The extent of misconduct is further complicated by work within the Southern Baptist Convention to move sex offenders to other communities and resist attempts to address the culture of abuse.
The report by the Chronicle and Express-News said that at least ten Southern Baptist churches welcomed pastors, ministers and volunteers who had been charged with sexual misconduct, many of whom were registered sex offenders.
Pastors Leslie Mason, Michael Lee Jones and Joseph S. Ratliff all continued to work as religious figures after allegations of sexual misconduct.
[1] Darrell Gilyard, who received multiple allegations of sexual assault, served three years in prison for child molestation before returning to the pulpit at Christ Tabernacle Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida.
[2] Mark Aderholt was credibly accused of sexually assaulting sixteen-year-old Anne Marie Miller when he was a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
[3] In 2016, he took an executive position at the South Carolina Southern Baptist Convention where he resigned[4] shortly after he was arrested on four felony counts of sexual abuse.
[6] Paul Pressler, former vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, was accused by Toby Twining and Brooks Schott of sexual misconduct in separate court affidavits.
[9] In the 2018 Chronicle report, Toby Twining was a teenager in 1977 when Pressler grabbed his penis in a sauna at Houston's River Oaks Country Club.
[1][12] On May 22, 2022; Johnny Hunt, the longtime pastor of First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Georgia; a former Southern Baptist Convention president who was serving as a member of the North American Mission Board, resigned from the North American Mission Board after the Guidepost report on sexual abuse in the SBC included an allegation that Hunt had sexually assaulted the wife of another pastor in 2010.
[13] Some survivors of sexual assault were asked to get abortions for children that were conceived during encounters with clergy, a policy that runs contrary to established Baptist dogma on the issue.
[18] In response to Brown's request, Wade Burleson, a prominent Southern Baptist leader in Oklahoma called for a database of sexual predators within the denomination multiple times.
"[1] One of the key internal issues that the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention point to in their inability to address allegations of sexual misconduct is the principle of local church autonomy.
[1] “It’s a porous sieve of a denomination,” said Christa Brown,[25] who was one of the most vocal advocates for a database, repeatedly spelling out how it could deter predators without sacrificing local church autonomy.
Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, called the move a "defining moment".
[27] Ronnie Floyd, president of the SBC's executive committee, echoed Greear's remarks, describing the vote as "a very, very significant moment in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention.
It also listed the named cases that involved the admission, confession, guilty plea, conviction, judgement, sentencing and registered sex offenders.
J. D. Greear, then president of the convention, described the abuses as "pure evil" and called for "pervasive change" within the denomination, including cooperation with local authorities on investigations and support for survivors.