A Heavy Cost, How will you reconcile?
So few stand for true righteousness when it becomes hard and costly. How will you explain this to a Holy Father, how will you reconcile your role?
SBC abuse reform initiative and attention, 2019 vs SBC 2025, you’ve looked away, again.
The extra rub, those attending the panel this year were charged an admission fee to attend. On our backs as survivors who have tirelessly worked to get them to acknowledge the problems, sharing our stories, our choice to enter back in over and over to call back to you (SBC) for change and prevention. You in many ways said there is no crisis, there aren’t that many, it’s not a priority. Yet, a panel is created with speakers and an admission fee, on the backs of the wounded, the expense of those who have given time and energy for free, Task Force members, ARITF, reporters, bloggers, writers, podcasters, families of these, families of the survivors. After being told there is no way forward, after being told that our efforts have bankrupted the SBC (not factual), after they withheld the millions set aside for it. After the hard death for us watching all of our work expire, work that messengers voted for, and now, a panel that you paid for if you attended, to hear about the perils of online predators for your children. You cannot make this senselessness up.
Yes, we know, there are online predators, everyone knows this.
Yes, the world is scary and evil things happen, we must be proactive and protective in our schools, homes, sports, neighbors and friends, even within families. We know this.
What people were just coming to realize is that our churches, as well, harbor predatory people, especially in places with few safeguards. Even with safe guards people who prey are stealthy and sneaky and they don’t look like bad guys. You can place every safety protocol on your home network, limit access, guard their friends, be cautious with sleepovers, send them to youth group and assume they are safe, and the predatory one initiates a mentorship and next thing you know your child is harmed, irrevocably. And you’ll say, “But I did everything to protect them.”
Background checks are NOT enough. We are dependent on the good word or inner promotions of our ministers, this allows an ease of movement in a community that believes you aren’t supposed to warn the next church. All too often, once a scandal or crime or even appearance of bad intentions appears in a church, the most common action is to keep it quiet. Let the church handle it quietly, which means all with knowledge are limited and silenced, the predator or bad actor is allowed to resign and leave fairly quietly. No one knows of their actions, no one is warned, the next place hires them and they usually are emboldened. Criminal charges or records cannot take place if they are not reported to law enforcement, and even if they are, charges are not guaranteed.
Evil is INSIDE the church, just as the enemy was INSIDE the garden of all things good, perfect, beautiful, without sin. A perfect place, until he convinced and connived a believer to trust him. It happens every day, no church is immune. Evil is exactly what the Bible tells us it is and He tells us to flee from it, to recognize wolves and cast them out, be vigilant.
But we are ‘church people’ who forgive and offer grace, we paint pretty pictures of redemption and grace, we turn the cheek to abuse and at times even idolize the predatory, even when they show themselves to be wolves. We either move them along, into an unsuspecting church somewhere else, or we far too often restore them and buy their books, pay to hear them speak on conference tours, we look right past their harm and right past the harmed in their wake.
It is insidious. It is also the perfect blinding of the enemy. He has you all fooled and you call it unfortunate, but quickly point to God’s bigger plan in all the good the org. does, as if God gives a hall pass for sin, for crimes, for secrecy and shame, for wolves. Maybe God wants you to call out evil and then like Him, leave the big org (99) for the 1, stating through action that if you aren’t willing to do what’s right, you’ll go the right way without you (the 99) and I’ll stand for the one. Covering sin is an instant multiplier. It grows.
At the very end of all of this, in the last days and testaments of the ending of the Abuse Reform movement in the SBC, which side were you on?
The side that was mostly interested in saving the convention, or saving the ship, or were you on the side of mercy, humility, justice and stopping the carnage and deflecting wolves?
Were you somewhere in between, leaving it to others to instruct you as to what was right, trusting your leaders to make the right decisions and not bothering to look into the issues?
Who and how many could be listed as those who stood for the right things, asked the right questions, sought the right type of counsel based in scriptures? The correct way written thousands of years ago, already foretold as to our instructions for walking in mercy towards the oppressed and harmed, walking humbly with God, seeking and helping in justice?
I can personally tell you, the list for the previous paragraph is devastatingly few. In the scheme of the size of the SBC and all of it’s partner churches and Pastors, the number is in the least of the margins. Although, at the convention for several years that number was over ridden when the ballots of thousands were lifted into the air, I will never forget that vision. And then, each year everyone went back to business as usual, we were forgotten as just a business item for the most part.
Until it was also found in your individual churches, which happened often in these years, the call or email “it has happened here”. I am aware that for the most part, you trusted your leadership to follow your instructions (via votes) and that you trusted them to do right. You felt you’d leave it in their hands and trust them to do what is right.
What about when they didn’t?
What about after you learned they didn’t follow your will at all?
Everyone for the most part went quiet. And it died.
And with it, we all died a little as any hope that was left evaporated before us.
A hard death indeed.
It’s been just over a year now, since the initial announcement of that death of reform, never even entering into lament. Lament began, barely at one convention in which the remnants were felt for a moment, thanks to a small few.
Then everyone grew weary. Not the survivors, we kept going, but everyone else grew increasingly silent, watching the casualties within the convention who dared to do what is right and just.
It has been a year, a new convention in Dallas was held, a few words spoken aloud as to the perils of online predators as to the (“new/actual/important”) crisis facing our youth.
You greeted your new President, Clint Pressly, and voted him back for another term. He’s never once even mentioned the cost to survivors or a path forward, he came in wanting to squash it all and he’s held his place.
You listened as your EC President, Jeff Iorg, was protective and showed zero transparency about financials of your monies, wouldn’t offer transparency as to legal counsel and who is involved (that costs you monies). No transparency, no lament, no looking back, no fixing it, no restitution for wrongs. He also basically said that social media, podcasters, bloggers, have done all of the damage, though the only way the truth would ever be told is from all of these outlets and media, otherwise we would be out here in the wilderness and you wouldn’t know we existed. Now you know, can you live with trying to unsee it?
You saw all types of red flags, all shades of red, on transparency, honesty, stewardship and fiduciary accountability. Silencing of the wounded sheep, over riding of the messengers will, and even lack of humility, one highlight below.
Ah, the humble servant, you couldn’t shake his hand, hug him or keep him too long, no photos, no frankincense or myrrh, gifting is frowned upon, save your praise and awe.
What are we allowing and fostering, what are we building? Jesus, come into the temple…
Where is the humble Pastor? Jesus, the most humble, friend of sinners, giver of attention, walked to preach, camped, no royalty, birthed in a manger, rode in on a donkey, crucified.
Ya’ll, these signs had to be designed and printed ahead of time, then set up at the lines, did no one speak up and say this is really sending the wrong message?
What are we (the body) doing? We are so far off course.
And people are literally losing their lives, having their lives derailed from all of the good God intended for them, they are suffering, watching these charades, we have called out for help, we have warned and shared, and you look away and join these lines, just for a moment of his presence, moving farther away from HIS presence.
And you, doing the opposite, chasing and building the 99 and leaving behind the wounded 1. The broken hearted, the harmed, the ones Jesus would have ministered to and fought for as a Shepherd.
What will you do? Change course or continue the course?
