Three Things Messengers Know when Voting on Sex Abuse Reform

For the third straight year, the messenger body of the Southern Baptist Convention gave their overwhelming endorsement to the creation of a warning system¹ to warn churches about people who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. In other words, they keep affirming the creation of the "Ministry Check" website. Why have they so consistently voted in this way?

Over the past two years, I have sometimes heard people speculate (that is, people who oppose this measure) that the messengers keep voting for Ministry Check because of what they do not know. They don't know the legal risks, we are told. They don't know what "biblical justice" is, others say. And yet, those criticisms (along with all of the others) have been aired for more than three years. It is no longer (if it ever was) a credible argument to suggest that messengers are voting the way that they are voting because of ignorance.

Rather, messengers are voting to affirm Ministry Check over and over with massive majorities because of at least three things that they DO know:

1. They know that their names will not be listed.
2. They know that there will be a growing number of people rightfully listed.
3. They know that they are going to need to hire employees and recruit volunteers for their churches sooner or later.

There it is. They keep voting for Ministry Check because they know those three things.

1. The messengers know that their names will not be listed. How can they know that? Because they know that they haven't been guilty of sexual misconduct. Whichever Southern Baptists are pursuing teenagers from the youth group sexually, are filling their hard drives with child porn, or have had their teaching certification pulled by the state for inappropriate behavior with teenagers, those are Southern Baptists who are not voting for the warning system. The Southern Baptists who are voting for the warning system know that no one has ever even accused them of any of these things.

This point exists in contradiction to anyone who would suggest that the SBC is chock full to the brim of sex offenders in our pulpits. If that were so, why would these people be voting for their own annihilation? Vote after vote, the Southern Baptist Convention has demonstrated that our rank-and-file Southern Baptists find church sexual abuse to be abhorrent and that they themselves are not sexual abusers.

2. The messengers know that there will indeed be a lot of names rightfully listed. In the 14 days surrounding the SBC Annual Meeting, serious allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse emerged regarding two mega-church pastors and a Southern Baptist pastor in Florida. Again, that's just over the span of a few days.

It's not crying wolf to acknowledge the growing problem of abusive sexual behavior among church leaders. It's also not "wokeism." It is utterly conservative to expect pastors, deacons, and church volunteers to follow the Christian sexual ethic. It is utterly conservative to refuse to give leadership positions to abusers. The Ministry Check website is conservative, Bible-believing Christianity. We live in a decadent culture. It gets worse every year. Sexual abuse is not unique to churches (it's in schools, Hollywood, athletics, etc.), but it is waging war against the churches and infiltrating them, constantly seeking to breach what Roger Williams called "the hedge of separation" between the wilderness of the world and the garden of the church. The worse the culture gets, the more of this we are going to see.

We rightly ought to be guarding the wall. We rightly ought to be alarmed. We rightly ought to take a defensive posture on behalf of the flocks alloted to our charge.

The warning system only makes us better at doing that.

3. The messengers know that they are eventually going to need to hire an employee or recruit a volunteer. They don't want to hire or recruit someone else's sexual abuse problem. They don't want to hire the predator who got chased away from another church and then came to their town fleeing the consequences of abuse and looking for somewhere to start fresh.

Can you blame these pastors for not wanting to be kept in the dark about these people when they have to hire someone? Their own children attend their churches. Their friends' children attend their churches. Children they visited in the hospital when they were born. Children they baptized when they came to faith in Jesus. They want to hire good people to serve their flock. They don't want to hire some wolf in sheep's clothing.

The warning system will benefit every kind of church that ever hires anyone or recruits anyone to volunteer. It will benefit megachurches and small churches. It will benefit urban churches and rural churches. It will benefit IX Marks churches, CBN churches, NAAF churches, Pillar churches—it will benefit every kind of church that doesn't want to hire that guy who created a sexual abuse scandal at another church three states away but didn't wind up on a sex offender registry.

Earlier this year, candidates for the SBC presidency debated whether we have a sexual abuse "crisis." For those who eschewed the description, they commonly offered the caveat that any church sexual abuse is a crisis for that one church. Yes, it is a crisis if a sexual predator plunders the flock of one church. Sometimes, because people are sneaky and devilish and highly motivated by their depravity, it is a crisis that could not easily have been prevented in that first church. But it is an even greater crisis when a single sexual predator creates crises at two churches, three churches, or a dozen churches. For any church after that first one, somebody could have done something to prevent it.

The messenger body knows that. They want to do everything they can do to avoid being that first church in crisis, but at the very least they also want to receive adequate warning to avoid being that second, third, or fourth church to fall into the clutches of a serial church abuser.

The messengers know that people will keep secrets and will work against them. They want every advantage they can get in the battle against these predators. It's good for their churches. And so, that's how they vote—they vote for the thing that will protect their churches and will protect the people in their churches.

Conclusion

There's just no mystery in this. The SBC Executive Committee now holds in its hands the third consecutive affirmation of this plan, referred to them by the messengers. There will be discussion about this. The perennial opponents of any kind of warning system will most definitely make their case. The members of the EC and everyone else will hear from those opponents all the reasons not to provide this warning system to churches.

I'm not looking to get in the way of anyone who wants to make their case against a warning system. We have a deliberative system. Let each one make his case as best he can (and let them make it publicly and on the record). And Southern Baptists should listen carefully (and critically) to what those people say.

But I do want to get in the way of this: When people dismiss the repeated votes of the messenger body by calling into question their knowledge or wisdom, I hope we'll all throw a little side-eye their way and point back to these three undeniable truths that have motivated the messenger body. The messengers' voice and the messengers' case should be articulated with appropriate clarity, enthusiasm, attesting data, and force. The reasons that motivate the messengers from the churches may not make a lot of sense to people whose daily work is outside the local-church context, but to a pastor, these three things are important realities. Although there is a further case to be made with additional reasons to implement a warning system, these three reasons are sound and compelling all by themselves. Let us show the respect due the messenger body—overwhelmingly populated by leaders in their own churches—and take their reasons and their needs seriously, too.

After all, don't the entities of the SBC exist "to assist the churches"?

¹This is often called "the database." I call it a "warning system" because I am open to any methodology that adequately warns churches about dangerous people.