A five-step program to combat sexual abuse in churches will roll out in June during the Southern Baptist Convention’s Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. Essentials: Sexual Abuse Prevention and Response revolves around five key words: train, screen, protect, report, and care.
“The desire and goal of this toolbox is to make every church the safest place on planet earth for every child, student and adult who comes to a church,” the document says. “To make our churches safe from abuse, we must be proactive.”
IBSA Associate Executive Director Mark Emerson has been engaged with the national SBC in developing strategies to combat sexual abuse and to improve screen and training of volunteers. “The SBC Essentials curriculum and strategy is a good addition to what we are already doing,” Emerson said. IBSA urged screening and training volunteers prior to the 2018 reports on abuse in churches, and has continued to improve its offerings to churches since that time.
Brad Eubank, senior pastor of Mississippi’s Petal First Baptist Church and an abuse survivor himself, has been working for two years with the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force. “Our real heart is to hit normal size churches, of 100 or less, give them something a little easier to grasp, more basic, if you will,” Eubank said. “If Caring Well and Church Cares are 3.0 programs, we tried to make (the new program) a 1.0.”
Giving churches a program that is easier to grasp and implement may help toward the goal of reaching some 15,000 SBC churches that currently have no program to weed out potential sexual abusers.
Currently, Eubank noted, as many as 75% of SBC churches have no programs to screen potential abusers and care for those who have already been abused. “We want to target them with those resources that are very easy to access,” Eubank said. “Everything is free. The training is around the five words. It is video training where they can gather five people for five months to do these five principles. Any church of any size can do this.”
The toolbox is at SBCabuseprevention.com.