The Southern Baptist Convention 

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) represents a Christian and Protestant denomination within the United States. The SBC represents the largest Baptist denomination in the world, and nearly the largest Christian denomination in the U.S. — second only to Catholicism.

The SBC has more than 47,000 Baptist churches. The organization maintains a central administrative organization in Tennessee and has an executive committee. 

While the SBC showed more than 14.5 million members in the US Census in 2020, it has lost 14% of its congregants from 2006 to 2022, or about 2.3 million members.

The Guidepost Solutions Report

Read the entire May 15, 2022, Guidepost Report of the Independent Investigation here

On Sunday, May 22, 2022, Guidepost Solutions released a report exposing sexual misconduct and sex abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

The 288-page report by the independent investigations firm, Guidepost Solutions, LLC, details how members of church leadership knew about the abuse allegations against pastors for almost two decades.  This seven-month investigation by Guidepost, during which time the firm conducted 330 interviews and analyzed thousands of internal SBC files, brought to light the innumerable reports of abuse made by church members across the nation to church leadership members (known as the Executive Committee or EC).

These reports were kept hidden since long before the investigation was made.  Unfortunately, most reports were handled with hostility or resistance.  Instead of handling the cases, the EC either ignored them, covered them up, or allowed the accused to simply move away. This action was undertaken with the goal of helping to avoid a ‘culture of sexual misconduct.’

Such sexual abuse reports were kept secret and not reported to authorities.   

According to the Guidepost report, the SBC had collected the names of 703 abusers. 

Guidepost was hired to investigate multiple allegations against SBC’s Executive Committee (EC) staff and member churches with regard to:

·        Sexual abuse

·        Mishandling sex abuse

·        Mistreating sexual abuse victims

·        Intimidating sexual abuse victims or advocates

·        Resisting sexual abuse reform initiatives

According to the report, for many years, sex abuse survivors have been reaching out to the SBC EC, and members of the committee responded with “resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.”

The report further states, “Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC’s response to these reports of abuse ... and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC.”

The report further describes how the survivors of sexual abuse were characterized as opportunistic individuals looking for lawsuits.

These victims were broken down and publicly vilified, while their accounts of abuse were trivialized. They were shunned, threatened, and treated as though they were lying or worthless.  

The management of all sexual abuse or assault reports by the Southern Baptist Convention seemed to have a common goal: avoiding liability.