Southern Baptists to release secret list of pastors accused of sexual abuse

Top administrative leaders for the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, said Tuesday that they would release a secret list of hundreds of pastors and other church-affiliated personnel accused of sexual abuse.

An attorney for the church’s executive committee announced the decision during a virtual meeting called in response to the release of a scathing investigative report detailing how the committee mishandled allegations of sexual abuse and stonewalled numerous survivors. The committee anticipates releasing the list Thursday.

During the meeting, top leaders and several committee members pledged to work toward changing the culture of the denomination and to listen more attentively to survivors’ voices and stories.

The 288-page report by Guidepost Solutions, which was issued Sunday after a seven-month investigation, contains several explosive revelations. Among those were details of how D. August Boto, the executive committee’s former vice president and general counsel, and former church spokesman Roger Oldham kept their own private list of abusive pastors. Both retired in 2019. The existence of the list was not widely known within the committee and its staff.

“Despite collecting these reports for more than 10 years, there is no indication that [Oldham and Boto] or anyone else took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches,” the report said.

Boto joined the executive committee in 1995 and became executive vice president and general counsel in 2007.

On Tuesday, the committee released a statement singling out and denouncing Boto’s words written in a communication to survivors and their advocates on Sept. 29, 2006, that “continued discourse between us [the executive committee and survivors’ advocates] will not be positive or fruitful.”

The committee, in its new statement, said it “rejects the sentiment [of Boto’s words] in its entirety and seeks to publicly repent for its failure to rectify this position and wholeheartedly listen to survivors.”

Gene Besen, the committee’s interim counsel, said during Tuesday’s virtual meeting that releasing the list is an important step toward transparency. The names of survivors, confidential witnesses and any uncorroborated allegations of sexual abuse will be redacted from the list that will be made public, he said.

Besen said the committee’s leaders would also look into revoking retirement benefits for Boto and others who were involved in the cover-up. He urged committee members to set aside past divisions and stay united in a collective commitment to end sexual abuse in the church.

Willie McLaurin, the executive committee’s interim president and chief executive, issued a formal public apology to all those who suffered sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention, which has a membership of more than 47,000 churches.

“We are sorry to the survivors for all we have done to cause pain and frustration,” he said. “Now is the time to change the culture. We have to be proactive in our openness and transparency.”

Executive committee Chairman Wally Slade began the virtual meeting by acknowledging the survivors.

“Our commitment is to be different and do different,” he said. “We can’t come up with half-baked solutions.”

After the report’s release, more sexual abuse survivors have been contacting the executive committee to tell their stories, Besen said. He said he has asked Guidepost Solutions to open up a hotline so survivors who reach out “are directed to the proper place and receive the proper care.” The committee will publicize the hotline number as soon as it goes live, McLaurin said.

The sexual abuse task force, appointed at the demand of convention delegates during last year’s meeting in Nashville, expects to make its formal motions based on the Guidepost Solutions’ report public next week. Those recommendations will then be presented to the delegates for a vote during this year’s national meeting, scheduled for June 14-15 in Anaheim, according to Bruce Frank, who led the task force.

Frank, lead pastor of Biltmore Baptist Church in Arden, N.C., said the crux of the task force’s recommendations based on Guidepost Solutions’ report would be to prevent sexual abuse, to better care for survivors when such abuse does occur, and to make sure abusers are not allowed to continue in ministry.

Survivors and advocates have long called for a public database of abusers. The creation of an “offender information system” was one of the key recommendations in the report by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm contracted by the executive committee after delegates to last year’s national meeting pressed for an outside investigation.

The proposed database is one of several recommendations that resulted from Guidepost’s seven-month investigation.

Lawyer and writer Christa Brown, who says she was sexually abused as a teen by the youth minister at her church, has been pressing the Southern Baptist Convention since 2006 to create a publicly accessible database of known abusers. She was heartened by Tuesday’s announcement that the secret list would be made public.

“I hope that will happen in the very near future. I’ll be watching and waiting,” she told the Associated Press. “It boggles my mind to try to imagine how they could have rationalized keeping this list secret for so many years — since 2007. It suggests a level of moral bankruptcy that I find incomprehensible.”