NEW SBC PRESIDENT COMMITS TO SEX ABUSE REFORMS
Vows to quickly create task force to implement change
The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention said Wednesday he will accelerate sex abuse reforms in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Texas Pastor Bart Barber’s first priority: to assemble a panel of people — Southern Baptist leaders and experts — to shepherd this work for the whole convention as mandated by thousands of representatives from local SBC churches.
The day after his victory in a run-off race against Tom Ascol, a Florida pastor who vowed to take the conservative denomination further right, Barber reiterated his desire to lead by being a unifier and peacebuilder. The SBC has seen deep divisions and a steady drop in membership for more than a decade.
During a news conference Wednesday, Barber voiced his commitment to forming a new action group to help carry out the recommendations of the Sexual Abuse Task Force, which delegates overwhelmingly approved Tuesday. Delegates at the SBC’s national meeting also agreed to create a way to track church workers credibly accused of sex abuse.
Those recommendations came after a blistering 288page report from outside consultant Guidepost Solutions. The firm’s sevenmonth independent investigation found disturbing details about how denominational leaders mishandled sex abuse claims and mistreated victims.
On the final day of the two-day annual meeting, the convention also overwhelmingly approved two sex abuse-related resolutions. One apologized for “the harm our actions and inactions have caused to survivors of sexual abuse,” and for not heeding survivors’ warnings. The other called for all states to criminalize sexual relationships between pastors and those in their care.
Survivor and longtime advocate for reform, Christa Brown, said the convention did the “bare minimum” this week, and renewed her call for a government investigation into abuse in the SBC.
On Wednesday, Barber said sexual predators have used the convention’s decentralized polity to turn congregations “into a hunting ground.” But with systemic changes and reforms, Barber hoped sexual predators will be put on notice.
“The hunters are now the hunted,” he said.
While he was reluctant to provide a timeline for action, he promised to appoint the new task force swiftly.
Barber repeatedly called for Southern Baptists to find common ground despite their differences over issues such as race and gender roles.
“I do believe we have seen some unhealthy ways recently that secular politics have dominated the conversation here in the Southern Baptist Convention,” Barber said. “As Christians, we need to be engaged in politics. We just need to make sure that in the dance between theology and politics, theology leads.”
Barber said “the coarseness and crass discourse out there has crept into” the SBC and into people’s social media feeds. Expressing anger on Twitter and “trying to own” people instead of solving problems has only deepened divisions among Southern Baptists, he said.
“Every way I’ve served SBC has left scars,” he said. “But this family of churches is worth it.”
However, the SBC, despite its size and political influence, has yet to figure out a way to stem long-term declines in membership or in baptisms — their key metric for religious vitality — that began long before the pandemic disruptions.
Annual baptisms stood at 154,701 in 2021, down 63 percent from their 1999 peak. Membership stood at 13.7 million, down 16 percent from its 2006 peak, according to statistics from the SBC’s affiliate, Lifeway Christian Resources.
Barber said tracking membership is complicated and results can be skewed, but noted the SBC president has little influence over it. “It’s the local churches that are going to carry the gospel forward and help us grow,” he said.
By any measure of the nation’s political and religious spectrum, the SBC is staunchly conservative. But groups such as the Conservative Baptist Network and Founders Ministries, which Ascol has long led, have mobilized to pull the SBC further to the right, claiming that its leaders and seminaries are being influenced by liberal trends and “wokeness.”
Candidates aligned with these groups were defeated for SBC president, chair of its Executive Committee and president of the influential Pastors Conference, held each year just before the annual meeting.