Much is being done and more can be done to protect children from sexual predators within Southern Baptist churches, but an ABC News “20/20” segment on the issue April 13 amounted to “yellow journalism,” SBC President Frank Page says.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) – Much is being
done and more can be done to protect children from sexual predators within
Southern Baptist churches, but an ABC News “20/20” segment on the issue April
13 amounted to “yellow journalism,” SBC President Frank Page says.
The segment focused on child sexual
predators within Protestant churches, focusing on 10-20 occurrences within
Southern Baptists’ 40,000 churches. In introducing the 16-minute segment,
20/20’s Elizabeth Vargas said, “What surprised us … is how little is being
done to stop it.” ABC’s Jim Avila used the term “preacher predators.” The
segment spotlighted a youth pastor who sexually abused minors at a church in Kentucky, and then moved on to a Missouri church and did the same.
Avila interviewed Page for roughly two hours
recently, but in the end used just a few seconds of the interview, and Page
said, left out what the denomination is doing to address the problem.
“Much is being done right now and much is
being done on the local level,” Page, pastor of First
BaptistChurch
in Taylors, S.C., told Baptist Press. “They did not want
to include that because it would have tainted their piece.”
Officials on the national level,
including those at the SBC Executive Committee, Page said, “are looking to
improve wherever possible.”
“I felt that it was an intentional
slice-and-dice effort to portray the SBC and its president as uncaring and
uninformed,” he said. “It was more than a two-hour interview reduced to less
than 60 seconds of choppy response. It was a prime example of yellow
journalism, in which a broad brush was used and the whole truth was denied a
fair hearing.”
Southern Baptist messengers in 2002
adopted a resolution calling on churches to “rid their ranks of predatory
ministers” and “to cooperate with civil authorities in the prosecution of those
cases.”
Page and other Southern Baptist leaders
have repeatedly encouraged churches to conduct criminal background checks and
to call a candidate’s references – as well as people not listed on the
candidate’s reference list – to make certain a candidate’s past is clean. To
assist in that, in 2002 LifeWay Christian Resources negotiated reduced-rate
background check services with a company, U.S. Investigations Services. LifeWay
also offers other resources for helping prevent child sexual abuse in churches.
- August Boto, general counsel and vice
president for convention policy with the Executive Committee of the Southern
Baptist Convention, also issued a statement of concerns, listing what he
described as misperceptions fostered in the ABC 20/20 segment.
“Unfortunately, the 20/20 report last
Friday had the effect of misleading at least some of its viewers to believe
that the Southern Baptist Convention somehow condones, hides or denies sexual
offenses committed by ministers in SBC-affiliated churches,” Boto said. “The
convention does none of those things. Quite the contrary.”
The segment, Boto, said, did include
“accurate assertions.” For instance, he said, “in some of those instances” of
sexual abuse, abuse “had occurred earlier at churches where those men had been
previously employed.”
“It is apparently true that at least in
one case a church previously employing a sexual predator and the church
employing the offender at the time of his ultimate arrest, did not communicate
with each other in a way that disclosed any earlier indication of moral
failure. It may be true that other churches have similarly failed to
communicate.”
But “it is not true,” Boto added, that
any of the ministers had been “qualified or endorsed” by the SBC. Local
churches, he said, “do the qualifying.” The SBC website referenced in the
program included a list of ministers across the SBC, with some on the list
having been convicted of sexual abuse. The convention, Boto said, “merely
shares information provided by its affiliated churches.” In other words, the
list is a compilation of names given to the SBC.net website by churches.
“I do, however,
see a major benefit to the airing of the 20/20 segment – that it significantly
raised the level of apprehension and wariness among Southern Baptists who have
responsibilities in qualifying volunteers and prospective employees,” Boto
said. “Significant impact in reducing instances of sexual abuse must start at
the local level. The authority is there, the children are there, the applicants
are there, the circumstances are understood better there, and the child’s most
motivated defenders are there – their parents.”