Guidestone to predator-free SBC churches

Christa Brown sees the Southern Baptist Convention’s big Guidestone program as a model for making the denomination more predator-free.

For nine decades Guidestone has leapt lightly over any nagging SBC concerns about church autonomy to provide retirement, health care and financial assistance services to SBC ministers.

They need those services, and it is in fact no fatal breach of individual church autonomy to systematically provide those services, denomination-wide.

Nor would it be a fatal breach of church autonomy to provide denomination-wide protection from clerical sexual predators, as Christa explains:

If local church autonomy doesn’t preclude the denomination from creating an entity to assure retirement security for ministers, why does local church autonomy preclude the denomination from creating an entity — i.e., an independent review board — to assure that those who report clergy sex abuse are compassionately received and that local churches are warned about credibly accused clergy?

Why don’t Southern Baptist leaders care just as much about protecting kids and congregants against clergy sex predators as they do about protecting the security of ministers in retirement?

There is no lack of need.

News of SBC clergy and staff predators is commonplace, despite church efforts to hush things up. By conservative estimate there are more than 3,000 active, Southern Baptist, pedophile ministers at work in the church, now. And private investigative services available to churches aren’t up to the job of winnowing them out.

All that truly bars the denomination-wide solution is the SBC decision not to create a service to protect congregations from abuses which inevitably attend deployment of wayward ministers.

Just a matter of priorities.

That’s all.