Thread by @rcollingsworth

Since @HoustonChron dropped their article Sat. night on sexual abuse in SBC churches, I've tried to reflect and listen. To survivors, who have spoken out in gratitude that their stories are finally being heard--and to leaders, who have condemned this behavior and promised change.

My heart is broken to know that we have collectively allowed such behavior to go on almost entirely unchallenged. But I haven't wept, and I think it's because I'm not surprised. Some of that article was brand new information, but most of it we already knew.

For years, Dee Parsons of @wartwatch has been writing about this. Christa Brown has spent over a decade detailing specifics on stopbaptistpredators.org and stopbaptistpredators.blogspot.com. It was Christa's work that first made many of us aware of the Darrell Gilyard debacle.

In 2007, @Wade_Burleson was calling from the convention floor for sexual predator tracking mechanisms to be implemented. He wrote about it again in 2011 (not the only other time): wadeburleson.org/2011/08/full-c…

Amy Smith of @watchkeep has been covering sexual abuse in the church, including the SBC, going back as far as at least 2011. It was on Amy's blog that I first read the story of Anne Miller/@girlnamedanne, who had been abused by Mark Aderholt when he was a student at SWBTS.

I know Mark. My dad was Executive Pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock when he was hired as Missions and Evangelism Pastor, and during the brief time I lived there, I got to know him and his family.

Later, he was the guy I went to when I was struggling to discern my call to ministry. Ironically, because of my own sin and past I was wrestling with whether or not I was even qualified to be "in ministry."

Here is Mark's response. Read into it what you will, but the first and second paragraphs are telling in terms of how he views (or at least viewed) ideas of sin, repentance, grace, qualification, character, and what constitutes a "deal-breaker" for working in vocational ministry.

Point being...my dad and his boss didn't have the luxury of knowing what we now know about Mark's past. They couldn't take it into consideration when hiring him because they simply didn't have the information.

I haven't asked my dad directly but I assume that, if he had been told that @IMB_SBC had investigated, concluded the allegation was credible, and been preparing to terminate him when he resigned, they never would have hired him.

Scores of other SBC churches have also been denied the luxury of knowing that their pastor or children's minister has a history of sexual predation. Lives were irrevocably harmed, innocence destroyed, because of our collective failure to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Autonomy is a good thing. Our whole model of cooperative giving, ministry, disaster relief, evangelism, education, equipping, and missions is based on the idea of individual churches banding together for broader gospel purposes. To do more together than we can do alone.

But for too long, autonomy has been the shield we have used to block good faith efforts to stand up for past victims and protect future ones. We have stood by and been complicit in their retraumatization by allowing offenders to dodge consequence time and time again.

What does it say to the injured sheep when the shepherd is busier helping the wolf find a new flock than he is tending to the bleeding and broken?

I have no power, position, or influence in the SBC, and I'm fine with that. But I still feel complicit in my silence. And while I have no individual at whom to point a finger other than myself, when I read broad condemnations from those who do have power or influence I wonder...

Where was the outrage when @Wade_Burleson was talking about it over a decade ago? When Christa Brown, @watchkeep, and @wartwatch were publishing stories and books and calling for reform? When @bartbarber's 2016 resolution didn't make it out of committee? praisegodbarebones.blogspot.com/2019/02/2016-p…

I fear the answer is that, for the most part, we viewed these people (sans Barber) as troublemakers. Pot-stirrers. Rabble-rousers. Liars. Conspiracy theorists. On the whole, they were seen as outsiders trying to stir up dissension and either ignored or actively maligned.

And now, all of a sudden--as if by magic--when these exact same stories are published by a local newspaper, SBC Twitter is exercising a collective rending of its garments.

I'm immensely grateful for folks like @sarahesmith23, @John_Tedesco, @RobDownenChron and @chrondigger. (And if nothing else, as a journalist this should cause us to all go subscribe to and support our local newspaper.)

But when our prophets are journalists outside of our camp, and our journalists are those like @BaptistBlogger and @martyduren who have been short-shrifted by the apparatus at-large or the anonymous (and fantastic) @SBCexplainer...we have a problem.

I don't have all the answers. But if those of us who deeply love and care for the SBC and desire to see its churches thrive are willing to only point fingers of blame at others instead of ourselves, we're doomed to repeat our mistakes. May God have mercy on us.