Find the Baptist pastor

Ricky Mill, a Southern Baptist pastor in Raleigh, North Carolina, went to court last Monday to urge leniency for David Chatham, who pled guilty on child porn charges.

What was the reason for urging leniency? According to pastor Ricky Mill, it was Chatham’s “dedication to Christ.”

Chatham, who was a high-level public relations specialist, had started going to Bible study groups after his arrest.

But before his arrest, he had spent 12 years looking at images of children being molested and sexually abused.

Twelve years.

According to the story reported in the Charlotte Observer, Chatham’s computers were “loaded with more than 3,400 images and videos of naked, molested boys and girls, toddlers and teens.”

3,400 images and videos.

How many kids were in those images and videos? Hundreds? Thousands?

How many kids are tormented by the memories of having their bodies used and abused for the sexual gratification of men like Chatham?

That’s David Chatham in the photo. According to the Charlotte Observer caption, his wife stands by while “he uses his cell phone one last time before heading into federal court.”

Before his arrest, Chatham was “a self-assured executive who could manage a crowd.” He hobnobbed with governors and city council members at charity events. He earned six figures.

But what did the money from his success go to support? The entrapment and abuse of children for the child porn industry.

But oh gee whiz… this public relations specialist started going to Bible studies after his arrest and has shown his “dedication to Christ,” says Southern Baptist pastor Ricky Mill. (Do you think Chatham may have made some significant donations to the church? I wonder.)

Ricky Mill is the “associate pastor of shepherding” at Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. It's a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. It's a church that shows 17 ministers on its “Meet the Pastors” page: David Horner, Mike Williams, Mike Erwin, Joel Leath, Leon Tucker, Joel McDaniel, Kevin Sweat, Matt Morgan, Dave Owen, C. Bug, Brian Frost, Steve Wright, Blake Hickman, George Tissiere, Ricky Mill, Bob Stancil, Eric Hamsho.

Not one of those 17 pastors is shown on the Southern Baptist Convention’s national online registry of ministers.

So imagine this scenario: You’re someone who was sexually abused by one of those Southern Baptist pastors when you were a kid. Twenty years later, you’re psychologically capable of dealing with it and you want to tell Southern Baptist officials about what this minister did. It’s too late for criminal prosecution -- that’s the usual scenario -- but you still think denominational officials should know so that others may be protected. How do you find the guy? You don’t even know what state he’s in. You write to Southern Baptist headquarters in Nashville, and they tell you they don’t have him on their list of Southern Baptist ministers.

So what do you do? Do you hire your own private investigator to try to find the guy? Or do you figure that, since he’s not on the Southern Baptist registry, then maybe you don’t have to worry so much about others? It’s already taken all your emotional energy just to get this far. Since no one in Southern Baptist circles is going to help you, and since he doesn’t show up on their registry anyway, maybe you decide to just let it go.

And so, the man continues in a position of trust as a pastor, with full access to kids, and with no one the wiser.

There isn’t anything unusual about this scenario. Lots and lots of Southern Baptist ministers don’t show up on the Southern Baptist registry of ministers. So if all you’ve got is a Baptist pastor’s name, good luck with finding him.

It’s bad enough that Southern Baptists don’t bother with keeping records on ministers who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse, but they don’t even keep basic records on the names of their ministers.

If Baptist leaders won’t do the job of exercising responsible oversight for ministers who bear the Baptist brand, then the very least they should do is to maintain a complete listing of the names of Baptist ministers and their locations. That would at least give abuse survivors, who are capable of speaking out, a fighting chance at finding their Baptist clergy perpetrators and of doing the job of trying to warn others.

It’s the job that Baptist leaders themselves ought to be doing and the job that they would do if they actually gave a hoot about kids.

Incidentally, a study done at a federal prison found that about “85 percent of men imprisoned for receiving or distributing child pornography and who did not have a known history of committing sexual abuse when arrested actually had committed a hands-on offense.”

So … even though the men had never been convicted on child molestation, when they got jailed on child porn, it was discovered that 85 percent had actually committed sexual abuse offenses.

Yet, Southern Baptist pastors like Ricky Mill urge leniency for a man convicted on child porn.

And as for David Chatham . . . he’s now in jail and blogging about his experience at From Shame to Grace.
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More information on the study about the incidence of child molestation among men convicted on child porn charges can be found in this New York Times article and in the Journal of Family Violence. Thanks to Baptist Planet for providing these links.