I grew up in a Baptist General Conference (now Converge International) congregation and graduated from their college (Bethel, St. Paul, MN). Though my professional life crossed paths fairly often with Southern Baptist Convention folk, I was never part of one of their congregations. I have been much more diverse since my college days, serving congregations that were non-denominational, Presbyterian (USA), and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). I had a sabbatical in a Roman Catholic community (L’Arche Daybreak) and three of my spiritual directors were Catholic priests. So while I am not a Southern Baptist insider, I write from my identification with the whole body of Christ – the Church.
I
saw the news about the report on clergy sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist
Convention before worship yesterday morning (May 22, 2022). Any who have been
watching this unfold in recent years are not surprised. I am sure many Southern Baptist pastors and
congregations were aware as they gathered for worship yesterday. How many went
on with business as usual without acknowledging their storm? How many scrapped
what had been planned to address what had to be on people’s minds? My thought
is that lament would be the only appropriate response. I can barely imagine the
pain as congregations gathered and pastors prayed with groans too deep for
words (Romans 8:26-27) for some word to speak into the unspeakable. I think
easy repentance is premature. This is a time for John the Baptist’s words in
Matthew 3:8 and Luke 3:8. “Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”
Though
I am not identified as a Southern Baptist or a Roman Catholic, I have more
experience with clergy sexual misconduct among colleagues, some of them
friends, than I wish. This has not made me an expert by any means, only fully
engaged in a community of lament. In some of these I did not have the luxury of
observing from a distance but was personally engaged from first intervention to
usually unsatisfactory resolution. Though I don’t believe I ever engaged in
inappropriate behavior or language (I regularly and fervently pray Psalm 19:12 for
myself. “Who can detect their errors? Clear me from hidden faults.”) I
know without God’s protection and regular spiritual accountability, I am as
vulnerable as anyone, if not this then something else. Yet, those personal
experiences wounded me deeply, and I still bear the scars. That may be why I am
feeling my lament for my Southern Baptist spiritual kin so acutely today. After
I retired I attempted to process how I was affected by those wounds and scars
in an unpublished novel, Standing Outside
the Door, 2018). Every time something like this happens, I am aware my
scars are not fully healed.
As
I started my lectio divina for the
new week, I was confronted by this in Jesus’ prayer in the lectionary Gospel
for next Sunday. “May (they) all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in
you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have
sent me. … I in them and you in me, that they may become
completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved
them even as you have loved me.” In a sense different than Jesus’
intention, the world does see all of us who claim to follow Jesus as one when
such scandals become public. Whether Protestant or Catholic, such flagrant
violations of Christlikeness associated with all of us who bear the name of
Christ. Even worse, our institutions devote themselves to systemic
self-protection at the expense and further wounding of the victims. So how can
we expect Jesus’ prayer to be answered that the world would know that the
Father has sent him.
Then
in my Psalm prayers this morning, I came to Psalm 53 (just a curious aside; it
is identical to Psalm 14). Verse 4 gave expression to my painful outrage, not
just at the Southern Baptist Convention (no one has any room for gloating) but
at how much sexual misconduct among clergy and church and Christian leaders has
been relentlessly in the public eye. “Have they no knowledge, those evildoers,
who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon God?”
