Senior administrative leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, said Tuesday they would release a secret list of hundreds of pastors and other church officials accused of sexual violence.
A lawyer for the SBC Executive Committee announced the decision during a virtual meeting convened in response to a scathing investigative report describing how the commission mishandled allegations of sexual violence and blamed many survivors. The commission expects to release the list on Thursday.
During the meeting, senior leaders and several committee members pledged to work to change the denomination’s culture and listen more closely to the voices and stories of survivors.
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The report is expected to include new details about former Jacksonville pastor Darrell Gilliard. He was pastor at the Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church in Jacksonville in 2007.
He was convicted of lewd contact with two teenage girls, sentenced to three years in prison and added to the Florida Department of Law’s list of sex offenders.
On Tuesday, News4JAX learned that the report included allegations by a woman that she had fought an attempted rape in 1991 at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville. According to the report. Gilliard was working there when the Jacksonville woman, Tiffany Tigpen, said she had been attacked. She said she was horrified and traumatized.
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The report shows that Dr. Jerry Weins, then pastor of First Baptist, “rejected her report” and told her that “it would be embarrassing for her if others knew about it.”
And according to the report, Gilliard then worked at a church in Texas, where other women accused him of abuse.
The SBC executive committee said it had learned that “44 women reported being victims of sexual misconduct” by Gilyard. The letter on page 146 states: “In almost every case it is reported that they were ashamed of it and left with the feeling that they did not believe them.”
On Tuesday, News4JAX learned that the report included allegations by a woman that she had fought an attempted rape in 1991 at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville.
The report says Tigpen wrote a letter to the 2019 Working Statute Working Group outlining how Gilyard was allowed to move from church to church with prominent SBC figures vouching for him. None of the working group on the rules responded to the letter. Thigpen also made a presentation to the Credentials Committee.
The report says she said the process took emotional toll, writing: “Imagine telling for decades to an unresponsive audience, an audience that abuses you with its shame and hate speech against you.
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News4JAX turned to Thigpen for comment, but received no response.
Dr Heath Lambert, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, sent the following statement to News4JAX on Tuesday night:
“I am horrified and saddened by the abuse and cover-up of the abuse described in the SBC’s report on sexual violence. This is especially true of the abuse of a precious former member of the First Baptist Church 30 years ago. It is sinful and wrong to mistreat every human being, to advise victims of violence to remain silent, and to protect perpetrators from exposure. The leadership of our church today requires a rigorous review of all staff and volunteers, strictly implements policies to protect innocent people, and requires all allegations of abuse to be reported to the authorities. I call on every person involved in abuse or cover-up to confess this sin and seek reconciliation with those who have offended. ”
The 288-page Guidepost Solutions report, released on Sunday after a seven-month investigation, contained several explosive revelations. Among them were details of how D. August Boto, former vice president and general adviser to the Executive Committee, and former SBC spokesman Roger Oldam maintained their personal list of abusive pastors. Both retired in 2019. The existence of the list was not widely known within the commission and its staff.
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“Although they have been collecting these reports for more than 10 years, there are no indications (Oldham and Boto) or anyone else has taken any action to ensure that the accused ministers are no longer in power in the SBC churches,” the statement said. report.
Boto joined the Executive Committee in 1995 and became Executive Vice President and General Counsel in 2007.
On Tuesday, the commission issued a statement highlighting and condemning Boto’s words, written in a statement to the survivors and their defenders on September 29, 2006, that “the ongoing discourse between us (the Executive Committee and the Defenders of Defenders) will not be positive or fruitful.” . ”
In a new statement, the commission said it “rejects the mood altogether (in Boto’s words) and seeks to publicly repent of its failure to correct this position and listen to the survivors from the heart.”
Gene Bessen, the commission’s interim adviser, said during a virtual meeting on Tuesday that publishing the list was an important step towards transparency. The names of the survivors, confidential witnesses and any unconfirmed allegations of sexual violence will be edited from a list to be published, he said.
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Bessen said the commission’s leaders would also consider lifting pension benefits for Boto and others involved in the cover-up. He called on commission members to put aside past divisions and remain united in their collective commitment to ending sexual violence at the SBC.
Willie McClorin, interim president and chief executive of the Executive Committee, has issued a formal public apology to all those who have suffered sexual violence within the SBC, which has a membership of more than 47,000 churches.
“We feel sorry for the survivors for everything we did to cause pain and disappointment,” he said. “Now is the time to change the culture. From now on, we must be proactive in our openness and transparency. “
Executive Committee Chairman Wally Slade began the virtual meeting with the recognition of the survivors.
“Our commitment is to be different and to make different,” he said. “We can’t come up with semi-finished solutions.”
Following the publication of the report, more survivors of sexual violence are contacting the Executive Committee to tell their stories, Bessen said. He said he had asked the Guidepost to open a hotline so that survivors who apply could be “directed to the right place and given proper care”. The committee will announce the hotline number as soon as it is live, McLorin said.
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The Sexual Violence Working Group, appointed at the request of SBC delegates during last year’s meeting in Nashville, expects to make formal proposals based on the Guidepost report next week. These recommendations will then be presented to delegates for a vote at this year’s national meeting, scheduled for June 14-15 in Anaheim, California, according to Pastor Bruce Frank, who chairs the working group.
Frank, a leading pastor at Biltmore Baptist Church in Arden, North Carolina, said the essence of the Working Group’s recommendations, based on the Guidepost report, would be to prevent sexual violence, to take better care of survivors when such violence happen and ensure that abusers are not allowed to continue to serve.
Survivors and defenders have long called for a public database of perpetrators. The establishment of the Infringer Information System was one of the key recommendations in the report by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm agreed by the SBC Executive Committee after delegates to last year’s national meeting were pressured to investigate outsiders.
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The proposed database is expected to be one of several recommendations resulting from the seven-month Guidepost investigation presented to thousands of delegates attending this year’s national meeting.
Lawyer and writer Christa Brown, who says she was sexually abused as a teenager by the youth minister at her SBC church, has been urging the SBC since 2006 to create a publicly available database of known abusers. She was thrilled with Tuesday’s announcement that the secret list would be made public.
“I hope this will happen in the very near future. I will watch and wait, “she told the Associated Press. “It amazes me to try to imagine how they could have streamlined keeping this list a secret for so many years, since 2007. That implies a level of moral bankruptcy that I find incomprehensible. ”
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