We will not be Silent about Sexual Abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention

We will not be silent about the culture of Sexual Abuse among Southern Baptists

In my sermon last Sunday (May 22), I used the “interpretative lens” of trauma to unpack Jesus’ words of encouragement and love in John 14:15-24.  I reflected on the aftermath of recent shootings over the past week: one in a church in Laguna, California, and a second mass shooting in Buffalo, New York.  I used my own experience with trauma as a result of gun violence to help us live more deeply in Christ’s love, God’s Word, and the brokenness of our world. 

Trauma, I said, can be debilitating, paralyzing, and complex–but it can also provide a profound witness to the persistence of God’s unyielding love, the courage of the saints, and the witness of Christ’s Church.

This weekend we are greeted with a new wave of trauma as the Southern Baptist Convention released its report on their investigation into sexual abuse across the Southern Baptist Convention. 

The report shows numerous cover-ups, violations of human dignity, and pervasive abuse that shielded clergy and leadership from over 700 cases of abuse.  This abuse happened in all areas of the Convention, from the local church to the highest ranks of the SBC.

I agree with Russell Moore when he said in a recent interview with NPR that this is not only a systemic issue, but a cultural issue.  Sexual abuse and predation have been issues I’ve been speaking and writing about for years, primarily when it comes to how women are treated, views of women in roles of leadership, how Baptists treat issues related to gender and power in Scripture, and women in leadership within the local church.  We who have been engaged in Southern Baptist politics over the last two decades knew that a reckoning was coming. As Moore put it in his article on the SBC report:

“Who cannot now see the rot in a culture that mobilizes to exile churches that call a woman on staff a ‘pastor’ or that invite a woman to speak from the pulpit on Mother’s Day, but dismisses rape and molestation as ‘distractions’ and efforts to address them as violations of cherished church autonomy? In sectors of today’s SBC, women wearing leggings is a social media crisis; dealing with rape in the church is a distraction.” 

I join other Baptists in calling for refrom; but, before you can reform a community’s culture, you must reform its theology.  Theology is the foundation that embodies (and embeds) the values that shape culture, worldview, and–eventually–the bureaucracies that enshroud those cultures in a larger community.

We must reform theological fault lines.  For years, I have proposed that when certain theologians set up humans in a hierarchy, claiming that, since men are made first and women made second in creation, you ultimately get a worldview that turns those-who-are-created-second into second-class citizens. For me, this was becoming a larger issue in Baptist life when conversations in Convention-sponsored seminaries focused on excluding women from teaching Bible and theology classes to seminarians. It’s one thing to argue about women serving as pastors, but when a class is unable to have women teach, what emerges are theological fractures that cannot hold over time.

If women cannot have a voice and God-given authority to shape life with Christ and life in the church, then why are we surprised that it robs them of a voice to speak out against their abusers and oppressors within the church. Abuse and exploitation is not a secular, humanist plot; abuse is originating with church leaders who have codified theologies of abuse for decades.

Nor is it isolated: part of my wife’s testimony includes her leaving the Southern Baptist church of her youth after learning that her pastor was having an affair with one of his parishioners.

Reform must include repentance and reparation.  This report must lead us all to repent.  We have all been caught up in a culture of silencing victims for the sake of increasing budgets and bodies-in-pews.  We may not be directly involved or know anyone affected by abuse and scandal, but this is our family and we have a part in that family whether we like it or not. 

But repentance is only the beginning.  As I have learned in my work with gun-violence victims, there must be reconciliation that brings about reparation.  To say, “I pray for you” is not adequate if prayer fails to inspire action.   

There must be a re-evaluation of theological foundations that have perpetuated toxic masculinity and exploitation in the Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist churches.  We must reclaim what Scripture says in a way that honors both male and female as having been made in God’s image and lives out a Christ-centered vision in which “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” in the life of the church.

We have used Scripture for our means, and we need to reflect what the Bible really says about humans and human dignity in all our publications and promotions in the Convention.  There must be a total rewriting of our sermons, narratives (especially those that seek explicitly to silence victims of abuse), and curriculum to reflect the kind of justice and humility that God expects from His children.

We broke the world, and now we must work to repair it. 

We broke the world’s trust, and we need to work diligently to renovate the integrity of the Gospel.

And we must work to restore the heart of Baptist ministry in local and global contexts that shield victims from abuse, not abusers from their victims.