Survivors skeptical of SBC reforms
Church leaders didn’t push needed sweeping changes at annual meeting, they say
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Did her trauma just not matter? It’s a question Jules Woodson ponders constantly.
It’s been two decades since the youth pastor of her Southern Baptist church in The Woodlands sexually assaulted her on a remote road, and 14 months since Woodson finally decided to confront Andy Savage, who by then was pastoring a Tennessee megachurch.
Savage has resigned, as have other officials who said they failed to call police after Woodson told them about the assault. Last week, Woodson paid her way to Birmingham to demand that leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention adopt sweeping reforms to oust predators from their pulpits and spare others from the trauma of sexual
abuse.
The pastor of her former congregation, Stone Bridge Church in The Woodlands, remains in the pulpit, and Woodson said he has never apologized for not calling law enforcement or consoling her. She left the conference “devastated,” having learned on her last day in Alabama that one of the pastors who resigned after she came forward had recently spoken at a Southern Baptist event in Nevada.
“I experienced a level of personal defeat that I haven’t felt in a while,” she said after leaving Alabama. “It was heartbreaking.”
Some 8,000 Baptists descended upon Birmingham for their annual meeting, the first since an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News in February found more than 700 people — mostly children — had been abused by hundreds of Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers in the last two decades.
Survivors such as Woodson wonder why the SBC didn’t do more before the newspapers’ report.
“Did it really take 700 names?” she asked.
SBC leaders have confronted the crisis by pushing through measures that could help excise from their ranks any church that mishandles abuse. They conducted panels, adopted resolutions and made promises. But for every vow to repent and reform, there were reminders of the monumental task that the SBC faces as it puts Birmingham behind and enters what leaders have called an “age of accountability.”
The SBC faced a reckoning long before the Chronicle’s ongoing series: Activists for years have warned that sex abuses were rampant in local churches, and last year’s annual meeting was marred by national headlines over leaders’ mishandling of sexual abuse claims.
SBC President J.D. Greear, who has called for dramatic change at the SBC to combat sexual abuse, does not have the authority to institute sweeping reforms or interfere in the affairs of local churches. Greear said there are still many churches that are unsafe, and that more must be done to regain the trust of those who have suffered in silence or been demonized by Southern Baptists.
“Why would survivors trust us to care for their souls if they’re not sure they can trust us to care for their wounds?” Greear asked a crowd of thousands of Baptists gathered at Legacy Arena in downtown Birmingham.
Stories from survivors
On Monday night, Woodson sat nervously amid hundreds of pastors and members of SBC churches in a packed meeting room. Armed with tissues and with her boyfriend at her side, she listened intently as a panel of fellow survivors detailed stories of horrific abuse or urged SBC leaders to take bold actions.
“Yes — oh, my God,” Woodson cried after Rachael Denhollander, an abuse survivor and advocate, told the crowd that survivors have been pleading for change for years.
Nearby, Christy Freeland sat in tears, wrapped in the arms of her husband. A victim of sexual abuse as a child, Freeland had driven four hours from Georgia to hear the stories of survivors such as Beth Moore, a Houston-based Bible teacher who had also been sexually abused as a child.
Moore did not disappoint.
“I pray that you will know that you are seen, that you are known by God, that you are not alone,” Moore said, bringing many to tears. “That there are so many of us who have been where you have been. We are on this journey with you. We may be behind you, we may be a couple of steps in front of you, but we are all on it together, and there are a whole lot of us to do this together. And that he has never left you.”
A woman fell to her knees. “Thank you. Thank you,” she bellowed as tears poured down her cheeks.
Moore has in recent weeks been a subject of controversy in the SBC, having delivered a Mother’s Day sermon that prompted criticism and bullying from the hard-line believers in “complementarianism” — the Southern Baptist belief that women are not allowed to be ordained, and should instead be complementary to their male counterparts.
Days later, Moore pulled out of an SBC panel because she felt her presence — and the SBC debate about women — was a distraction, Greear said.
Freeland couldn’t believe it. She had leaned on Moore’s teachings to confront her own trauma. Trying to silence Moore, she thought, was akin to telling survivors their stories don’t matter.
“What that did for me was open a door to one day knowing I could do that, too,” Freeland said of Moore’s decision to talk openly about her abuse. “What if she had not done that? What if she hadn’t followed that call in her life to be brave and to speak up? What if I had never heard that? Where would I be?”
Progress made?
The next day, Southern Baptist delegates — known as “messengers” — overwhelmingly passed two measures aimed at sex abuse. They empowered a credentials committee to make “inquiries” into churches regarding their handling of sexual abuse, and they advanced an amendment to their constitution that says churches that do not take abuse seriously are not in line with the SBC’s statements of faith.
Activists — including Denhollander, the survivor who has helped guide SBC leaders as they confront the crisis — described the changes as a first step. But key details about how the credentials committee will conduct its business remain unanswered.
Denhollander and others are concerned that the committee will do more harm than good if it’s not staffed by experts or abuse survivors. SBC messengers later rejected a proposal to add to the committee Susan Codone, an associate dean at Mercer University’s School of Medicine, who as a girl was abused by her youth pastor, then again by the pastor to whom she confided at a small Southern Baptist church outside Birmingham.
Bucky Kennedy, a preacher from Gainesville, Ga., was chairman of an SBC panel that nominated the new members. He said the committee was put together in a matter of days. Calls to Kennedy’s ministry offices weren’t answered Friday, and it’s unclear how the members were selected.
Greear, the SBC president who has been leading the effort to stymie sexual abuse, wasn’t involved in the selection process.
One of the SBC leaders who will sit on the credentials committee, Mike Stone, said he was sexually abused as a boy. He defended the makeup of the committee.
The Chronicle investigation has also revealed that the SBC’s International Mission Board, which supports thousands of missionaries, has failed to act on multiple cases of abuse by missionaries abroad. Yet a proposal to make public an internal report on missionary abuses also was defeated.
Wade Burleson, the Oklahoma pastor and reformer who pushed to make the report public, called the SBC’s response “stunning” and “tone deaf.”
Mission board officials did not address the issue of sexual abuse during their scheduled speech to messengers. And they didn’t talk about it at a packed dinner Monday night where the organization celebrated its accomplishments.
An old foe
Outside the convention hall, 30 or so survivors and activists gathered Tuesday on a sidewalk. Organizers of the For Such a Time As This rally had been relegated to protest outside because of what officials said were logistical issues, an exclusion that survivors said spoke volumes.
It was the first SBC meeting Christa Brown had attended in years. For more than a decade, she had warned SBC leaders about the abuses she suffered at a church near Dallas, hoping to prompt them to action and spare others from trauma.
Few listened. Some berated her.
Brown has since stepped back from the reform movement, preferring hikes in the woods of Colorado to the boardrooms of Southern Baptist men. Her return this year to an SBC meeting came as leaders have increasingly rallied behind a reform she has long sought: a database of sexual predators who’ve worked in SBC churches.
Greear, the SBC president, said the database could be considered as part of a package of reforms to prevent predators “from moving to church to church with impunity within our convention.”
Brown said that until the SBC reconciles its decades of inaction on abuse, she’ll remain skeptical that anything will change.
“Even the best intentioned people, if they’re working in a system that fundamentally lacks structures for accountability, then they will not be able to effect change within that system,” she said. “It has to be structural, institutional change, and that’s a hard thing.”
She noted that the SBC had been dominated for years by men such as Paige Patterson, the former president who was ousted last year from a seminary in Fort Worth for his handling of students’ sexual abuse claims.
Patterson once called advocates for reform “just as reprehensible as sex criminals.”
On Wednesday, Brown sat in the lobby of a hotel near the SBC’s meeting, joined by her longtime friend, David Clohessy. The two met as members of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, an advocacy group that was among the first to warn about the Catholic Church abuse scandals.
They wondered about the future of the SBC. They understand that the power of the convention’s old guard is fading, and they hope that a new generation of leaders will be able to confront a culture that has silenced and shamed survivors.
A woman emerged from a nearby elevator, headed to the restaurant just feet away from where Brown sat.
It was Patterson’s wife, Dorothy.
Brown could only laugh.
» To read our investigation online, go to: Houston Chronicle. com Abuse of Faith