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A half dozen state conventions have proactively commissioned audits of their own abuse protocol as the national Executive Committee undergoes an investigation.
Southern Baptist leaders in North Carolina have announced plans to proactively review their state convention’s response to the issue of sexual abuse.
The review, approved on Monday by the executive committee of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, will look at current policies and procedures for preventing abuse and responding when abuse occurs.
Todd Unzicker, the state convention’s executive director-treasurer, said leaders want to show churches they take abuse seriously.
“If our churches do not see us as a convention being proactive in this, mistrust will happen,” he said in a statement Monday.
North Carolina joins at least five other state conventions in addressing the issue of abuse at their annual meetings this fall. In recent weeks, state Baptist groups in Georgia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida, and California have set up committees or task forces to address sexual abuse. Attempts to set up similar responses failed in Mississippi and Missouri.
“I want to make clear that we as Georgia Baptists have zero tolerance for sexual abuse,” W. Thomas Hammond, executive director of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, told the Christian Index, a Georgia Baptist publication.
The statewide responses follow on the heels of a bitter dispute at the national SBC’s Nashville-based Executive Committee over how to conduct an independent investigation into that group’s handling of sexual abuse in recent decades.
A national task force to oversee that investigation was set up this past summer at the annual meeting of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But members of the Executive Committee disagreed about how transparent the investigation would be and how many details would ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
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