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| Paige Patterson (Fort Worth Star-Telegram) |
Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary president Paige Patterson preaches that churches should resolve their conflicts
internally and should not take them to “the world of unbelief.”
This means, he explains, that
when a person has been “offended…misused and abused” within the church, he
should take his complaint to church elders and the congregation, and should not go to the courts or talk to the
press. In the final prayer of his sermon, Patterson included even “the government”
among those to whom church members should not
take their troubles.
This insular sort of anti-outsider
stance is dreadfully dangerous. Yet, for decades, it has been a common Baptist
teaching, and tragically, it is now being inculcated into still another
generation of Baptist pastors.
Outsiders are essential to
any organizational system of accountability. They bring objectivity and
detachment, and these ingredients are critical for the effectiveness and credibility
of an accountability system. Without outsiders, you get cover-ups and cronyism.
Contrary to Patterson’s instruction,
whether the outsiders are “believers” or “unbelievers” is irrelevant so long as
they are outsiders to the system in which the alleged wrongdoing occurred. In
any event, since I don’t credit Patterson or anyone else with mind-reading
ability, I doubt that his believer/unbeliever distinction can be readily
discerned. There are unbelievers in churches just as surely as there are believers
who are not in churches.
As human beings, we are creatures
with a natural tendency toward bias. When we already feel as though we know and
trust someone, our minds naturally move toward wanting to confirm that trust
rather than toward giving equal weight to a person whose dissonant story clashes
with our pre-existing belief. Most organizational accountability structures now
recognize this reality of human nature and incorporate safeguards against it. For
example, nowadays, when a police officer is accused of abuse, his conduct is
reviewed by an independent panel, not by his buddies in the same department.
In the context of clergy sex abuse,
the human tendency toward bias means that, typically, when churches try to
handle abuse reports internally, they accept the accused pastor’s word and
minimize the word of the person who brings such challenging information to the
forefront.
When churches are confronted
with clergy abuse allegations, not only should
they go to outsiders, but they must go
to outsiders. State laws require
that information about allegations of child sex abuse – or even about suspicions
of abuse – be reported to government officials such as the police or child
protective services.
This does not mean that going
to the cops is enough. While reporting abuse allegations to law enforcement is
essential, the majority of child sex abuse cases cannot actually be criminally
prosecuted. Typically, the reasons are procedural and have nothing to do with
the merits of the allegations. In these cases in which criminal prosecution is
impossible, alternative accountability systems are needed if kids are to be
protected.
Alternative systems of
accountability are nothing unusual; most other professions use such systems.
For example, an attorney need not be convicted of a crime in order to have his
conduct reviewed through a professional disciplinary process. That process
carries the power to take away the attorney’s mantle of trust and to make known
the attorney’s misdeeds.
Southern Baptist ministers
need a similar accountability system – one that carries the power to assess a
minister’s conduct and to warn congregants about safety concerns. When it comes
to protecting kids, the criminal justice system cannot do it all, and the
Southern Baptist Convention abandons moral responsibility in declining any
denominational system of accountability. Merely because a man cannot be put in
prison does not mean that he should be allowed to continue in a position of
high trust as a minister.
Most other major faith groups
now have clergy accountability systems. With such systems, those who have been abused
may at least have the possibility of reporting the clergy-perpetrator to a
panel of people who are outside the minister’s immediate circle of trust –
i.e., who are outside the local church – and of seeking some process of review.
These denominational systems are
far from perfect and often fail in actual practice. But for Southern Baptists,
lacking even the bare existence of a denominational accountability system, failure
of accountability is virtually assured. If a Southern Baptist pastor isn’t literally
sitting in prison, he can probably find a pulpit to stand in. The denomination
has no alternative system for stopping him.
You might think the Darrell Gilyard saga would have taught Patterson the danger of what
he preaches. An insular approach to multiple claims of abuse and assault is
precisely what allowed pastor Gilyard to persist in predatory conduct for two
decades. According to the Dallas Morning News, many of those claims were reported
directly to Paige Patterson . . . but to no avail. By the time Gilyard was
finally convicted on child sex charges in Florida, over forty young women and
underage teens had made allegations against him – and that’s just the ones we
know about. Thank God a young Florida teen finally went outside Baptists’
insular system and took her report to government officials.
And what about Patterson’s insistence
that his anti-outsider stance is somehow biblical? If Patterson needs a biblical basis
for doing what's right, then he should look to the first
thing listed by the prophet Micah. “And what does God require of you? To act
justly . . . .” (Micah 6:8)
If churches are to “act
justly” in dealing with clergy sex abuse reports, outsiders are essential.
_______________________Thanks to ABP News for publishing this posting as a guest column and for linking to it in still another Baptist clergy abuse story the very next day, demonstrating yet again why Baptists so desperately need to adopt effective accountability systems.
Thanks also to Nonprofit Quarterly for quoting extensively from this published column in an 11/7/2013 article by Rick Cohen on "The Dangers of Keeping Organizational Secrets."
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