Regarding Registering Abuse

Ethics Daily is reporting that Frank Page, President of the SBC, told an ABC News reporter for 20/20 that Southern Baptists were looking into the possibility of creating a registry to record clergy sex offenders. He did so after the reporter asked him why the denomination was more concerned about investigating whether SBC churches have women pastors or ordained homosexuals than they are with whether SBC churches have predatory preachers.

The reporter's question was devastating. SBC leaders have been on a witch hunt for more than 25 years. They investigated and terminated hundreds of denominational executives, professors, and missionaries for refusing to toe-the-line of their fundamentalist theology. Why do they hesitate to address clergy sex abuse?

A couple reasons for their hesitancy come to my mind. One is that they are afraid to address this issue for fear of what they might find. Their authoritarian, patriarchical, pastor-as-ruler-of-the-church theology might be proven to be highly congenial to predatory preachers. Another reason might be, knowing how flimsy their rationale was for firing so many denominational employees over theological issues, that they are justifiably worried that unscrupulous persons could use the registry to unjustly blackball select ministers.

It is this latter concern that prompts my admiration for the courage of Ben Cole and Wade Burleson who have announced their intentions to encourage the Convention to address the issue of clergy sex abuse at the SBC meeting this June in San Antonio.

These two preachers are at the forefront of a movement of young SBC pastors who are taking a stand against some of the unaccountable and despotic leaders of the SBC. Should they succeed in getting the SBC to address this issue and start a database of SBC ministers convicted of sex abuse, they need to make sure that the names on the database are open to the public. A secret database, that could not be publicly verified, might accidently be seeded with the names of innocent, but dissident, ministers.