Posted on 06/10/2008 10:21:33 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Under pressure to fight child sex abuse, the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee said Tuesday that the denomination should not create its own database to help churches identity predators or establish an office to field abuse claims.
The report decried sexual abuse as reprehensible and a sin. But the Southern Baptist principle of local church autonomy means it's up to individual churches _ and not the convention _ to screen employees and take action against offenders, the committee said.
Meanwhile, Texas Baptists provided buses and volunteers to round up the FLDS children and separate them from their mothers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN_QG1UqHLs
Dumb move. Can’t they have a database for the denomination and have the local church deal with the screening and punishments?
“Local church autonomy rules out creating a centralized investigative body to determine who has been credibly accused of sexual abuse or anything else, it said, and the convention has no authority to bar known perpetrators from ministry or start an office to field abuse claims.”
I just think it is interesting in light of Baptist involvement in the round up of FLDS children - all based on a false report of sexual abuse. I just think it is very interesting.
P.S. I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church and have many fond childhood memories but I am horrified the way the Baptists provided buses to haul off those innocent children.
They’re probably afraid of the kind of lawsuits that the Catholic Church endured, if they keep track of predatory staff. This way, they can plead ignorance at the convention level.
“Can’t they have a database for the denomination and have the local church deal with the screening and punishments?”
Too busy obsessing over the FLDS. The scripture about the log in your eyeball comes to mind.
“Too busy obsessing over the FLDS. The scripture about the log in your eyeball comes to mind.”
You do realize there is a Texas Baptist Convention don’t you that is separate from the Souther Baptist Convention? I have no idea who was involved in the FLDS situation though.
Why are there Baptists, and American Baptists, and Southern Baptists, and Free Baptists, and Conservative Baptists and a bunch of other kinds of Baptists?
I read an article that the First Baptist Church of El Dorado was the church that provided the buses to haul off the FLDS women and children to be dumped in a coliseum (a coliseum!).
So . . . the Texas Baptist Convention - they are not Southern Baptists . . . they are just regular Baptists? When I was in Reno a while back I attended a Conservative Baptist church that also claimed to be non denominational. What? A great service by the way.
Whoa! I found this really neat article about the FLDS kids thanking a Baptist foster home facility where they stayed:
http://www.abpnews.com/3214.article
That is truly heartwarming and sweet. Very Christian.
Yikes! Here’s an article not so favorable to the Baptists on how they were involved in the FLDS raid:
In Texas, there is the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the smaller, more conservative Southern Baptists of Texas. (There are also more liberal groups.) An individual church can belong to none, one, or both the SBoT and the BGCT. They also may be members of the SBC.
The SBC isn’t a denomination in the sense that the Methodists, Presbyterians or Lutherans have denominations. The only discipline that a Convention can really administer is to kick out the offending church.
Well, as to Southern Baptists and American Baptists, there was this little problem sometimes known as the War of Northern Aggression. The division today is more of a liberal/conservative issue.
There is a lot of theological diversity among Baptists today, as well.
And finally, there is the saying that if you have two Baptists, you have a church. If you have 3 Baptists, you have 2 churches. It isn't really that bad, but since it is a voluntary association rather than a centralized denomination, no one can really tell a local church what to do or to believe.
the trend over the last 20 years in the SBC has been toward more centralization, not less. Now when centralization is suddenly inconvenient, they fall back on the individual autonomy rubric.
The best example of a Database for Identifying Sexual Predators on a large scale is BishopsAccountability.org.
Anything less is useless.
Each Catholic Diocese controlled themselves, they were locally Autonomous and CORRUPT.
See where that got them.
The best example of a Database for Identifying Sexual Predators on a large scale is BishopsAccountability.org.
Anything less is useless.
Each Catholic Diocese controlled themselves, they were locally Autonomous and CORRUPT.
See where that got them.
Nice thread hijack.
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