leave if you want to. Or at least make sure you took up your personal and church responsibility to try to change the convention and move it in the right direction. If God gives you the opportunity, you should try to leave the convention in a better place than when you got here. That is my suggestion. “Let each one be fully convinced in his own mind” (Romans 14:5).
Decide and implement necessary recommendations and changes
Guidepost Solutions made several good recommendations that could help bring about institutional change. We should discern and make all the necessary changes by thinking of God’s glory and the protection of victims and children first, not legal liability first.
Attend and vote this year
To make these changes, we need to send messengers to the national convention (annual meeting) this year and in the following years. We should send messengers who will attend, pay attention, speak, and vote according to biblical wisdom, love, righteousness, and truth. The convention is in June this year and every year.
Specifically, at the 2022 convention on June 14-15, the messengers should vote for both task force recommendations:
- To approve the creation of an Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF), authorized to operate for one three-year term. The ARITF is to be appointed by the president elected by the 2022 Convention, who will also appoint its leadership, and
- To authorize the ARITF, in coordination with the Executive Committee, to create a “Ministry Check” website and process for maintaining a record of pastors, denominational workers, ministry employees, and volunteers who have at any time been credibly accused of sexual abuse. You can read the full text of the formal recommendations here.
Keep speaking
Keep speaking the truth in love wherever God gives you the opportunity, especially if you are a pastor, trustee, or entity staffer. God says, “Speak up for those who have no voice, for the justice of all who are dispossessed. Speak up, judge righteously, and defend the cause of the oppressed and needy” (Proverbs 31:8-9). Be an advocate and keep speaking the truth in love so that we are built up and move more and more with and toward our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 4:15).
Pray
Lastly, pray. God hears and answers prayers for his glory and his people’s good in his way and time. Our Lord Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” So let us pray. Instead of listing prayer requests, I will close this piece by encouraging you to lament and pray the God-breathed and inerrant words of Psalm 10:
1 Lord, why do you stand so far away?
Why do you hide in times of trouble?
2 In arrogance the wicked relentlessly pursue their victims;
let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.3 For the wicked one boasts about his own cravings;
the one who is greedy curses and despises the Lord.
4 In all his scheming,
the wicked person arrogantly thinks,
“There’s no accountability,
since there’s no God.”
5 His ways are always secure;
your lofty judgments have no effect on him;
he scoffs at all his adversaries.
6 He says to himself, “I will never be moved—
from generation to generation I will be without calamity.”
7 Cursing, deceit, and violence fill his mouth;
trouble and malice are under his tongue.
8 He waits in ambush near settlements;
he kills the innocent in secret places.
His eyes are on the lookout for the helpless;
9 he lurks in secret like a lion in a thicket.
He lurks in order to seize a victim;
he seizes a victim and drags him in his net.
10 So he is oppressed and beaten down;
helpless people fall because of the wicked one’s strength.
11 He says to himself, “God has forgotten;
he hides his face and will never see.”12 Rise up, Lord God! Lift up your hand.
Do not forget the oppressed.
13 Why has the wicked person despised God?
He says to himself, “You will not demand an account.”
14 But you yourself have seen trouble and grief,
observing it in order to take the matter into your hands.
The helpless one entrusts himself to you;
you are a helper of the fatherless.
15 Break the arm of the wicked, evil person,
until you look for his wickedness,
but it can’t be found.16 The Lord is King forever and ever;
the nations will perish from his land.
17 Lord, you have heard the desire of the humble;
you will strengthen their hearts.
You will listen carefully,
18 doing justice for the fatherless and the oppressed
so that mere humans from the earth may terrify them no more.
If you are/have been a victim of sexual abuse or suspect sexual abuse by a pastor, staff member, or member of a Southern Baptist church or entity, please reach out for help at 202-864-5578 or SBChotline@guidepostsolutions.com. All calls are confidential.