Abuse probe urges Baptist affiliate to reform rules
Missionary group pledges to implement changes on reporting claims to police
The Southern Baptist Convention’s missionary arm knew of sexual abuse allegations against one of its former top missionaries for over 10 years before his arrest — accusations that exploded last year and forced the organization to bring in a third party to investigate its handling of abuse.
Anne Marie Miller told the International Mission Board in 2007 that Mark Aderholt, then a missionary to Central Europe, had initiated sexual contact with her as a teenager. He resigned quietly from the IMB and went on to rise in the Southern Baptist ranks until Miller reported him to police and went public with her story in 2018. No one from the IMB contacted law enforcement during the course of its 2007 investigation.
The law firm retained by the IMB in the wake of the Aderholt scandal put out a release Wednesday recommending sweeping changes to the organization’s policies for reporting abuse to law enforcement.
“IMB is a unique organization that places families all around the world, often in remote and isolated locations,” wrote Gray Plant Mooty, the Minnesota-based law firm the IMB hired to conduct the investigation. “Unfortunately, that isolation has the potential to put children at greater risk of abuse.”
The review is ongoing. The IMB did not release any specific details on past fail
ings, nor did it indicate that it plans to do so.
The update to the investigation comes as the Southern Baptist Convention gears up for its annual meeting in June, which will revolve around how the denomination deals with sex abuse in the wake of a Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News investigation that found over 700 victims of sexual abuse by Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers over two decades.
Neither the IMB nor Gray Plant Mooty responded to requests for comment.
Gray Plant Mooty recommended that the IMB adopt protocols to report allegations of child abuse to U.S. and foreign authorities “even when there is not a legal duty to do so” and involve outside counsel when the board gets a report of abuse.
The firm also recommended that the IMB create a full-time position to oversee abuse prevention and response and revise its current policies to clarify that IMB personnel can and often must report abuse allegations to authorities as well as mission board officials.
IMB pledges to do better
IMB President Paul Chitwood issued an apology on the organization’s website, pledging to “do better in the future” and implement all the recommendations. The IMB has already started reporting incidents of abuse by IMB personnel and affiliates to law enforcement, according to the statement.
The IMB’s silence allowed Aderholt to continue in the Southern Baptist world and eventually become the chief strategist of the South Carolina Baptist Convention.
Miller, now of Fort Worth, had just moved to Arlington and met Aderholt as a teenager looking to connect with a Christian community. Aderholt, who was 25 at the time, allegedly initiated sexual contact with her when she was 16.
After a two-month investigation, the IMB concluded that Aderholt had “more likely than not” engaged in “inappropriate sexual relationship” with Miller. Two months after his January 2008 resignation, he found employment at another Southern Baptist Church. His 2009 resume lists two top IMB personnel as references.
Aderholt awaits trial in Tarrant County on one count of sexual assault of a child and two counts of indecency with a child. His lawyer did not return requests for comment.
Miller found the study update and promise of reforms “encouraging” but said she still worries that the changes won’t go far enough.
“The IMB needs to look further into situations like mine to see if there was any abuse on the field,” she said. “I don’t think a girl in Vietnam or Hungary is going to be aware of this and see this and go, ‘Oh, I remember that guy from 20 years ago — he molested me.’ They need to go above and beyond to find and appropriately care for any other victims.”
Aderholt visited 29 countries during his eight years with the IMB, according to his 2009 resume.
Unlike the IMB thus far, other mission boards have released voluminous reports detailing their past failures after similar outside investigations. Those reports named not only alleged abusers, but enablers in the organizational hierarchy.
Tangible measure
The Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly Mission Counsel commissioned a three-member independent board to investigate sexual abuse in 2003. The board spent seven years investigating and released a 546-page report that found 30 instances of abuse.
A missionary to Bangladesh with the Pennsylvania-based Association of Baptists for World Evangelism — which isn’t associated with the Southern Baptist Convention or the IMB — abused children for nearly three decades with the knowledge of his supervisors. In a 280-page report, a third-party group revealed 23 alleged victims and that ABWE leadership knew about the abuse.
The IMB has not said whether it plans to release a similar accounting.
Miller hopes the IMB publishes a full report — but doubts that they will.
“If they summarize the report and keep the meat of it private, there is no way of knowing why they failed in the past and what they strive for in the future,” she said. “Releasing it publicly is a tangible way of saying, ‘We’re sorry we have failed you. Here’s why, and here’s what we are doing in the future.’ ”