Denial and almost subtle blame-shifting

Denial: It ain’t just a river is Christa Brown’s gentle, detail by detail portrait of an unrepentant Southern Baptist sexual predator on his way to prison.

For 29 years Music minister at First Baptist of Benton, Arkansas, David Pierce was charged with 54 counts of sexual indecency with children and in a plea bargain pleaded guilty to four.

Pierce was as a result sentenced to two six-year terms to run concurrently and two four-year terms to run concurrently, followed by an additional term of two years’ suspended sentence. Upon his release from prison, he will be required to register as a sex offender and will be listed as an habitual offender

After sentencing, Pierce had his attorney read a sermonesque statement which said in part:

Our family has learned that forgiveness and reconciliation are the first steps to mending broken hearts. To that end, I express my most sincere apologies to every person affected by my actions. It was never my intention to hurt anyone.

The children he used to pleasure himself sexually over the decades are invisible. They are lost amid those “affected” by his actions, because he is seeking to exculpate himself. It is a classical pattern, also seen in an April letter to church officials in which Pierce asserted that he did not “engage in actual sexual contact.”

The almost subtle implication is that the victims are to blame. An implication reinforced by First Baptist pastor, the Rev. Rick Grant, who in a statement reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said it was hard to see a friend, mentor and a colleague “end up in this kind of circumstance.”

Oh yes, and, “I’m also sad for the victims in this ordeal – young men and their families who trusted David as a teacher and leader.”

Also?

Contrast those statements with the concern for the victims of Prosecuting Attorney Ken Casady

In bringing this case to resolution, the things I considered were Mr. Pierce’s actions toward the victims, the long-term insidious nature of these actions, and the impact of those actions on the victims.

Read Brown’s thorough and systematic analysis here.

Needed: Straight GCR answers

A story in the Florida Baptist Witness begins by trumpeting that “no question was turned down” during a dialogue Aug. 26 between four members of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Great Commission Resurgence Task Force and 400 people attending a luncheon. But a careful reading of the article reveals sticky issues that weren’t adequately answered.

The first issue focused on is loyalty to the Cooperative Program (CP) — the SBC’s method of distributing money. Churches send money to state Baptist conventions, which keep a share and send the rest to the SBC.

Many Southern Baptists, especially older church-goers, regard the CP as nearly sacred.

Many younger Baptists, however, have much less denominational loyalty and question why they should support the SBC.

Complicating the issue are the amounts sent to the CP by the churches of those who serve on the task force. Several questioners, according to the Witness article, said it sent a “mixed signal” when task force members’ churches do not contribute at an average level of CP giving.

Baptist Press, the official news agency of the SBC, detailed the percentage of undesignated funds in commission member church budgets that is sent to the CP.

Three of the commissioners’ churches were not reported.

Out of the remaining 20, BP reported that 14 sent less than five percent to the CP and seven sent 2.5 percent or less. Only three of the 20 sent more than 10 percent, although two others were close — 9.9 percent and 9.8 percent respectively. Another was 9.4 percent.

The highest was 18.3 percent.

SBC president Johnny Hunt, who appointed the task force as required by a directive from messengers at the SBC annual meeting in June, and who also serves on the commission, responded to a question about CP giving. Hunt — whose church gave 2.5 percent of its $17.45 million in undesignated receipts to CP — said his church had given a total of $3.6 million to “Southern Baptist causes.”

“But it’s not Cooperative Program missions,” responded Jim Wilson, pastor of First Baptist Church of Seneca, Mo., who asked the question.

Al Gilbert, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C. and a member of the task force, appealed for local churches to exercise their autonomy in deciding how best to deliver mission dollars to the field.

“Quite frankly, our church could care less about how folks outside count our loyalty,” he said, discounting attempts to quantify a church’s commitment to missions by citing its gifts to the traditional Cooperative Program funding mechanism. “It’s a game the next generation is sick of and they have no desire to have that kind of loyalty pin. We’d better wake up and listen to that,” he said.

Hunt hinted that he might be interested in changing the formula for division of CP funds between international and national missions efforts. He said he wants to “get the dollars to the pockets of lostness, instead of the majority staying in the States or in the country we’re in.”

The task force is reportedly reviewing an analysis showing the denomination spends per capita 33 times more for missions in North America than it does for the rest of the world.

But the most disturbing revelation in the article lay in the way the panelists answered questions. In response to a question about some task force members’ ties to a controversial pastor who is admired by some younger pastors, a seminary president said he was glad his students didn’t hear it and called for the need to “elevate the discussion.”

Worse, Hunt showed a propensity to answer questions by asking a question in return. Two questioners called for greater representation from smaller churches.

For example, according the BP profile, 16 of the 23 members attend churches with an average worship attendance of more than 2,000. While only two have an average worship attendance of less than 200.

Hunt’s response when asked about that: “Does it matter the size church you serve or does it still matter where you’ve been?”

When someone asked about a rumor that the task force’s plan would “deemphasize church planting and evangelism in America,” Hunt said, “An even greater question is who is addressing the poor journalism that would allow reporting that we may be attempting to disassemble NAMB. When there is absolutely no quote whatsoever to go with that. It’s ludicrous.”

Further pressed, he eventually issued a clear denial that there had been any consideration of merger.

These responses, coupled with the task force’s decision to meet behind closed doors, did little to raise the confidence level among those in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

A group that could call for a major restructuring of the convention can expect skepticism in response to a pose which in effect says, “Trust us. We know what we’re doing.”

Moderation on the American Catholic right?

Today’s resignation under a “cloud” of Scranton Bishop Joseph Martino portends change for politically aggressive, conservative bishops.

“Moderazione” is the message from the powers that be, persuasively argues Mark Silk of Trinity College’s Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life.

Catholic religious journalist David Gibson wrote that some bishops may be uneasy with the “more strident and even partisan tone of many church leaders”:

Last week, Santa Fe Archbishop Michael Sheehan publicly broke with that minority, telling National Catholic Reporter that the anti-Obama views represented a minority of bishops, and that the majority was hesitant to speak up.
“The bishops don’t want to have a battle in public with each other, but I think the majority of bishops in the country didn’t join in with that, would not be in agreement with that approach. It’s well intentioned, but we don’t lose our dignity by being strong in the belief that we have but also talking to others that don’t have our belief. We don’t lose our dignity by that,” he said.

Too bad for the protestant Religious Right? It relies on what Silk calls “take-no-prisoners” members of the Catholic hierarchy to echo and add credence to its campaigns – most recently the counter-factual campaign against health care reform.