Accommodated to unaccountability

It was two years ago that SNAP first showed up on the doorstep of Southern Baptist headquarters in Nashville. So let’s reminisce a bit.

On September 26, 2006, we hand-delivered a letter with 5 requests for action to make kids in Baptist churches safer, and we asked for a dialogue.

The Southern Baptist Convention replied with a terse brush-off letter saying “continued discourse between us will not be positive or fruitful.”

But I didn’t personally receive that brush-off letter, and I didn’t know about it. Neither did David Clohessy, SNAP’s national director, and neither did any other SNAP leader. The letter just sat in a pile at SNAP headquarters in Chicago. (Apparently, a volunteer there didn’t see much significance in the letter, but of course, why would she? It was just a brush-off.)

So, since I never saw the letter and didn’t know about it, I wound up making statements to the press, saying that SBC officials hadn’t replied to SNAP’s Sept. 26th letter. That was a mistake.

It was an inconsequential mistake, because the SBC’s reply letter was nothing but a brush-off and not anything substantive, but it was still a mistake.

As soon as I got the first indication about the mistake, I looked into it and tracked down the SBC’s letter. Then Clohessy and I made a public apology in a news release. And I personally contacted every reporter I had spoken to about it and told them about the mistake. (None of them seemed to think it mattered much. They were more interested in whether the SBC had actually done anything.)

Though neither Clohessy nor I bore any personal fault, we made an apology on behalf of the organization. It’s what leaders in organizations do.

SNAP is a diffuse and dispersed organization. It is an organization comprised mostly of volunteers who exercise a large measure of autonomy and who are scattered across the country. But the local volunteers join together in a “network” for the pursuit of greater good.

Does that sound like another organization you know? Isn’t the Southern Baptist Convention also a sort of dispersed organization? And it’s comprised of local churches that voluntarily network together for the pursuit of greater good.

But however voluntary the network may be, the SBC is still an organization.

So why don’t SBC officials see the need for their own organizational apology? Do they just not believe in apologizing?

Or are they so accommodated to unaccountability that they don’t even notice when mistakes are made?

Before showing up in Nashville, SNAP had asked SBC officials to launch an investigation into the abysmal mishandling of my own abuse report so as to learn from it and make changes. My report showed that it was substantiated by another Baptist minister, who eventually made a sworn statement attesting to his knowledge of the abuse.

Yet, the SBC wrote that it had no record the perpetrator was still in ministry.

Many months later, and with no help from church or denominational leaders, I learned that my perpetrator was actually still working in children’s ministry at a Southern Baptist church in Florida. He had been in children’s ministry all along, including a long stint at the church of former SBC president Charles Stanley and a stint at the church of former Florida Baptist Convention president Dwayne Mercer.

But despite his prominent connections, I’ll simply assume for the sake of argument that no one at the SBC actually knew where the man was. Even so, wasn’t it still a mistake for the SBC to write that they had no record he was in ministry – when in fact he was?

SNAP lost a brush-off letter, and we made an organizational apology for that mistake even though neither Clohessy nor I had any personal knowledge about the letter’s existence. Our lack of knowledge didn’t alter the fact that the letter was actually there in Chicago.

Meanwhile, the SBC “loses” a reported clergy child molester, and gives out the misleading information of saying there’s no record he’s in ministry, and to this day, the SBC has made no organizational apology. Even if it’s true that SBC officials didn’t personally know about him, it doesn’t alter the fact that the man was actually there in Florida working as a Southern Baptist minister.

Do you think SBC officials even realize that a mistake was made?

Or are they so accustomed to being in a “buck-stops-nowhere” organization that they don’t even notice their organization’s mistakes?

Certainly, the SBC’s mistake was one that carried far graver potential consequences than the loss of a brush-off letter. Yet, it’s a mistake for which the organization has made no apology.

Why doesn't the SBC expect of itself the same sort of organizational accountability that it expects of other organizations?

The SBC still owes an apology, not only to me, but also to all those Florida parents whose kids they left at risk.

The SBC’s organizational apology is long over-due, of course, but better late than never.