Trick from the Baptist playbook

Before I went to bed last night, this article about a Southern Baptist youth minister in Kentucky crossed my screen. It was late. I was tired. So rather than load it onto the StopBaptistPredators website, I just hit print.

This morning, when I got ready to load the article, I noticed that it had been updated. The updated version no longer referred to the guilty man, Frank Shaw, as a “former youth minister” at Chester Avenue Baptist Church. That part was deleted. (The video was apparently harder to change; it still describes Shaw as a “former youth minister.”)

There isn’t anything unusual about an article being updated. But I’ve seen this sort of thing before -- where the fact that the guy was a Baptist minister gets omitted. Sometimes that fact never gets mentioned to start with.

I don’t blame the reporters. Baptists don’t make it easy for people to figure out who’s a minister. It’s not as if there’s a registry somewhere that lists all the men who carry the “Baptist minister” brand. There’s not.

Not only do Baptists fail to keep any systematic records on ministers accused of child molestation, but they don’t keep any systematic records on ministers… period.

What’s more, Baptist leaders play with the definition of minister.

In yesterday’s Kentucky case, I figure the reporter probably got some information that Frank Shaw was a minister, and after the article went to press, he may have heard from a representative of the church, who told him he was mistaken and that Shaw wasn’t actually an ordained minister. So the article got updated to delete the reference to Shaw being a “minister.”

Obviously, I don’t know for sure that this is what happened. I’m just making an educated guess.

In connection with another recent case, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch referred to the accused as “the director of children’s programs” at First Baptist Church of St. Charles. It then cited the senior pastor of the church, David Sheppard, as saying that “the man was not an ordained minister.”

Well, let’s see. “The man worked for the church running children’s programs, Bible school and evening youth services.” Sure sounds like a Baptist youth and education minister to me.

Whenever I see that “he’s not an ordained minister” line, I get suspicious. It usually means that the church is simply trying to distance itself from the ugliness of what their guy did.

But a Baptist minister doesn’t have to be ordained to be a minister. Most of the time, people in the pews won’t have a clue one way or the other about whether their minister is ordained. They’ll just think he’s their minister.

In fact, with Baptists, ANYONE can be a minister. That’s one of the problems. Baptist ministers aren’t required to have any sort of minimum qualifications or training. And there isn’t any sort of preliminary screening; Baptist ministers don’t even have to go to seminary. All they have to do is convince a few people that they were “called” by God.

It’s a perfect set-up for con-men.

But of course, the average reporter probably isn’t going to realize all this. So when a pastor tells him that “the man was not an ordained minister,” the reporter might think it means the man wasn’t a minister. And then the reporter will probably decide to err on the side of caution and not put the fact that the man was a Baptist minister into the story.

You can’t blame the reporter. He’s working on a tight deadline and where else is he going to check? There isn't any reliable registry where he can confirm who's a minister and who isn't.

I tend to notice this sort of thing because I saw how this game was played in my own case. The national headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote that it had no record my perpetrator was still in ministry anywhere. And get this… I believed them.

Besides, I had already looked at the SBC’s online registry, and my perpetrator’s name wasn’t there. At that point, I presumed the online registry was a complete listing. That was a mistake. My perpetrator was indeed still in ministry, and he had been all along.

The SBC’s online ministerial registry isn’t complete… not even close. Moreover, it’s easily manipulated. I first figured that out when I saw how minister James Moore appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared on the registry. Since then, I’ve seen that lots of other ministers don’t show up on the registry either.

In my childhood church, James Moore was the music minister who knew that the youth and education minister had sexually abused me. He knew about it at the time, even when I was a kid. Years later, as an adult, when I started trying to deal with it, Moore was still there.

I was thrilled when I saw Moore’s name listed as a “minister of music” on the SBC’s registry. I immediately printed it out. “No problem,” I thought. “Moore knew what happened, and he’s surely older and wiser by now, and he’ll want to do the right thing.”

Looking back, I can’t believe how trusting I still was. As soon as I started trying to even talk about this, the church’s attorney wrote that Moore wasn’t “an ordained minister”. . . as though to preemptively stave off any possible argument that the church might bear any responsibility for what Moore did and didn’t do -- i.e., for the fact that Moore allowed the abuse to continue, didn’t tell my parents or report it to the police, and allowed the perpetrator to eventually move on to another congregation.

According to the church, it wasn’t their problem. Why? Because Moore wasn’t “an ordained minister.”

Incidentally, the attorney who came up with that “he’s not an ordained minister” line was the longtime attorney for the largest statewide Baptist organization in the country, the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Since then, I’ve talked with several other clergy abuse survivors who had encounters with this same attorney. He’s the guy the Baptist General Convention of Texas sent out to “help” churches when they had to deal with a “clergy abuse crisis.” As best I can tell, the way he “helped” was by intimidating and misdirecting the abuse survivors. I figure he pulled that “he’s not an ordained minister” line on a lot of other people, too.

Meanwhile, back at national headquarters, minister Moore’s name suddenly disappeared from the Southern Baptist Convention’s registry of ministers.

When I saw that disappearing act… and after I pulled out my printed sheet to make sure I hadn’t been mistaken… I knew for sure that there was a lot of gamesmanship going on with the whole “who’s a minister” thing. Both the clergy-perpetrator and the minister who knew about it had been taken off the ministerial registry. Yet, they were both still in ministry.

Ultimately, because I couldn’t get Moore or any of the other church leaders to even meet with me, I filed a lawsuit. Only then did the church leaders finally deem me worthy of sitting down to talk with.

Shortly after my lawsuit ended, Moore’s name reappeared on the Southern Baptist Convention’s registry as a “minister of music.” I guess they decided it was safe to again list him. Of course, he was really a Baptist minister all along.

So… here’s the lesson: When a Baptist pastor or church official tells you “he wasn’t an ordained minister,” it doesn’t mean diddly-squat. It’s just one of the games in the Baptist playbook.