Lament for the People of the Southern Baptist Convention

         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?”