(RNS) — For decades, leaders of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination mistreated survivors of sexual abuse, labeling them as troublemakers and enemies of their church while claiming there was little the leaders could do to address abuse in local congregations, often in the name of protecting their vast missionary operations.
Then, in the summer of 2021, Southern Baptists had had enough.
Angered over a groundbreaking newspaper investigation of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention and over concerns that SBC leaders continued to mistreat survivors despite promising to do better, Southern Baptists overruled their leaders, called for an in-depth investigation into their actions and, after receiving the report of that investigation in 2022, passed a series of reforms aimed to help prevent abuse and to care for survivors.
Among those reforms: building a “Ministry Check” database to track abusive pastors, providing care for survivors, training churches on how to prevent abuse and resourcing a committee charged with expelling congregations that knowingly mishandle abuse allegations.
Putting those reforms into practice will be difficult and will take decades of rebuilding trust, something abuse survivors have long known.
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“I have understood from the beginning that this is a long game,” said Jules Woodson, an abuse survivor who has spoken to the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, charged with implementing reforms in the SBC.
That task force has come under fire recently for a lack of transparency over a temporary hotline, set up to collect reports of abuse, and for the slow pace of implementing reforms. That’s raised questions of whether a volunteer committee — made up mostly of pastors, often from larger churches — has the capability to get the job done.
In early February, the task force — which is due to make recommendations to the SBC’s annual meeting in June — released an update saying it will likely need more time.
“Given the scope of its assignment, we do anticipate and have begun discussions about the need to extend the ARITFs work beyond the 2023 annual meeting in New Orleans,” the task force said in a statement posted on its website. “We are acutely aware of the depth of process we must undergo and vigilantly follow-through.”
South Carolina pastor Marshall Blalock, who chairs the task force, told Religion News Service in an interview that he’s increasingly aware of the complexity of addressing sexual abuse — and that it is a long-term project.
Blalock served on a previous abuse task force from 2021 to 2022. That task force had a more straightforward task — choosing a firm to investigate SBC leaders and then delivering a report, along with recommendations for reform, to the annual meeting. That previous task force’s work ended in June 2022 after a report from Guidepost Solutions was delivered to the convention.
“Last year we had one main objective,” he said. “We had to be careful in how we did it, but it was pretty forthright.”
At the annual meeting, a set of reforms was approved by an overwhelming majority. Then a new task force was set up, with Blalock staying on to provide some continuity.
The biggest task — and the one getting perhaps the most attention — is setting up a “Ministry Check” website, a database to track pastors who were convicted or credibly abused of abuse.
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“On the surface, it sounds pretty simple,” said Blalock.
As the task force has dug in, things have become more complicated. The task force needed to find a firm to build the site that had a trauma-informed approach to working with the stories of survivors and needed to make sure only credible accusations and convictions were added to the database. The task force also needed cybersecurity expertise — to make sure any data on the site is safe from hacking and no private information about survivors could be made public.
