By Bob Allen
Friday, October 14, 2011
DENVER (ABP) – A victims’ advocate says autonomous Baptist churches are ill-equipped to deal with the problem of sexual abuse by clergy because they lack the objectivity to respond appropriately to allegations against a trusted minister.
Christa Brown, who owns the website StopBaptistPredators.org, says the first sentence of a recent news article about a former youth minister charged in April with two counts of sexual activity with a minor sums up the problem: "Pastor Matthew Ellis’ first urge was to trust his youth minister."
"For pastors and congregants alike, that's the first instinct for most people when a minister is accused of sexual abuse," Brown, formerly Baptist outreach leader for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and now studying for a Ph.D. at Iliff School of Theology, wrote in a blog Oct. 13. "Good people tend to think the best of others, and particularly of others who are in positions of high trust."
Brown, a survivor of sexual abuse by her Southern Baptist youth minister when she was 16, says that if Brijbag had done what accused ministers often do -- leave quietly and move on to a new church -- Pastor Ellis might never have had second thoughts.
Brown said Brijbag’s excuse for refusing to face his accuser -- that he didn’t want his integrity questioned -- ironically puts him on common ground with clergy molestation victims.
Brown said that is why the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s second largest faith group behind Roman Catholics, needs a denominational panel of trained professionals to assist churches with clergy abuse reports, assess allegations that cannot be criminally prosecuted and ensure that persons with reports of clergy abuse "will at least have their reports received in a responsible and compassionate manner."
Brown, who shared her testimony in a 2009 book titled This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang, was a G.A. Queen Regent who hadn’t been on a single date and had never held hands with a boy when her married youth and education minister groomed her into having what at the time she regarded an "affair" in 1969.
Brown, by now an attorney, wondered if her abuser was still in the ministry and set out to warn Southern Baptists that a sexual predator might be in their midst.
She contacted a total of 18 Baptist leaders in churches, state conventions and the SBC, and all responded it was not in their job description.
SBC leaders told her there was no record to indicate her perpetrator was still a minister, but she discovered through her own efforts that he had served on staff of some high-profile Southern Baptist churches -– including First Baptist Church of Atlanta while Pastor Charles Stanley was SBC president -- and presently was on staff at a prominent SBC church in Florida.
After the study, the Executive Committee recommended against the idea, saying the convention lacked authority to investigate local churches, which are responsible for calling their own ministers. Time Magazine ranked the decision as one of the top 10 under-reported news stories in 2008.
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Sexual Abuse of Minors in Protestant Churches
The mainstream media has all but ignored the recent Associated Press report that the three major insurance companies for Protestant Churches in America say they typically receive 260 reports each year of minors being sexually abused by Protestant clergy, staff, or other church-related relationships.
In light of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church beginning five years ago, religious and victims’ rights organizations have been seeking this type of data for years. It has been hard to come by since Protestant Churches are more de-centralized than the Catholic Church.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,286153,00.html#ixzz1aoLfqUsn
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Responding to heavy media scrutiny, the Catholic Church has reported that since 1950, 13,000 "credible accusations" have been brought against Catholic clerics (about 228 per year.) The fact that this number includes all credible accusations,
not just those that have involved insurance companies, and still is less than the number of cases in Protestant churches reported by just three insurance companies, should be making front page of The New York Times and the network evening news. It’s not.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,286153,00.html#ixzz1aoL2GUFy
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By Mark Clayton, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor / April 5, 2002
Despite headlines focusing on the priest pedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant, and most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but church volunteers.
These are findings from national surveys by Christian Ministry Resources (CMR), a tax and legal-advice publisher serving more than 75,000 congregations and 1,000 denominational agencies nationwide.
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