Four key takeaways from the bombshell Southern Baptist sex abuse report

I have yet to come across a leader who was willing to do something about it.” She said her abuser is still a pastor at a church that is no longer affiliated with the SBC.Sing Oldham, a former spokesman for the Executive Committee, which is the administrative arm the report focused on, said in an interview that he had set up a Google alert for “Baptist” and “arrested” and would forward news reports to Southern Baptist Executive Committee leader August Boto about anyone who might be connected to the SBC. A Southern Baptist leader wrote back and said there was nothing they could do because, “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over local churches.”The report includes emails between leaders and employees of the SBC’s Executive Committee in which members of the survivor community were ignored or “shunned, shamed, and vilified.”In an internal email in 2019, Boto equated the focus on sexual abuse with the work of the devil, saying, “It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.” In an email, Oldham wrote to Boto, offering to bring him up to speed about the group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. Grant Gaines, a Southern Baptist pastor in Murfreesboro, Tenn., said the denomination, as well as individual pastors, need to be thinking seriously through sexual abuse prevention steps.Gaines said his own Belle Aire Baptist Church has had policies in place, such as having at least two adults in a nursery room and background checks for volunteers, but it has gone through extra steps this past year to work with a group called GRACE to add more training and awareness around sex abuse for his whole congregation.“As painful as it might be,” he said of the Guidepost report, “it’s nothing like the pain survivors have felt, the resistance they have felt in getting things changed.”Jules Woodson, whose 2018 allegation that her Southern Baptist youth pastor sexually assaulted her was viewed as a tipping point in leading the denomination to confront sex abuse, said the Guidepost investigation is historic for the denomination.“This is going to need to be a cultural change,” Woodson said.