‘Gut-wrenching.’ Kentucky’s Southern Baptists reeling from sexual abuse report

Lexington Herald-Leader - 5/26/2022

Southern Baptists in Kentucky and around the nation are staggered by the release of a national report that exposes both the breadth of sexual abuse within the church and its attempts to hide the problem.

Ministers at Kentucky’s 2,400 Southern Baptist churches have to now explain to their parishioners how so many Christians could have behaved in such opposite ways to Christian teaching.

“I think we need to know that we as Southern Baptists have handled these abuse cases terribly, there’s no other way to put it,” said Rev. Hershael York, the former pastor of Ashland Avenue Baptist Church who is now dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s School of Theology in Louisville. He compared it to the neglected traveler in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan — “at best we have neglected abuse survivors and at worst we have added to their suffering greatly. This is cause for our repentance, our laments, our apologies and our learning to do this better in the future.”

The report stems from the work of two Texas newspapers, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio News Express, which in 2019 documented more than 700 cases of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention in the series “Abuse of Faith.”

Abuse survivors, advocates and some grassroots Baptists urged the SBC executive committee for an outside report because of evidence that the executive committee knew about the abuse but elected to ignore it. They even kept a secret list of abusers, which they have said they would release this week.

While SBC headquarters are in Tennessee, Kentucky plays an important role in this drama because of the seminary and survivors like Jennifer Lyell, who was abused by Professor David Sills while a student there. After she agreed to go public, the report says, Baptist Press, the communications arm of the SBC executive committee, wrote an article that described the abuse as a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Seminary president Albert Mohler confirmed her account. The article was later redacted.

Kentucky is also the home of attorney Rachel Denhollander of Louisville. A former gymnast, she was the first accuser of Larry Nasser, the Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor found to have assaulted hundreds of athletes under the guise of medical treatment.

A top lawyer for the SBC described Denhollander and survivor Christa Brown as the architects of a “satanic scheme” to distract from the church’s evangelism.

“I’m heartbroken, but not surprised,” Denhollander said of the report. “These are the elements we’ve been warning about for years — the deception by the SBC, the harassment and intimidation of survivors, we’ve known these things for decades.”

In two weeks, the SBC annual meeting will be held in Anaheim, Calif., where Denhollander hopes action will be taken on the report’s numerous recommendations, which include establishing an independent commission to oversee reforms, followed by a new administrative entity dedicated to training and prevention of sexual abuse.

“I’m really hopeful they will be implemented,” Denhollander said. “I think the scales have fallen off the eyes of a lot Southern Baptists.”

Last November, Kentucky Baptist Convention President Wes Fowler introduced a measure to create the Kentucky Baptist Sexual Abuse Task Force. The task force had four priorities:

1. Review internal KBC documents related to sexual abuse: Guidepost Solutions, the group that wrote the national report, has begun to review those documents to see how best to prevent sexual abuse.

2. Training KBC staff members: Guidepost Solutions will also provide training this fall to ensure KBC staff members not only understand how to prevent sexual abuse but do better to care for victims.

3. Production of a Sexual Abuse Prevention Handbook: Guidepost Solutions is helping the KBC produce a handbook to be distributed to Kentucky Baptist church leaders and will address prevention, response and care as it relates to sexual abuse. This handbook should be finished by early fall and made available to Kentucky Baptist churches and their leaders.

4. Training Kentucky Baptist church leaders: This October, the KBC will host sexual abuse training experts in the state to provide equipping opportunities at four separate locations for Kentucky Baptist church leaders.

At York’s former church, Ashland Avenue Baptist, senior pastor David Prince said the topic of sexual abuse has been a constant one, leading to his church getting abuse awareness training for several years.

“The report is gut-wrenching and heartbreaking,” Prince said. “I am thankful to God for the report, for all injustice and abuse to be exposed. The only way that we can move in a healthy direction is by having it exposed. As difficult as it is to read that report, it is absolutely vital. I pray it brings substantive change to churches in the way they love and care for people and respond to abuse situations.”

As we’ve learned far too many times, sexual abuse is a scourge everywhere, but particularly in religious arenas where there is an expectation of good behavior and unwillingness to admit the opposite could happen. No matter the religion, the same pattern emerges: Denial, cover-up and eventual admitted guilt.

Matthew Cressler of the National Catholic Reporter noted the similarities between the Southern Baptist Convention and the Catholic Church: “They both begin with the horrors of predation, assault and rape perpetrated by religious leaders, often in religious spaces and couched in religious language. When survivors and their advocates came forward to trusted authorities in their lifelong communities, at best they found their allegations ignored and their warnings left unheeded. At worst, they were intimidated, demonized and framed as enemies of the faith.”

Let’s hope the Southern Baptists can move more quickly to right itself.