Issues like these can escape the attention of the average SBC church member. We are generally just trying to take care of what is in front of us. We are meeting, praying, and sharing the love of Jesus in our communities. We are budgeting, and attending committee meetings and going to Sunday School. At the same time, we are connected to a vast network of congregations, and we have a collective public witness.
The SBC is congregational in nature. Each local church and every attendant entity all are autonomous. Our association with each other has always been characterized as "friendly, willing, and voluntary." We are an inverted pyramid with the church on top. The SBC, we are told, really only exists as it expressed collectively at the Annual Meeting of its approved church messengers each year. And the will of those messengers is absolute. Unless it isn't.
A few years ago the Houston Chronicle wrote a series of articles exposing an egregious problem among SBC churches. That was that over 700 cases of sexual abuse and child sexual abuse had occurred in SBC churches over a 20 year period. I have written about that before. Even though each church and entity is autonomous, there is still a mutual obligation to accountability. It is complicated to work through how an organization that is not top-down can adjudicate the cause of abuse survivors. But because something is complicated that doesn't mean it's impossible.
The messengers in Nashville voted that the Executive Committee must hire a third party firm to allow its behavior to be scrutinized by an unbiased source. In order to do this, they needed to waive attorney client privilege, which was ordered in the action of the assembled messengers. The Executive Committee initially balked at that, and is at this date (9/27/21) deliberating their stance (in violation of the messengers wishes). Waiving attorney client privilege gives basic forensic access to needed correspondence, emails, and recordings that provide an accurate understanding of what actually transpired.
The EC leadership and EC president Ronnie Floyd so far have approved millions of dollars in Cooperative Program funds to pay for attorneys' advice, while simultaneously minimizing steps toward advocacy, openness, and education. That's how we know they are not caring well.
My advice to anyone who cares about the future of the SBC would be to stay informed about what is happening further out than your local church. What's happening out there affects you. It can be part of the difference between a viable, healthy network of churches and a convention that is circling the drain.
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