Posted on 02/10/2019 7:14:29 PM PST by NYer
As one who has been on church staff, and had experience with many Protestant and Anabaptist denominations, what I have seen is heterosexual, post-pubescent immorality, not pre-pubescent homoeroticism.
I know of cases of youth pastors with teenage girls; I know of pastors and other staff committing adultery with grown women. Some were covered up; some were not.
Maybe it is a “man” problem. How many women leaders in churches have been involved with sexual misconduct?
it bothers me to see one Christian denomination apparently pitting itself against another. if that wasn’t the intention of your post, then i apologize. i can’t know your motives.
though having read this piece, i couldn’t draw any credible conclusion from it other than there is some small percentage of southern baptist ministers committing sexual assault. haven’t got a clue how you could draw yours from this “report.” the enemy press would of course like to trumpet any failure of Christians, thus diminishing all Christians of every stripe.
anyway to perhaps shed some light for myself, as i sometimes do on this site when i see a post containing apparent nonsense, i did some research on my own with the following results:
1. from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016 (2015 - 2016): “During the same period, rape or sexual assaults declined from 1.6 to 1.1 victimizations per 1,000 persons.”
so about 1 per 1000 in the general pop. that’s a standard that an honest reporter should use to compare Christian ministry workers to the general population imo, at least according to BJS stats.
2. according to wiki there are about 15 x 10^6 So Baptists in the US so if there were 700 assaults / 20 years = 35 assaults / yr, that’s about a 1 in 428571 chance of being assaulted in a southern bapt church per year by a ministry worker. again these are “mythical average” probablity calculations; just trying to get an honest assessment of risk here. that is a lot less than in the gen pop. like 400 times less!
3. looking around further i found a report on Catholic parishes in PA claiming 1000 assaults in the last 70 or 1000 / 70 = 14 assaults / yr. the internet claims about 3 x 10^6 Catholics in PA. so we again do a rough calculation for PA and find that we have a 1 in 3000000 / 14 = 214285 chance of being assaulted in a PA parish by a ministry worker.
so a few back of the envelope calculations of my own leave me very assured to me as a Christian in a denomination different from both Catholic and So Baptists that i and my family would be far less likely to be assaulted by a ministry worker in the confines of a Catholic parish or a Southern Baptist Church should we be visiting than in the general population of secular America. we are talking 100s of times less likely in the case of either denomination.
How many priests have the CC referred to law enforcement for sexual misconduct?
It is so bad with the CC that DOJ is now involved at a federal level investigation.
What a blessing. s/
The scale is small compared to that of the Catholic church. And how many Catholic priests were actually tried and convicted instead of sheltered and if need be shifted out of US jurisdiction?
“So much for the theory that this problem would not exist with married clergy.”
The article includes ministers AND “volunteers” and did not give the breakdown included in the 380. Obviously the volunteer part would include the largest segment.
Jesus warned of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Married clergy has nothing to do with it. It’s a human failing. I note that only 2% or less of clergy fail in this way - lower than teachers, scout masters etc. it should ideally be 0, but it’s not
Correct. it’s not just the Baptists or Catholics
I wasn’t aware there were that many dims in the Baptist Church.
Agree.
Be they clergy, staff or volunteers, since the John Jay Report, the Catholic Church now mandates that all must submit to a background check ... AND ... be VIRTUS certified. Certification entails training. The training makes participants aware of the signs of child sexual abuse, the methods and means by which offenders commit abuse, and five easy steps one can use to prevent child sexual abuse. Once completed, re-certification training is required, every few years. This entails watching a series of videos that demonstrate the seemingly innocuous ways perps target their victims, even tricks used to assuage parental concerns. Personally, after watching these recently, I suggested they be shown to parents who also deal with teachers, camp counsellors, and others who prey on children.
The newspapers reported that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) largely treated the accusations as isolated issues,
Congregational polity. My understanding is, the SBC exists to cooperatively support missions. In a sense, these are isolated instances. A whole bunch of them.
L8r
According to the SBC website, there are over 47,000 member churches. While even one abused child is too many, I wouldn’t label this an SBC epidemic.
At least with Baptists, the congregation can fire the preacher.
380 Laity out of the thousands of Southern Baptists over decades? Hmmm. I wonder how that would compare percentage wise against the perverts in the press who wrote this hit job? Or the priests in the Catholic Church? Or members of Congress? I would say that if you try to say “would not exist with married clergy”, I would say that this hit job points out that no group is without guilt, but the Southern Baptists are probably less like than certainly the Media or Congress, or other religious groups.
Different positions of authority, no way to compare.
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