Boots, biscuits and Prestonwood Baptist

In Texas, we’ve got a saying: “You can put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make ‘em biscuits.”

That’s what I keep wanting to tell officials at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, as I watch them trying to alter the reality of the clergy sex abuse cover-up scandal that’s engulfing them.

When Chris Tynes’ questions were deleted from Prestonwood’s Facebook page, he scheduled an appointment with one of the church’s ministers. As reported by WFAA News in Dallas, Tynes had “discovered that a former music minister admitted to sexual misconduct with young boys while at Prestonwood Baptist Church more than twenty years ago.”

“Sexual misconduct?” You can see from the get-go the sort of minimizing slant that reporter is going to take. We’re talking about a minister who committed sex crimes against children. Some of his crimes are detailed in this court document; they include the molestation, digital penetration, and oral rape of young boys.

Prestonwood officials kept the secret of its minister’s soul-searing conduct for more than twenty years while the minister, John Langworthy, went right on working with kids at another Southern Baptist church. Last January, Langworthy was finally convicted on child sex crimes in Mississippi.

If Prestonwood officials had taken responsible action when they first heard reports about Langworthy’s conduct twenty years ago, a whole lot of kids could have been a whole lot safer.

So, having read multiple news reports about all this – news reports which implicate Prestonwood officials in a long-time cover-up – Tynes was troubled. It looked a lot like the Penn State cover-up. As a member of Prestonwood, he decided to try to get some answers from church officials.

But Tynes’ appointment to talk about it was cancelled, and the minister’s secretary wouldn’t reschedule. Tynes was being stonewalled.

So, on a weekday, he hung out in the mostly-empty church parking lot, sitting on his car. He was hoping to catch the minister when he came back from lunch.

Church security approached, and Tynes was super-polite. (You can see a video and transcript of the encounter here.) They asked Tynes to leave, and he did. Nevertheless, church officials called the cops, and they characterized Tynes as “possibly violent.”

Crazy, eh? That’s how it is in Baptistland.

Prestonwood officials are trying to turn this scandal into a fluffy biscuit hubbub about an odd-ball church-member so as to deflect attention from what it really is – a big stinky old boot scandal about their own twenty-year history of keeping quiet about a minister who molested kids.

Now they’ve dug in their spurs even more and accused Tynes of making “terroristic” threats. Why? Because while he was waiting in that mostly empty parking lot, he twittered to his friends a photo of the minister’s empty spot with the words “my target,” and then in another tweet, he wrote that he had found “my perfect ambush spot.”

Oh my.

You can read Tynes’ explanation here. He took down the postings right away after a friend suggested they might be misinterpreted. And here are my own thoughts on it.

First, Tynes is an ordinary guy. He’s not a trained and paid public spokesperson, like the lawyers and PR people that Prestonwood hires with its endless supply of offering plate dollars from its 32,000 members. And at least Tynes was prompt in offering an explanation. That’s a lot more than I can say for Prestonwood’s senior pastor Jack Graham, whose long silence only raised more questions.

Second, let’s put Tynes’ comments in Southern Baptist context. This is a faith group that has a long history of using militaristic metaphors in its often over-zealous evangelical efforts.

In fact, not too long ago, at one of Southern Baptists’ premier seminaries, the school president, Paige Patterson, “stormed onto the chapel stage” dressed in a military camouflage shirt and stationed as the gunner in a military fast-attack vehicle. (I kid you not – see this for yourself in this photo.) He then fired off a round of blanks from a .50-caliber Browning machine gun. All of this was to illustrate his message about “taking the hill” as they evangelically targeted the households within a one-mile radius of the seminary.

By the standards that Prestonwood is applying to Chris Tynes, that whole seminary should be shut down for making “terroristic” threats against the neighborhood. Heck, they even put their weapons on display.

And for those of us raised in this faith group, we grew up with “Onward Christian Soldiers” from the time we were two. Every summer of my childhood, in Vacation Bible School, I went “forward into battle” and “marching as to war” as we paraded into the church singing that militaristic song. By the standards that Prestonwood is applying to Chris Tynes, I guess the Bible schools should also be shut down as training grounds for “terroristic” activity.

I hope you see the lunacy in this.

But still, I’ve got to hand it to Prestonwood. They’ve sure got some slick spin-meisters. It takes a lot of time in the saddle to be able to spin the story of a mega-church’s clergy child molestation cover-up into a story that boot-stomps the one church member who dares to ask questions.

But Ben Lovvorn, Prestonwood’s director of administration, stuck with the spin-script. “When it comes to protecting our people, we take that very seriously,” he said.

Whoa. We’re talking about a church that, from all appearances, evidence, and news reports, didn’t take the protection of people seriously at all . . . at least not if those people include church kids and their families.

Prestonwood officials can keep trying to cook up some biscuits, but they can’t alter the reality of what’s already in the oven. That stinky old cover-up boot isn’t going away and, so far, it’s getting stinkier with every word they say.
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Update: "Pastor says let God judge accusers," Associated Baptist Press, 3/19/2013 (This is a great summary. It contextualizes the Prestonwood saga and shows how Southern Baptist officials will publicly rebuke others involved in child sex cover-ups but won't hold their own accountable. ABP is a press service that is independent of the Southern Baptist Convention.)

Megachurch calls cops on member who speaks out

A Southern Baptist megachurch reportedly called the cops on a longtime church member who raised questions about news stories that church leaders had “failed to alert authorities about credible allegations of child molestation” involving a staff minister and had kept quiet while the minister moved on to work with kids in another church.

As the Watchdog blogger succinctly explained it, the church didn’t call the cops on the child molester – a minister who has since been convicted – but did call the cops on the member who asked questions about it.

That’s Baptistland for you.

Jack Graham

The church is Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. With about 32,000 members, it’s one of the largest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention. Its senior pastor, Jack Graham, is a former two-term Southern Baptist Convention president, and he heads a ministerial staff of about 40.

You’d think there would be somebody in the mega-sized-leadership of this mega-sized-church who would do the right thing, wouldn’t you?

You’d be wrong.

So far, they have not only failed to do the right thing – over and over again – but they have affirmatively done the wrong things – over and over again. For two decades, Graham and other Prestonwood church leaders kept the allegations against their former minister under wraps, and in doing so, they allowed many more kids to be placed at risk of sexual predation. And now, they try to bully a member who simply seeks to ask some questions.

The story has been repeatedly reported in the media. Just take a look at that long list of articles at the bottom of today’s story in the Associated Baptist Press (which, incidentally, is a news service that’s independent of the Southern Baptist Convention). It’s also been reported on WFAA TV and CBS News, in the Clarion-Ledger newspaper, and in numerous postings by numerous bloggers, including myself. It’s a story that shows an abdication of institutional responsibility and an abandonment of moral responsibility.  

So why don’t the people in the pews see this? Why don’t they speak up? Why don’t they demand accountability?

That’s always the mystery, isn’t it? Southern Baptists say they care about children, but in a church with 32,000 members, only one man speaks up.

Chris Tynes

That man is Chris Tynes. Remember the name. I think you’ll wind up hearing more from him. He’s polite, but very persistent. He's not one of the silent many. You can follow the continuing developments in this story on the Facebook page that Tynes has started called People Against Prestonwood’s Silence on Allegations of Sexual Abuse. Ever the optimist, I'm hoping that many more will eventually join Tynes in his efforts.

Meanwhile, I’m still remembering the over-the-top editorial that the Dallas Morning News wrote about Jack Graham back in 2008, when another one of Prestonwood’s ministers was arrested on child solicitation charges. The News heaped undue praise onto Graham for the simple fact that he addressed the congregation after the minister’s arrest. But of course, by the time Graham spoke, the story of the arrest was already making headlines, and so Graham didn’t have the possibility of keeping things quiet in that case. Now, since the news about this two-decades-long scandal has finally come to light, we see what happens when the possibility for keeping things quiet does exist.    

“In the end,” wrote the Dallas Morning News editorial, “the real scandal in cases like this comes not from the sins and crimes of sexual offenders. No church will ever be free of that. The truly damaging scandals arise when church leaders mishandle these crises by failing to treat them with the gravity they deserve. Many in church authority have failed their calling and their congregations under similar conditions through defensiveness, dissimulation and deferring hard decisions. Not Jack Graham.”

Yes . . .  Jack Graham.
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Thanks to Patheos.com for linking and quoting this posting under Fred Clark's "Smart people saying smart things" column, March 11, 2013.
Thanks also to Deep Thoughts blogger, Mojoey, for spreading the word about this "unholy scandal" in "Baptist hell."  

One Commission, Two Commission: What's the Difference?

Last month, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote a letter to President Obama.

Whew. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? But that’s what it says on the letterhead: “Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

The Commission maintains offices at Southern Baptist Convention headquarters in Nashville and also on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.

Richard Land, who is the head of this lofty-sounding commission was writing to the President to tell him that “we would like to take this opportunity to add our voice to the discussions” on gun control.

He used that word “we” quite a lot. So who exactly is the “we” and by what authority does Land speak for the “we”?

After all, this is a denomination that claims it cannot possibly create a commission to consider clergy sex abuse allegations – as numerous other denominations have done -- because the Southern Baptist Convention has no authority to tell local churches about their ministers. Or so they say. They claim that Baptists’ professed belief in local church autonomy precludes such a thing.

Yet, obviously, this is a denomination that has no problem with creating a commission to consider political issues and to tell others – including even the President – what the Commission deems to be “sensible proposals.”

In fact, “the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission takes positions on a broad array of moral and social concerns.” For example, the Commission recently helped to sponsor an ad in USA Today, urging that Boy Scouts should refuse to allow gay people into their membership.

These public acts of position-taking are paid for with dollars pooled from local Southern Baptist churches, who contribute to the functioning of denominational offices through their “Cooperative Program” giving.

So here’s what I don’t understand.

If Southern Baptists can create a denominational commission for taking public positions on social issues and for telling others what they think is “moral,” why can’t Southern Baptists create a denominational commission for responsibly assessing abuse allegations against their own Baptist clergy and for telling Baptist congregants about their conclusions? Why can’t Southern Baptists create a denominational commission to offer “sensible proposals” to churches – proposals such as “this man should not be allowed to remain in ministry” – just as they now have a commission that offers “sensible proposals” to the President?

If Southern Baptists can create a commission empowered to tell others who they think should and should not be allowed into the Boy Scouts, why can’t Southern Baptists also create a commission empowered to tell their own churches who they think should and should not be allowed to stand in Southern Baptist pulpits? Why can’t Southern Baptists create a commission that could tell their own Southern Baptist churches about ministers who have substantiated sex abuse allegations?

If Southern Baptists can create an Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission – and can even allow it to have a second office on Capitol Hill – why can’t Southern Baptists also create a Commission for Ministerial Accountability? Why does “local church autonomy” allow for the first Commission but preclude the second?

It is as though Baptists are saying that their religion allows them to eat red potatoes but not russet potatoes. It makes no sense.

This nonsensical inconsistency makes apparent that there is neither reason nor religion behind the Southern Baptist recalcitrance on clergy sex abuse.

Most clergy molestation claims cannot be criminally prosecuted. This is a big part of the reason why many other faith groups have begun implementing denominational commissions to assess clergy abuse allegations. Even if denominational leaders cannot put such men in prison, they can at least keep records on the allegations, warn congregants, and inform churches. They can take away the clergy-predator’s weapon of unsuspecting trust.

No doubt it may be easier for Southern Baptists to tell others what they think is moral, but what is much needed is for Southern Baptists to turn a mirror on themselves. They must create a Commission by which their own clergy may be made denominationally accountable so that they cannot so easily church-hop.

For Southern Baptists to persist in claiming that their religion precludes this sort of accountability is nothing more than a lame excuse and a cowardly cloak.
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Related posts:
Autonomy schmonomy, 2/18/2009
More autonomy schmonomy, 8/16/2009

Real men don't buy girls

We have seen too many reports of Baptist pastors who apparently don’t understand this basic truth: "Real men don’t buy girls.” Just a few days ago, on February 21^st, a 54-year-old pastor at the First Baptist Church in Everett, Washington, was charged with commercial sexual abuse of a minor. But of course, he’s merely the most recent one to make the news. 

Maybe Baptist seminaries need to start teaching this truth to their students: “Real men don’t buy girls.” Or maybe evangelicals’ “Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” could address it? (Yes, such an organization really exists.)

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Photo from Restore A Voice.

United Nations chides U.S. for laxity on clergy sex abuse

In a report adopted this month in Geneva, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child chided the United States for “failing to fully pursue cases of child sex abuse in religious groups.”

As reported by the Reuters news service, the Committee wrote in its report that it was “deeply concerned at information of sexual abuse committed by clerics and leading members of certain faith-based organizations and religious institutions on a massive and long-term scale.” It also found a “lack of measures taken by (U.S. legal authorities) to properly investigate cases and prosecute those accused.”

The Committee arrived at its conclusions after a routine review of U.S. compliance with the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In response to the Committee’s report, SNAP, the world’s largest support network for clergy sex abuse survivors, issued a statement. In some other western democracies, wrote SNAP, “courageous political leaders have launched governmental investigations into heinous clergy sex crimes and cover-ups. But little if anything of comparable significance has happened in the U.S.”

“The right to practice one’s religion is precious,” continued SNAP. “Even more precious, however, is the right of children to grow up without being sexually violated, especially by those who claim to be religious guides.”

The U.N. Committee’s report shows that the world is watching. The United States loses moral authority when it allows the rubric of religious freedom to trump the rights of children.

If religious institutions do not stop the cover-ups and begin implementing effective measures of clergy accountability, then sooner or later, government institutions will intervene, as they have in some other democratic countries.

Religious freedom does not include the right to cover-up clergy sex crimes. Religious freedom does not include the right to let accused clergy predators church-hop without accountability. Religious freedom does not include the right to leave church kids at risk of rape and molestation by ministers, or the right to leave church parents in the dark about accused clergy predators.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s unconscionable failure to implement clergy accountability systems cannot rightly be shielded under the guise of religious freedom. It’s not religion. It’s the hateful machination of a huge religious institution’s self-serving spare-no-cost protection of its own power structure. The cost, of course, is paid by kids.

The world is watching.

Baptists terminate investigator of child sex abuse claims

Only a few weeks before the release of a final investigative report on allegations involving a missionary's sexual abuse of kids, the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) has fired the investigative team, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE).

 

The investigation had been on-going for nearly two years, and GRACE had interviewed approximately 100 witnesses. At issue in the investigation was not only the missionary’s alleged acts of sexual abuse, but more broadly, questions related to how ABWE responded to allegations. In other words, the investigation was also concerned with who at ABWE had knowledge about the accused missionary’s conduct, and with what they did or did not do.

GRACE was prepared to issue its final report and had already informed ABWE that the report would be delivered before the end of March.

ABWE hired a new investigative team to replace GRACE, but its new investigative team has a privacy policy which provides that the results of its investigation will be  released only to the client -- i.e., only to ABWE -- and not publicly.

Read GRACE's February 11th letter in response to ABWE’s termination – a letter that sets forth some of ABWE’s conduct during the investigative process – and decide for yourself what you think about this. Personally, I think ABWE’s termination of GRACE gives the appearance that there were likely some officials at ABWE who feared that GRACE’s report would implicate them in a keep-it-quiet cover-up in much the same way that an independent investigation of the Penn State scandal implicated others at the institution in addition to the child molester.

GRACE sums up its response to ABWE with this statement: “When placed in the context of ABWE’s conduct over the past 20 months, the termination of GRACE strongly suggests ABWE is unwilling to have itself investigated unless the investigation is within your control.”

GRACE also points out that many missionary kids and their families have been waiting for a decade to have an independent investigation of this matter. Tragically, GRACE is almost certainly correct in stating that, for many of these individuals, ABWE’s decision “will inflict a pain as great as any they have ever known.”

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Related post:

GRACE report vindicates missionary kids, September 4, 2010

People to remember in the Prestonwood/Morrison Heights scandal

Amy Smith
(Rick Guy/The Clarion Ledger)

Over the course of two and a half years, Amy Smith made dozens of phone calls, and sent even more emails, to try to assure that Southern Baptist minister John Langworthy would not be able to molest more children. Smith knew what had happened 20 years earlier at the prominent Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, when she was a college intern there.

“Although ministers at Prestonwood fired Langworthy in 1989 when at least one teen told church leaders Langworthy molested him, they never reported the allegation to police,” reports the Clarion Ledger.

Langworthy simply picked up and moved to Mississippi, where he went to work as a staff minister at another prominent Southern Baptist church, Morrison Heights. He also became a choir teacher in the Clinton school district.

In her efforts to bring Langworthy to justice, Smith encountered the usual brick wall of Baptists’ keep-it-quiet system. The saga of her efforts to get around that system, and to find someone who would put kids’ safety first, is a saga that implicates “the silence of the many.”

It would be easy to believe that clergy molestation scandals are about the bad deeds of “lone wolf” perpetrators. But Smith’s saga shows all too clearly that this easy belief is not the truth.

The truth is that most Baptist clergy molestation scandals also involve many other people who turned a blind eye – who could have done more but didn’t – who gave rote “thank you for your concern” responses -- and who bullied any who tried to speak out. The Prestonwood/Morrison Heights scandal is no different; it implicates “the many” and not merely John Langworthy.

Those many others should also be remembered in connection with this scandal. Among the most well-known are these:

• Rev. Jack Graham, former Southern Baptist Convention president and senior pastor of Prestonwood at the time Langworthy was fired and still twenty years later when Smith was seeking help to expose Langworthy;
• Rev. Neal Jeffrey, a current Prestonwood staff minister who was also on staff when Langworthy was fired, and who was contacted by Smith twenty years later;
• Rev. Greg Belser, senior pastor of Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Mississippi, who was contacted by Smith, and after a quiet internal church investigation, initially “decided to keep Langworthy” and then allowed him to simply resign;
• Dr. Phil Burchfield, superintendent of the Clinton school district, who was Smith’s first phone call in 2010, but who obfuscated and did not nearly enough;
• Philip Gunn, an elder at Morrison Heights, an attorney, and Mississippi Speaker of the House, who reportedly advised church leaders not to cooperate with the police in disclosing their communications with Langworthy.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Smith sent emails to the high school principal, high school counselors, members of the school board, PTA leaders, and a staff member at the Mississippi Department of Education. The father of one of Langworthy’s victims said that he had also contacted the Mississippi Baptist Convention, but to no avail.

Smith’s own parents “objected to her speaking out” and told her she should “write letters of apology to the pastors at Prestonwood.”

Meanwhile, the parent of a Langworthy victim is asking “that Prestonwood take responsibility for their coverup.”

Thanks to Amy Smith, that “coverup” was exposed, and in January, John Langworthy pled guilty on multiple child molestation charges. He is a convicted felon, but because his crimes were concealed for so long, he will serve no prison time.

Smith’s efforts were solidly vindicated by Langworthy’s conviction, but those efforts came at a heavy personal cost.

Last week, The Clarion-Ledger published two lengthy articles about Smith’s saga, and I expect Smith would say they’re the short version.

Consider all that Smith went through, and imagine that, instead of being someone who simply knew about a clergy perpetrator, you are someone who carries the weight of trauma and shame from a clergyman’s sexual abuse. It is a childhood trauma so profound that you can scarcely bear to bring the images to the forefront of your own mind, much less to speak about it with someone else. If you encountered the sort of resistance that Smith encountered – from family, community, church leaders and others – how long would you continue to pursue it? How long could you pursue it before you realized that you had to let go in order to save your own self?

The victims of John Langworthy were fortunate to have an advocate like Amy Smith, who stood in solidarity with them, and who gave of herself in order to bring forward their voices. Many other clergy abuse survivors are not so fortunate. The Baptist keep-it-quiet machine effectively silences them, with the result that, even when minister-molesters are reported to church and denominational leaders, most are still able to continue as ministers.

When a faith group does nothing at all about its clergy-coveruppers, you can be certain that its clergy predators will persist. That is the institutionalized scandal of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Baptists should heed mother's call for accountability

Members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)
at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, on January 26, 2012.

A mother, who says her son was repeatedly molested by a minister at one of the Southern Baptist Convention’s largest churches, claims the church needs to come clean about a cover-up of child sexual abuse.

“I want people to know the truth,” she said in a written statement released to CBS News last Saturday. “The hurt our family endured…is indescribable. . . . The church never reported John to the police . . . . We ask that Prestonwood take responsibility for their cover-up, and to say they are sorry.”

After minister John Langworthy was allowed to simply walk away from abuse allegations at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas in the late 1980s, he went on to serve two decades as music minister at another prominent Southern Baptist church, Morrison Heights in Clinton, Mississippi. There, he recently received a 50-year suspended sentence for molesting multiple boys as young as six. But Langworthy avoided prison time because, in the plea bargain process, prosecutors were concerned about the statute of limitations.

So, thanks to many years of secrecy surrounding his crimes, minister John Langworthy walks away with no prison time. But no one should overlook the fact that his crimes could have been disclosed many years earlier – and countless kids better protected -- if only the leadership of Prestonwood had spoken up and reported Langworthy to police.  

As described in the Associated Baptist Press, Prestonwood is the fifth-largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention. Its pastor, Jack Graham, was a two-term Southern Baptist Convention president from 2002-2004. So this is a pastor who is well-entrenched in Baptists’ good-ol’-boy network.

Who in that Baptist network will now answer this mother’s anguished call for accountability? Who will require that Prestonwood “take responsibility for their cover-up”? Will anyone do diddly-squat? Not if the patterns of the past continue.

Much like the insider network that covered up a coach’s abuse of kids at Penn State, the Baptist good-ol’-boys don’t hold one another accountable.

This is not the only time that Prestonwood has dealt with ministerial child sex allegations. In 2008, another Prestonwood minister, Joe Barron, was arrested for soliciting sex from an officer posing as a 13-year-old. On that occasion, pastor Jack Graham had little possibility for keeping it quiet because Barron had already been arrested and was making headlines. So, after Barron’s arrest, Graham took the pulpit and preached about doing the right thing. And he claimed that, “in forty years of ministry,” he had “never had one moral problem with a staff member” prior to the Barron case.

Now that we know about the prior Langworthy allegations, we know Graham’s statement wasn’t accurate. Perhaps pastor Graham just forgot about the Langworthy case – meaning a staff minister’s molestation of a kid was not a memorable problem for him – or perhaps Graham remembered the Langworthy case but chose to keep up the smokescreen and to heck with the safety of kids.

In any event, despite Graham’s inaccuracy, his preaching was the usual fine performance, and many heaped praise on him for his cheap, toothless pulpit talk.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s chief executive officer, Morris Chapman, urged other church leaders to follow Graham’s example “in confronting this horrible crime, exposing it for what it is, and doing everything within our power to protect the children under the care of the ministries of our churches.”

But is that what Graham did with Langworthy? Did he do everything within his power to protect children? I expect most ordinary parents would say no.

Graham and other Prestonwood leaders simply allowed Langworthy to move on. They got him off their own turf, while leaving countless other kids at risk. And even as recently as 2011, Prestonwood’s executive pastor, Mike Buster, proudly described Prestonwood’s modus operandi of a quiet dismissal by saying that the church had “firmly and forthrightly” dealt with the Langworthy matter.

If that’s what Southern Baptists call being firm and forthright with clergy molestation allegations, then parents should keep their kids out of Southern Baptist churches.

But Graham is a prominent somebody. Not only did other Baptist officials sing his praises, but so too did the Dallas Morning News. After Graham took the pulpit following Joe Barron’s arrest, the Dallas Morning News published an editorial extolling Graham as though he were the perfect example of a pastor who had done all the right things. And even as Prestonwood’s leaders basked in that over-the-top praise, they continued to keep their dark secret about Langworthy locked tight in their closet.

And Langworthy continued to work with kids.

“In the end,” wrote the Dallas Morning News, “the real scandal in cases like this comes not from the sins and crimes of sexual offenders. . . . The truly damaging scandals arise when church leaders mishandle these crises by failing to treat them with the gravity they deserve.”

Prestonwood and Jack Graham failed miserably, and Baptists should heed the mother’s call for accountability. In the end, when organizations do not impose consequences for those who turn a blind-eye, then blind-eyed behavior continues, and kids remain at greater risk.

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Thanks to the Associated Baptist Press (an independent news service) for publishing this post!

Related posts:

Jack Graham: Deceiver, believer or in-betweener, 10/1/11

Penn State and Prestonwood: Consequences are necessary, 11/10/11

Penn State lesson for Baptists: Outsiders needed for oversight, 11/25/11

Related ABP column:

Prestonwood saga shows clergy abuse database is overdue, 8/19/2011
 

Update:

Amy Smith's persistence brings justice in John Langworthy clergy abuse case, Clarion Ledger, 2/6/2013
Sex offender loses pharmacy license, ABP, 3/1/2013 (with numerous additional links to articles on the Prestonwood / Langworthy scandal)

Clergy sex abuse and the "silence of the many"

"True evil lies not in the depraved act of the one, but in the silence of the many." On this day, I am contemplating these words, attributed to a black Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr.

In countless stories of Baptist clergy sex abuse, we have seen the sad truth of King’s words made manifest. Even with childhood histories of horrific abuse – of having been molested, raped and sodomized by Baptist preachers – many have said that the worst of their experience came when they tried to tell about the abuse within the faith community.

That was when they faced “the silence of the many.”

That was when the relational fabric of community, and often even of family, was torn asunder.

That was when faith itself was deemed a fraud.

Church after church has stood, not in solidarity with those who have been abused by clergy, but rather, with the accused minister-molesters. Often, the churches have stood with the ministers even when they admit their soul-murdering deeds, and sometimes, even when they have been criminally convicted.

Church leaders have quietly allowed accused preacher-predators – even those with multiple accusations -- to hop to new churches – and to do so repeatedly.

Denominational leaders have sat back and claimed powerlessness. Simultaneously, they have stayed silent about Baptist pastors, including some high-profile pastors, who kept quiet about abuse allegations involving ministerial staff.

The unmistakable message of so much silence and do-nothingness is that, among Baptists, clergy sex abuse is typically treated as “no big deal.”

No one in Baptistland wants to hear the voices of those who were sexually abused by Baptist clergy. Indeed, in the Southern Baptist Convention, there does not even exist a basic structure to support the compassionate hearing of such wounded people. Instead, they are told that they must take their allegations to the church of the accused minister. This is like telling bloody sheep that, if they want help, they must go to the den of the wolf who savaged them. It is a system that does not work.

But no one in denominational offices will take responsibility for assuring that clergy abuse allegations will be responsibly heard, or even that any records will be kept.
 

As a practical matter, because the vast majority of molestation allegations cannot be criminally prosecuted, a Southern Baptist preacher can stand in a pulpit so long as he is not literally sitting in prison. There is no denominational entity that will stop him. Even when a minister has hopped through multiple churches in multiple states with multiple allegations, Southern Baptist denominational entities pretend that it is better to not know -- to not even try to know.

Denominational leaders claim that their hands are tied by the congregationalist polity of Southern Baptist churches. In effect, they assert an “it’s our religion” rationalization for denominational do-nothingness.

However, some have realized that this is not truly a stance based on religion. Rather, it is based on the weighing of “responsibility and liability issues.” In effect, it’s a business decision. As David Roozen, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary, recently explained: “If the organizing body of a denomination claims no responsibility for supervising, or even ordaining clergy, it may be harder to hold it responsible when a pastor molests a child.”

Southern Baptist leaders have weighed these “responsibility and liability” issues and have come down on the side of seeking to protect denominational entities via a do-nothing response. Other major faith groups, including some congregationalist faith groups, have come down on the side of seeking to protect church kids via the implementation of denominational review boards to assess abuse allegations. Such review boards can at least provide a first step toward denominationally hearing the voices of those abused by clergy.

But for Southern Baptists, this first step remains untaken. They stand on an island of inertia.

The result is that Baptist church kids are being ravaged, not only by the sexual abuse of many ministers, but also by the denomination’s complicit silence. The rationalization by which the denomination cloaks its do-nothingness is of little consequence; this is true even when that rationalization is called “religion.”

The end of power remains the same  --  to preserve the status quo. If Southern Baptists want to responsibly engage their faith with respect to clergy sex abuse, they must start by considering the silent complicity of their own church and denominational power structures. They must respond to this systemic problem from a position of compassion and care rather than from a position of power.

What better way for Baptists to honor a Baptist preacher’s timeless voice for justice than by committing to actively hear the voices of those brutalized by their own clergy and ostracized by their own complicity?
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Thanks to the Associated Baptist Press (an independent news service) for publishing this column!