A dispute going as far back as the 2021 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was brought back to the fore at the SBC’s meeting in Dallas this week after Texas Pastor Tom Buck made a motion for the SBC’s Executive Committee (EC) to launch an investigation.
After some discussion, the motion failed to receive a majority vote from church delegates, called messengers.
Buck’s request involved an incident that took place at the 2021 SBC annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, involving former EC Chairman Mike Stone and sexual abuse survivor Hannah-Kate Williams. During that year’s meeting, the denomination was fiercely debating the merits of a third-party investigation into whether the EC had mishandled allegations of sexual abuse.
The denomination went on to contract Guidepost Solutions, and the resulting investigation uncovered that the EC had systematically and consistently ignored, silenced, and at times even ostracized survivors of sexual abuse over the course of two decades.
During the 2021 annual meeting of the SBC, Mike Stone was in the running for SBC president when an interaction between him and Williams became the center of controversy.
The details of the interaction have been disputed. At the time, some alleged that Stone spoke to Williams in such a way that left her in tears, but Stone maintains that the conversation was cordial.
Since that time, Mike Stone, along with Tom Buck and others, has requested to no avail that the security footage from the incident be released, so as to clear his name.
On Tuesday (June 10), Buck made a motion on the convention floor requesting that the EC investigate Stone’s claims. The motion, which SBC President Clint Pressley dubbed “the Tom Buck motion,” was brought to the floor for discussion on Wednesday.
Strict rules of decorum against naming other people or making accusations on the convention floor were enforced by Pressley and the meeting’s parliamentarians.
At first, Buck sought to amend his motion to include the appointment of a seven-member task force to conduct the investigation, but that motion was ruled out of order due to pending litigation. When Florida Pastor Tom Ascol asked for the SBC’s legal counsel to provide further details about that litigation, his request was ruled out of order.
Buck was further reprimanded for expressing his belief that Mike Stone was “slandered” following the 2021 annual meeting of the SBC.
 was brought back to the fore at the SBC’s meeting in Dallas this week after Texas Pastor Tom Buck made a motion for the SBC's Executive Committee to launch an investigation. ){kind=link}