At a presidential candidates’ forum in May in Texas, Hadaway said: “We don’t want to minimize the suffering of these women.” He spoke, however, of his desire to maintain a balanced approach to addressing abuse claims.
“When I was regional leader and I was supervising 300 missionaries on the field, I investigated every case myself because it affected people’s careers,” he said at the forum at First Baptist Church Keller. “You want to be open with the abused, but you also want to make sure that someone is not being accused of being an abuser who really wasn’t. And that’s a real fine line. And I think we just need compassion and not condemnation in this area.”
In an interview, he said those responsibilities were his when he supervised missionaries in Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
“The actual abuse allegations that came were very few and were concerning the nationals of a particular country,” he said, declining to state the South American nation where such an investigation occurred. “What happened in those couple of cases — those people ended up resigning from the mission field.”
Hadaway acknowledged hesitancy about spending millions that might have gone to support missions activities instead on reforms to avert abuse. But, he said, “In this instance, our church members and churches understand that we need to fulfill our obligations to carry on to implement the recommendations that the committee sees fit.”
As Southern Baptists and the rest of the nation await a Supreme Court decision that could overturn Roe v. Wade, Hadaway said the issue of making abortion illegal is personal rather than academic for him and his family because he has an adult daughter who is mentally disabled.
“She was that way from birth; we raised her on the mission field,” he said. “Those of us who have handicapped children, we love them and we would not want them to be any other way. We might wish they were normal, but we still love them. And so my wife went full term with our daughter. We were happy to welcome her into our family.”
Recalling learning of the Roe decision when he was stationed with the Air Force in Alaska, Hadaway said cultural issues are ever present, all the way back to biblical times. He noted accounts by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament books about the Corinthians and the story of Hebrew Bible figure Nehemiah who led the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.
“Just as Nehemiah was on the wall with a sword and a trowel, you always have to be building,” he said. “And you also have to be fighting a spiritual warfare at the same time.”
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This article originally appeared on ReligionNews.com.
