Southern Baptists Vote to Create Database Tracking Pastors, Church Employees Accused of Sexual Abuse

This file photo shows hymnals in a church pew. Kyler Nixon/Unsplash

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) voted on June 14 to create a “ministry check” website to track pastors and other church workers credibly accused of sexual abuse following a report that revealed how leaders had mishandled sexual abuse cases for years.

In May, Southern Baptist leaders published a nearly 300-page report (pdf) conducted by an independent firm detailing decades of sexual abuse and cover-ups within the denomination as leaders sought to protect their own reputations.

The report revealed that “for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the SBC Executive Committee (EC) to report child molesters and other abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff.” The survivors and advocates reached out to the SBC via phone calls, mailed letters, and emails, as well as meetings and rallies.

However, their reports had been met “time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC.”

The report also revealed that survivors and advocates had called for a public database of abusers to be made, but those requests had been denied by the SBC.

For more than 10 years, the report alleges, an executive committee staff member collected a list of Baptist ministers accused of abuse, but there is no indication that the staffer or anyone else “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”

The most recent list held by the staffer contained the names of 703 accused abusers, with 409 believed to be affiliated with the SBC at some point in time, according to the report.

On June 14, members of the Southern Baptist Convention voted overwhelmingly in favor of two recommendations presented by the Sexual Abuse Task Force: first, the creation of an online database or “ministry check” website to share “properly vetted information” regarding those who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse.

Secondly, members voted for the creation of an Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF) to oversee reforms in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The database will be “established and maintained by an independent contractor, with the ARITF to oversee and report back to the Convention on feasibility, effectiveness, and costs,” the SBC said.

The task force will operate in accordance with “best practices in keeping with Southern Baptist church polity,” according to Baptist Press.

“Today we will choose between humility or hubris,” Task Force chair Bruce Frank said at the SBC annual meeting on June 14. “We will choose between genuine repentance or continually being passive in our approach to sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. We will choose between doing the best for the Glory of God and for the good of people, or we will choose, again, business as usual.”

While some abuse victims praised the recommendations as steps in the right direction, Christa Brown, an advocate of fellow abuse survivors, said she was disappointed with the reforms.

“I know people like happy endings, but I’m not feeling it,” Brown wrote on Twitter. “I feel grief. It’s better than nothing but that’s such a low bar. And if this is all that’s done even when such massive media is mustered, that saddens me.”

Also at the annual meeting, convention members elected rural Texas pastor Bart Barber as the next president of the convention. Barber defeated three other candidates, including his closest rival, Tom Ascol, who had hoped to move the denomination further to the right after protesting against an increase in “wokeness,” The Associated Press reported.

Thousands of Southern Baptists are currently in Anaheim, California, for the conference’s annual meeting.