Guidepost Solutions Report and the Future of the SBC

This is a special weekend edition of conversations with a Calvinist, and we're going to begin right now. Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey, and I am a Calvinist, and I am welcomed today by my new friend and fellow pastor, Daniel Kendall, and he is the pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Gainesville, Florida.

Hi, Daniel. Thank you for being on the program with me today. Hey, Keith. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. Yes, sir. And I want to give a little history as to why I asked you on the program today.

Why the SBC Abuse Report Matters

I have been, as many have been, watching the unfolding that is going on in the Southern Baptist Convention, specifically with the report that came out this week in regard to the abuses that have been hidden and are now coming to light, and I actually posted a request, if there was anyone who might be interested in coming on and talking with me about this particular issue, because I am not a Southern Baptist.

I sort of stand on the outside, but I do feel a kinship with the Southern Baptist Convention because, one, I went to a seminary. That is a Southern Baptist seminary. Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary defines themselves as a Southern Baptist institution, and I do feel connected to the historic Southern Baptist Church with men like John Broadus and James Pettigrew Boyce and Basil Manley, those men who were the founders, if you will, of the Southern Baptist Convention.

And so when I see what has been defined as the largest Protestant denomination in America, and I am not even sure that is fair to say because people sometimes argue it is not a denomination, but leaders within the group have called it the largest Protestant denomination in America.

When I see it struggling in the way that it is, it causes much pause in my heart and concern, and I know many other people have that as well. So for a moment, Daniel, what I'd like to ask you to do is just sort of tell us about yourself, about your church, a little bit about the history of where you're coming from and why you were willing to come on the program today.

I've been at Antioch since I was 23 years old. I don't know what they were thinking when they called me, but that's where God had me. I've been there 14 years. God has been very, very gracious. A little bit of the history of my personal history that also ties in the history of the church that ties into the subject.

As we were talking before we started recording, my uncle was actually on the list of names that was released this morning. I remember as a kid, before I even knew what pornography was or sex was or anything like that, my dad sitting down and telling us that our uncle was going to jail.

And as I've gotten older, I've learned more and more and more. He actually used his position as a pastor to molest a 15-year-old girl that he was counseling. And then from there went on to child pornography.

When he got out, went back to jail, got out, and he's actually in jail right now for child pornography. From there as a pastor, that's something that's always been an issue for me, just thinking of the pain that my cousins and my whole family went through.

So as a church, we are very, very vocal and outspoken concerning sexual abuse. And because of that, a substantial number of people have come to our church who have been sexually abused. Off the top of my head, I could probably almost get to 10 of our congregation that I personally know of have been abused.

Most of them is by family members, not by clergy. But a few years ago, a local Southern Baptist pastor molested a kid, ended up in the dissolution of the church. Right now, about a third of my congregation came from that church.

I've been dealing with this issue for years, and it's been one of those where we've been outspoken about it. And that's why a lot of those people who have been hurt from those situations, because of other church situations, have come to our church.

I mean, I focus on preaching the gospel, but part of the gospel is caring for the weak and abused, and they feel safe coming to our church because of the way we've been outspoken about this issue.

Amen. Well, it's a blessing to know that there are places where people can go and feel safe and feel like their story is not absolutely unique to them, where they feel like they can be loved and appreciated and not put in a place where nobody's going to talk to me or nobody's going to deal with me because I'm broken or I'm abused or I'm hurt.

I can tell you a really neat story that happened about two years ago along those exact lines. A family came to our church, and at the time, we were going over training for how to identify abuse, what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to handle that.

And the family had abuse within their home, and a couple of their kids had been abused by a family member. And when the young lady disclosed that, all the ladies in the church obviously gave her a hug.

They were just encouraging her, and she actually came to faith in Christ. And part of that is because Christians—and I use that term very loosely— at other churches, as soon as they heard of what had happened in their family, then they were the unclean.

We can't talk with them. We can't be around them. And it was just such a testimony to the good people of our church that the love of Christ is for broken people, and surrounding someone who is hurting and broken with the love of Christ brings wholeness, as opposed to the ostracizing, covering it up, et cetera, et cetera.

I sent you a video. Now, I know this isn't Southern Baptist, but I sent you a video, and you said you had seen it where a pastor announced that he had sinned, that he had committed the sin of adultery and had done so for many years.

And he was asking for forgiveness, and the church applauded him, which I found odd, but I get it. They're trying to show forgiveness. But then the young girl that he had abused stood up, and she said, It started when I was 15 or 14 or something.

And she says, Why don't you tell him the whole story? And he backpedaled, argued. She came up onto the chancel, tried to talk. And the church still surrounded him, still supported him, and sort of blackballed her.

And that was excruciating to my heart to see.

It made me furious, absolutely furious.

That the church would side with him. And there's a church in Jacksonville a few years ago where the pastor, it became known that he was a sexual offender with children, and so the church barred children.

Did you hear about that?

Oh, yeah. I have mentioned that in our congregation as, What's from the pits of hell? Yeah, exactly.

I mean, Jesus literally talked about a millstone and tying it around this person's neck, but we're going to keep him as the pastor, and we're going to make our church a child-free zone.

Yep. Put people in the parking lot to turn away families with kids. I think the exact phrase was so. It wouldn't violate his probation.

Wow. Wow. This is a brave new world. It's a sick world. It is sick world. It is. Absolutely. Well, when we talk about the situation regarding the Southern Baptist Convention, as I said before, not being a Southern Baptist, I am not privy to any of the inner conversations.

You are Southern Baptist. Your church is still part of the convention. That's correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay, so you would have more information than I do, but let me ask you this just to start out.

Has this been a conversation that's been ongoing for a while, or is this a surprise to you all as well, that this report?

Attorney-Client Privilege, the Executive Committee, and the SBC Structure

No, I think, I mean, we can get into the ins and outs of the whole report here in a little bit, but the reason for this report is because the average Southern Baptist, and we can talk about polity in a little bit to help people understand, the average Southern Baptist for the last 20 years has been saying, y 'all are hiding something.

Y 'all are hiding something. We want to address this. And no matter how much the person, the people in the pews and the regular pastors have been saying, this is a problem. We've got to fix it. There has been this appearance of indifference from people high up within the convention.

So this report stems from basically 20 years plus of your average Southern Baptist saying, guys, we've got to do something. And eventually, I mean, waiving attorney client privilege is insane. That's the nuclear option.

And about 90 of the people in the Southern Baptist convention, in terms of the average church members, pastors said, we want the nuclear option. We're tired of the stonewalling. We don't care what happens.

We want this fixed.

Now, I remember that partially because this was at the last, when was the meeting of the last, when was the last convention meeting? So it had been June of last year. Okay. And I remember that coming out about the waiving of attorney client privilege.

I didn't, I didn't quite understand everything that was going on, but what it seemed, correct me if I'm wrong, what it seemed to be was the convention members, the people who are supposed to decide what the executive committee does, the convention members were saying, we don't want you to be able to hide anything.

We don't want you to be able to have your privileged conversations with your lawyers. We want everything on record. And the executive committee went against the will of the people and said, no, we're going to maintain that attorney client privilege.

So let me back up and kind of explain the way the Southern Baptist Convention works. I think that would help people understand. Sure. Yes, please. Every Southern Baptist church is 100 an independent church.

So we're an independent Baptist church. So the Southern Baptist Convention is that we are of the conviction that we can do more for the kingdom of God if we link arms with like-minded brothers and sisters.

So what we do is we pool all of our resources so that we can train pastors and seminaries and send out missionaries and plant churches. So, you know, every Southern Baptist church down the road with 15 members, they support close to 4000 foreign missionaries because of the cooperative program.

So the convention only exists, so to speak, once a year. And that's in June when we have a meeting. And all of the authority is in the local church congregation, and each church can send what are known as messengers, and all the authority is vested in them.

What they say goes. There is not a top-down structure. So the day-to-day operations of the Southern Baptist Convention is run by the executive committee. The executive committee is a full-time staff, and the way the Southern Baptist Convention works with like seminaries, International Mission Board, all of that, is they have a trustee system.

And these trustees are representatives of the local churches to ensure that this, I think there's like 25, 26 people in the executive committee, that they run the day-to-day operations the way the committee members wanted to.

So when it came to the waiving of attorney-client privilege, that's insane. Nobody in their right mind does that. That is legal suicide. But the reason it got that way is because there was, within the executive committee, not necessarily the trustees, but the executive committee, a stonewalling that when we said, hey, we want to registry what we know of all the Baptist pastors who've molested people.

We can't do that. And it kept coming from the executive committee. So in that whole debate on attorney-client privilege, it really was the executive committee, not the trustees. So the committee would prepare the report for a trustee.

The trustee reads over the report, prays about it, thinks through it, comes and makes a decision. The trustees for the executive committee were done a disservice by the executive committee itself. They did not, even though they had several months, to come up with an option that would be legally protected, that would work through all those things.

They just basically told, and what I'm saying is kind of a summary, but they dumped on the trustees literally day before over 100 pages to read and said, we can't waive attorney-client privilege and expected them to make a vote right then and there against the will of the churches who had sent them that they were representatives of.

So that's where the whole fiasco of, are we going to do it? Are we not going to do it? Are we going to do it? Not going to do it. But it ended up being very good because what we found out on the report is a lot of the people who were against waiving attorney-client privilege, there was a reason.

And it's because they were going to be named for covering up all of the abuse, stonewalling, et cetera. And so when attorney-client privilege was waived, a substantial number of people resigned. So now that the report's out, the report's largely dealing with people that have no position in the Southern Baptist Convention anymore.

There's literally nobody to fire. They all resigned or quit for the most part.

Okay. Well, that paints a little different picture, and it puts it in a different light because now we're thinking when we get to the question of where do we go from here, is there anybody to punish? And is punishment necessary?

Does it need to happen?

So those are the questions. Those are real questions. But like I said, largely almost everybody that was named, with one exception, he resigned the week before the report came out. Almost all of them had either retired or resigned or quit or whatever before the report came out.

So the report is detailing and naming names of people. Like, for example, the lawyer for the convention that advised the executive committee, he was behind a lot of the, well, we can't do this because of ascending liability.

You waive attorney-client privilege, you find that out. But as soon as attorney-client privilege was waived, he says, we're not going to serve the convention anymore. So you have to go get a new lawyer.

And I get the argument that he was making because as a lawyer, your job is to protect your client from lawsuits. We're pastors. We're Christians. Our job is to protect people who are being abused. Who cares about the lawsuits?

Now, the lawsuits, we want to try to avoid those. But if you do what's right and you punish and you turn over and you fire and you turn it over to police, let the police investigate, you don't have to worry as much about lawsuits because you did what's right.

If you do background checks, if you don't put people in positions, if you don't hire pedophiles, that's the way you protect yourself. Yeah, absolutely.

Catholic Abuse Scandals and the Difference in Baptist Polity

And that brings up another quick thought. And I want you to sort of give me your bird's eye view comparison. I know that somebody like me looking at this from the outside, I would say, you know, I remember about 20 years ago or so, there was a major scandal that came out within the Roman Catholic Church that priests were molesting children specifically, and that instead of the church doing something about it, they would move that priest to another diocese or something.

And therefore, a lot of people, a lot of Protestants specifically, oh, look at there. That's an example. Catholics don't have a right understanding of the church anyway. They don't have a right understanding of the gospel.

And here they are showing their devilish side. I mean, I heard all kinds of stuff. People saying here they're showing their demonic side. And it shows itself in expressions of child molestation. But then we come back and we say, okay, but as Baptists, we believe we have the gospel.

We believe that we have at least a biblical understanding of church structure. But even though I know some of our friends and maybe the Lutherans and Presbyterians might disagree with our structure of congregational polity, we at least would say we believe we have a biblical church structure.

We believe we have the biblical gospel. And yet it's now at our door. Do you think that there is any similarities between what happened in Rome or with the Roman Catholics and what has happened?

Yes and yes and no. The similarity is wherever you have children and vulnerable people, perverts and abusers are going to be attracted. If you look at the statistics with the public school system in the United States, the Roman Catholic Church does not even compare to the amount of child abuse that is taking place in the public school system.

It is not even close. The public school system blows them all out of the water. I was not aware of that. I mean, it's that bad. Yes. I mean, so what you have, though, is everybody views it as the religion causes the action.

Whereas if you have a teacher who molest students or you have there's been a big in the news that you have a lot of female teachers that are attractive being with, you know, 14 year old boys and stuff like that.

Oh, yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, I didn't even really think about that. But, yeah, you view that as a rogue teacher. You don't view that as the entire system being corrupt. So wherever you have kids and vulnerable people, you're going to attract abusers.

Beyond that, there's a massive difference with the Catholic Church and what happened in the Southern Baptist Convention. And it's this the Catholic Church. You have folks, bishops, archbishops, all of that who move the priests.

If a Southern Baptist Church fires a pedophile, calls the police and has them turned in, the Southern Baptist Church across the country is a completely autonomous, independent organization. And if that pedophile, after he gets out of jail, puts out his resume, it's up to that congregation to do their due diligence.

Now, would I track down if we fired a guy who was a pedophile or we kicked someone out of the church who was a pedophile? Man, I would contact the next church he goes to and say, hey, you don't want this guy in your church or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

Like to me, but that's that's that's on me as an individual. So you have that where you have the churches that would fire the guy, turn him in. And if you look through the list of the names that was released, a substantial number of them, the list that was released this morning, it's like 200 pages of people, not necessarily pastors, but pastors, deacons.

There were some women on the list, some people who had molested people in nursing homes. But if you look at it, a substantial number of them were on that list because they had been arrested. They were on the news.

They had been convicted, et cetera. What you have is you have a couple of congregations who, for whatever reason, you got a public committee. They don't understand anything other than asking a couple of questions.

I mean, and so you have somebody come in, you call all the people that are on his resume. It's up to you when you put on your resume where you can tell them what you got fired from your last church. You know, like if you're going to put names for references down, you're not going to put people down who know you're a pedophile.

So unless that church searches to find out his criminal record, especially when you're going across states. I mean, I don't know how to find out what took place in Nevada. I don't know how to search their legal system.

Then you have it where the church may innocently think that they are hiring a charismatic, great, godly man.

And by charismatic, you don't mean like speaking about a personality.

Yes. The way the way they have access to children is because they're very trustworthy. They're very friendly, personable, et cetera. Absolutely. So that's that's the difference. It was not someone high up saying, oh, no, he's a pedophile.

But we want to have access to kids. Let's move in. It was an individual church firing somebody. And then he, on his own, goes to a church up the road. Now, there were a couple of bigger name people back in like the, I don't know, early 2000s that had somebody that they recommended.

But they weren't privy at the time to all the information. Some of them were mishandled the abuse and recommended them. But that was in a pastoral level. That was never in the executive level, because there is no there's no ordaining council for the Southern Baptist Convention.

You're ordained by the local church. So the Southern Baptist Convention can't certify a preacher, can't revoke his ordination. They can't do any of that. That's all in the local church level. So the way the scandal came out was local church individuals would know, hey, this guy molested me.

And now he's a music minister at another church. They would call the church and the church would roll their eyes as, you know, you know, they go ask him, oh, it's just a rumor. Those people, you know, you have Satan tries to destroy us.

And they believe it because of him being personable and trustworthy and all those things. So the survivors would then call the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, be like, guys, you got a church that hired a pedophile.

How can you take money from that church and give it to missions? And that's where everything stonewalled was within the executive committee. There was about two people that, you know, the weakest link in the chain that stonewalled everything.

And that's where the churches kept saying, guys, we got a problem. We can't have another Southern Baptist church hiring a convicted pedophile for their youth pastor. You just can't do that. We don't want to receive their funds.

We don't want their missionaries. You know, we don't want anything to do with them if they're going to hire abusers. And then the response. So they would refer to the executive committee. You know, you look through our bylaws and you figure out something that can be done.

So next year comes around. We look through our bylaws. There's nothing we can do about it.

Does that make sense? Yeah, no, absolutely. And it begins to to make me ask the question. And maybe maybe it's a good question. Maybe it's a bad question. But it kind of makes me begin to wonder, well, what is the level of guilt then that is really to be laid on them?

If they really wasn't anything they could do.

So there is things they can do. And that's the whole thing. So, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention has been asking for like, I don't know, maybe even since the 90s, a guy by the name of Wade Burleson put forth a motion to have a public database of Southern Baptist pastors that have been convicted.

So like so you have that doesn't that didn't exist until this report.

It existed in private and the people who had it privately publicly said we can't do one that's not feasible. The report that was released today is the private database that they held for 20 years or 12 years or however many years when they started doing it.

While completely telling us we can't do it. So that's that's where the guys this is feasible. This is feasible. This is feasible. Like, why can't we just have a Web site where when this Southern Baptist pastor gets arrested and fired that the members of that church can call.

Now, if a local congregation doesn't want to look in that database, that means local congregations that don't even use the sex offender registry, you know, that's on them. But then at least we as a collective body have done what we are able to do with the authority we have, which is literally no authority over other independent congregations.

I can't help.

I just came to my mind this the important question. Is there a database that has all Southern Baptist or ordained pastors in it, is that does that even exist. No, not really, because.

There's probably a database that is close, you know. So, for example, there's a being part of the Southern Baptist Convention. They do things with insurance and retirements. So you probably get some of that there.

But like if we when we ordained our elders. We didn't tell the Southern Baptist Convention. Sure. Yeah. That's a good business. It's a good point. They can't tell us no. They can't tell us yes. They don't certify them.

If we as a local congregation believe that they're qualified, we ordain them.

Yeah, that's interesting, because when I was when I was ordained, I was ordained by the church, the church that I was serving in. And that's biblical. Yeah. And, you know, I was told because at a certain point I did get a job offer to go to a Southern Baptist church.

I didn't go by God's grace. I'm still where I am. But I got a job offer to go to a Southern Baptist church, but I was told I would have to be reordained in that church, which I thought was I was willing because it didn't matter to me.

But but I didn't know if that meant that put me into a registry or maybe that was just that church's rule that you had to be.

If you had somebody that was. Ordained a Catholic priest. Yeah. And they wanted to come serve as an elder in your church. You go, OK, well, we need to go over, like, yeah, redo it. And so when it comes to the Southern Baptist Convention, we have different beliefs than some fundamentalist independent Baptist.

We have different beliefs and say Church of God, Assembly of God. And if a local congregation that's Church of God says you're qualified. I don't know that we as a church are comfortable with the Church of God enough that we would recognize that without doing our own due diligence, in which case when we did our due diligence, we ordained.

But there is no if there is a database, it's an unofficial. Because of that, you have your retirement with guidance.

And what's interesting, you mentioned the elders. That's true, because not all Southern Baptist churches have distinguished elders. And some would distinguish between whether they're elders or pastors, like in our church, our elders or pastors, our pastors or elders.

There's three men. They're all ordained. Yeah.

And that's part of the issue is because we are independent. We are autonomous. The Southern Baptist Convention has zero say so on anything we do. And any reporting we do to the Southern Baptist Convention is entirely voluntary on our part.

Now, this is where some of the issues came up with the report and some of the things, the issues the church were pushing to is that is a two way street. The Southern Baptist Convention is entirely autonomous and gets to choose its members.

And they have the ability to the same way you can remove someone from your church from your discipline and say, you know, you're not a part of the body anymore. The Southern Baptist Convention has the same autonomy.

You know, and that was part of the issue is, you know, the Houston Chronicle report named 10 churches. And so there was a push. OK, let's let's remove these 10 churches. If they have a pedophile in the pulpit, then they can do they can keep having them in the pulpit.

That's between them and God. But we don't want their money. We don't want them bearing our name. We don't want that. You know, to me, the Catholics, I disagree with Catholicism, but I have no authority over them.

That being said, if a Roman Catholic wanted to join my church, they're going to have to become Protestant. They're going to have to, you know, believe in like.

We have to affirm what you what you teach. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of the issue there. I remember a few years ago listening to Al Mohler on the dividing line, him mentioning that there was a church that had ordained or was supporting homosexuality and that the church at the Southern Baptist Convention removed them.

And that was like a big deal because they were saying, well, you were supposed to be autonomous. They would basically do what we want, but there was still a line.

Yeah, and that's the thing, and that was part of the issue that a lot of people raised. Russell Moore, in response to this, wrote something really bring it out like. And this is one of things actually in the report.

How fast the Southern Baptist Convention acted when a church ordained a lesbian versus what they didn't do when a church hired a convicted pedophile and gave them unrestricted access to kids. Oh, wow.

And that was the issue that people like myself, the regular Southern Baptist pastor church members like, guys, this is nuts. This is crazy. If you can kick them out of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is, again, kicking them out.

Like, if we got kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention, it literally changes nothing about our church. Yeah, we just give our money elsewhere. But like, if you can do that when a church and you can do it so fast, why can't you do it when like the video you showed, which wasn't Southern Baptist.

Like. If that video was of a Southern Baptist church, I would fully expect that church to be kicked out of the Southern Baptist. This fellowship is what the term they use. Yeah. Not friendly cooperation immediately.

Yeah. And they will for different things. But over this issue, for whatever reason, which we found in the report, the reasons they drug their feet on.

And you would think this would be the reason. I mean, like, if there's a reason for a church not to be welcome, that would be that they are supporting a pastor or pastors who are abusing people. Exactly.

And that's what you think is what the vast majority of Southern Baptists think. That's why, I mean, again, waiving attorney client privilege is insane. That's a nuclear option. Why do you think about 90 percent, maybe 95 percent was a voice vote?

Why do you think the overwhelming number of Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Convention last year said do it? Because we don't want pedophiles and pulpits associated with us. Yeah. We want nothing to do with that.

And the fact that it was getting stonewalled and taking so long, we're going, OK, there's a problem somewhere. Somebody's hiding something. We want to know what it is. We want the person gone. We want to deal with it because this is ridiculous.

Absolutely. And that may be the quote of the show right there. We don't want pedophiles and pulpits associated with us. I mean, how simple is that? I mean, it's like, why are we even having this conversation in the sense of this should be a no-brainer?

And that was the whole frustrating thing with the whole Southern Baptist Convention. And this gets into a whole bunch of other politics and other nonsense. But that was where the frustration, I mean, for an entity to waive attorney client privilege, you're basically putting up a billboard saying, please come sue us and take everything we have.

Like, that's what you're doing. And the fact that the vast majority of Southern Baptists said, put up the billboard. Because honestly, if it's my kid, I would rather you sue me and take everything I have and leave my kids alone.

You know, like, if it's my wife, sue me, take everything, but don't touch my wife. You know, and I think that's the mentality that the average Southern Baptist has. And so when you begin to look at these entities and what was discovered in the report is it really was two or three people that were the weak link in the chain that derailed the whole thing.

Now, were you actually at, do you go to the convention as a representative? I go to the Florida Baptist Convention.

We were talking before the show about, you know, I tell everybody, you know, we're Southern Baptists with our hand on the door. And that's because we're Christians. We follow Christ. We're an independent congregation.

If the majority of the Southern Baptist Convention, if they vote to renounce Christ, we're gone. You know, anything that we can't live with. That being said, what I see out of this report is I see a willingness of the vast majority of Southern Baptists to do whatever it takes to make our churches safe for children, for women, for the disabled, for the weak.

And if that's what they're doing, then I want to go full bore in. Now, this is a report that is not actionable yet. What actions take place? We may find out that there was just a bunch of talk and no action, in which case we're out.

But if they want to, if they want to address this issue, how can we as Christians not say we're 100 behind that?

You know, like that's our duty. You know, and I think we have failed. We need to move forward and do something. We need to reconcile.

We need to repent. We need to acknowledge the truth. And that was part of the things the messengers wanted, is they wanted the untouched report released publicly. The reason you do that is because we want the truth.

We want to repent. We want to confess. We want to acknowledge. We want to make it right. And that was the demand of the messengers is we don't want the executive committee going through this report and tell us, no, we want the full thing.

Give us all the footnotes. Give us all the emails.

Give us everything. Now, I have seen I have several friends on Facebook and in real life who are in the Southern Baptist Convention. Some of them, many of them pastors, and I've seen at least a couple of them who have made the point of giving a public response to the report.

And what I have seen is their response is, well, it usually starts with grieving over what has happened and those things, but then assuring their people that this is not how we do. We do thorough background checks, and we make sure our children are cared for appropriately, and any act of abuse is brought to the proper authorities immediately.

All that sounds good to me. Do you think every church should be doing that? Are you guys putting out something like that, or is that something you felt the need to do?

Reporting Abuse, Romans 13, and Church Discipline

So, we have never released a public statement or anything. The elders have worked on one from years ago that is more going to be part of membership classes type stuff. But our approach to this issue has been to be so upfront and open and honest with it that if you have nefarious purposes, you won't even want to visit our church.

The Southern Baptist Convention did a curriculum on caring well for the abused, and it was for church leaders. I took the entire congregation, including kids, through it because it's not just going to be the elders know this material.

I want kids to know what's inappropriate. I want them to understand. I want everyone to understand. In all honesty, we excommunicated someone because they didn't report child abuse. Now, there was more to it, but that was the beginning of it.

We don't play. We're not doing that. When it comes to excommunication, there's a lot more to it than that. But in essence, for those who are not familiar with church discipline, at the end of the excommunication is you are not my brother in Christ.