Southern Baptists meeting in Nashville June 16 asked newly elected SBC President Ed Litton to facilitate a third-party investigation of the denomination’s handling of sexual abuse and its care for abuse survivors.
Tennessee pastor Grant Gaines made the motion in Nashville and after debate, messengers voted overwhelmingly to approve it. Executive Committee President and CEO Ronnie Floyd told messengers before the vote, “I want all of you to know I hear you. The Executive Committee respects the messengers. We need this deliberative process. We know that this will make our convention stronger, and that is what I want.”
Gaines’s motion was initially referred by the Committee on Order of Business to the Executive Committee itself. The Executive Committee had announced prior to the annual meeting they would work with Guidepost Solutions on an investigation of charges that some leaders mishandled the SBC’s response to abuse.
After the referral, Gaines went back to the microphone to oppose it, explaining, “Since they are the ones being investigated, they can’t be the ones in control of the investigation.” Messengers voted to overrule the Committee on Order of Business and debate Gaines’s motion on the floor.
The claims at issue came from leaked letters written by former Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore, and from a series of leaked audio clips later released by Phillip Bethancourt, former ERLC executive vice president.
Meeting prior to the business session, the full Executive Committee declined to discuss a motion from member Jared Wellman to expand the Guidepost investigation to include “all paid, appointed, or elected leaders or staff, previous or current, of the Executive Committee, Convention, and Convention entities.” Wellman’s motion also proposed the newly elected president of the SBC or his designee should appoint a task force separate from the Executive Committee that would receive Guidepost’s report prior to the Executive Committee and present it to the full SBC.
After Wellman’s motion was declined by the EC, Gaines tweeted that the motion he and fellow pastor Ronnie Parrott would bring to the convention would include much of the same language. Gaines’s motion asks the EC to “transfer oversight of the independent third-party review into the handling of sexual abuse to a task force appointed by the newly elected president of the SBC.”
The task force should be appointed within the next 30 days, the motion specifies, and the investigation should include actions and decisions of staff and members of the Executive Committee from January 1, 2000 to June 14, 2021, including actions of the Credentials Committee created in 2019 and tasked with investigating reports of churches mishandling abuse.
In a press conference after his election, Litton spoke in favor of a third-party investigation. “I think we also need to be very pastoral in how we handle victims, in how we hear them, how we empathize and sympathize with them,” he said. “We want to bring all this out and expose it to the light.”