Southern Baptists’ Nuanced Divides on Display at Annual Meeting

Kate Shellnutt in Indianapolis

From a wider slate of six candidates, president Clint Pressley takes the “strange honor” of leading the convention’s growing factions toward missional unity.

Clint Pressley, newly elected Southern Baptist Convention president

Sonya Singh / Baptist Press

In the weeks before the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting, newly elected president Clint Pressley finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s book on precision bombing in World War II, Erik Larson’s bestseller set in the lead-up to the Civil War, and a history of a 19th-century mutiny on a Royal Navy vessel.

A few years ago, these stories could have been a metaphor for the convention. Back then, an even more conservative wing had emerged with literal pirate flags and a rallying cry of “take the ship,” and the previous few presidential races pitted a Conservative Baptist Network (CBN) candidate against a more traditionalist nominee.

But the 2024 slate wasn’t split between two factions. Southern Baptists decided among six presidential candidates and took a historic three rounds of voting to elect Pressley—a sign of the ranging positions and priorities among the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

Pressley, a sharp-dressed 55-year-old North Carolina pastor, steps into the presidential role knowing the challenge of finding consensus among today’s Southern Baptist leaders from autonomous churches, who sometimes clash with each other on ministry styles, theology, or the work of the convention—and whose clashes are increasingly on display online.

He didn’t refer to the presidency as a battle to win but as a chance to dampen divisions and bring unity.

“As a convention, we want to be unified around not only our understanding of the Bible and love for the Bible, love for the gospel, and love for the mission. We’re unified around the Baptist Faith and Message that we affirm,” Pressley said. “There’s a lot that we can really be glad of.”

The biggest piece of business for Southern Baptists this year was a proposal to add a constitutional requirement that SBC churches name only men as “any kind of pastor.” A majority were in favor—61 percent—but the vote fell short of the two-thirds threshold needed to add it to the SBC’s governing document.

While Southern Baptists remain complementarian, they’ve taken nuanced positions on this particular move to restate their position in their constitution. They disagreed on whether to support the amendment, the rationale for doing so, and the importance of the vote at all.

Arguments for and against swirled online in recent months and at auxiliary events during the week of the annual meeting itself, held by groups like the Center for Baptist Leadership, The Danbury Institute, Founders Ministries, Baptist21, 9Marks, and The Baptist Review.

Jared Cornutt, a founder of The Baptist Review, said these networks can be helpful for fellowship and friendship within the convention. But they also risk fostering an echo chamber or a sense of tribalism.

“There are so many groups,” said Cornutt, who pastors a church in Birmingham. “We’re really seeing how diverse and divided we are.”

Pressley, lead pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church outside Charlotte and a council member for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, had taken a stance in favor of the amendment, saying it “makes sense” with what he sees the Bible and the Baptist Faith and Message affirm about ministry roles.

But he also saw it as a move for clarity, not a response to a significant egalitarian presence in the SBC. Before the vote, Pressley said that, either way, “we’re going to have to be OK … and keep moving forward with the mission and what we do as a complementarian convention.”

The convention has held to that stance for affiliated churches without an explicit mention in the constitution. Last year, the SBC deemed Saddleback Church “not in friendly cooperation” with the convention over its female preaching pastors; this year, it did the same for a Virginia church that espoused egalitarian beliefs.

The SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission was applauded for its work on behalf of life and religious liberty, even though a failed motion to dissolve the entity garnered votes from a sizable minority.

From the convention stage and in related events, leaders acknowledged the disagreements among Southern Baptists but urged them to recognize their shared beliefs in Scripture, complementarianism, and evangelization, especially against a society moving further away from those convictions.

“Your enemy is not in this room,” charged pastor Dean Inserra in the convention sermon, lamenting that denominational infighting can hinder their gospel work.

Pressley has a solid conservative background and a history of involvement in Southern Baptist life. He was elected as the first vice president of the convention a decade ago, serving alongside former president Ronnie Floyd.

He currently holds a position on the board of trustees for The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—Pressley said its president, Albert Mohler, would be his first call in a time of crisis. He is pursuing a doctorate from Southern and holds a master’s from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Fellow North Carolina pastor Chris Justice, who nominated Pressley, said he “operates with a joyful orthodoxy, which will be a blessing for the SBC.”

Pressley came to faith as a teen and attended Hickory Grove before going on to serve on staff. After pastoring churches in Mississippi and Alabama, he returned as Hickory Grove’s senior pastor in 2010.

His church recently reported a volunteer to police over abuse allegations and disclosed the situation to the congregation. This week, he thanked the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force for its resources on addressing abuse. “We would not have known what to do had this not come up. So there’s some very real and tangible results that have already happened.”

Speaking after the annual meeting concluded on Wednesday evening, Pressley said it was a “strange honor” to have won the election, but “with all that’s going on in our convention,” he felt like now was his time to run.

“Part of the president’s job,” he said, “is to do all you can by way of influence to make sure that, as a convention of churches, we are focused on what our mission is.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt in Indianapolis

News

Why Does Southern Baptist Abuse Reform Keep Hitting Hurdles?

Kate Shellnutt in Indianapolis

Leaders and advocates are grateful for the convention’s support but frustrated at the inability to enact their plans.

Josh Wester and members of the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force

Sonya Singh / Baptist Press

Jules Woodson remembers the spark of hope she felt when a sea of yellow ballots went up across the hall at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in 2022. The vote in favor of abuse reform following a watershed abuse investigation was her sign that the messengers cared about victims like her and were willing to listen and make changes.

At this year’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, the recommendations on abuse reform passed again, with another wave of thousands of ballots, but she teared up for a different reason: disappointment over how little had been done.

SBC entities have pledged millions to fund the cause. The convention has repeatedly voted in favor of abuse prevention and response efforts by overwhelming margins. Task forces appointed by the convention president have volunteered their time to develop training resources, a database of abusive pastors, and an office to oversee the ongoing work of abuse reform.

“For messengers for whom abuse isn’t on the forefront of their minds, they think, Oh, we’re doing good,” said Woodson, whose testimony of abuse by her Texas youth pastor launched the #ChurchToo and #SBCToo movements six years ago. “But there’s so much more to be done.”

The abuse victims and advocates calling for reform in the SBC are now watching Southern Baptist leaders within the convention try to navigate the kinds of denominational hurdles and roadblocks they faced for years from the outside.

“We’ve been told over and over again, You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” said Mike Keahbone, a candidate for SBC president who serves on the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF). “You have to ask yourself, Why in the world are we being fought so hard on this issue? … Either you don’t really think there’s a problem or you’ve got something to hide.”

On Tuesday, the task force celebrated a new curriculum to help SBC churches respond to abuse, but the long-awaited database remains empty, and there’s no “permanent home” to oversee abuse reform once their work expires this week.

The messengers in Indianapolis voted to affirm those priorities and to pass the work of the task force onto the Executive Committee, the body that handles SBC business outside of the annual meeting, and its new president, Jeff Iorg.

“Abuse response and prevention efforts grow as we raise awareness, and so I’m thankful to see the excellent work done on the essentials curriculum,” said Keith Myer, a Maryland pastor who has spoken up for the cause, in a statement to CT.

“I’m concerned that a set of relatively simple components in an entire protection system feel controversial and unachievable. A database makes sense and solves the problem of communicating about bad actors across our 50,000 churches. A permanent home for abuse gives churches and pastors someone to talk to when they encounter a crisis, and solves the problem of finding help when they don’t know what to do.”

ARITF chair Josh Wester explained that they learned in January that insurance liability concerns prevented significant, robust reform efforts—including the database—from being hosted by the convention itself. After the task force suggested forming a new nonprofit to launch the database independently, they no longer had access to their funding. The entity heads who offered $3 million said it couldn’t be used outside the SBC.

Wester, a pastor from North Carolina, said the task force did all they could and that members were “beyond frustrated” to not present the database they had readied with over 100 names before hitting hurdles within the SBC. “You only have the means to take the steps you can pay for,” he told reporters. “It has been a real struggle for us.”

The task force has raised $75,000 on their own to fund the independent Abuse Reform Commission. They’re confident the Executive Committee won’t let the database website go empty for another year, and some survivors feel particularly hopeful about Iorg’s leadership. He steps into the role after serving as president of the SBC’s Gateway Seminary in California and has voiced a commitment to help.

Those pushing for reform knew the process would be slow—but it still feels discouraging that even the basic things and first steps they’d laid out aren’t happening yet.

Grant Gaines, a pastor from Tennessee, is concerned about losing the significance of the moment as implementation continues to get delayed.

“The survivors told us from the beginning this is going to be hard and to expect roadblocks, even from people you like and trust,” said Gaines, who put forward the 2021 motion calling for an investigation into the Executive Committee’s abuse response.

The concerns over liability and funding that the ARITF came up against over the past two years reflect some ongoing reservations about the convention’s attempt to address abuse—particularly as the dollar amounts continue to add up.

From the stage, Wester had to repeat clarifications that the abuse reform efforts don’t interfere with church autonomy and that abuse does not have to be widespread for the convention to improve its response.

“When it comes to sexual abuse, the problem for the Southern Baptist Convention was never that we had abuse occurring at wildly disproportionate rates or that our convention was shot through with abusers,” he told the messengers. “Instead, the problem that we faced is grappling with the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention, having more than 10 million members and nearly 50,000 churches, as America’s largest Protestant body, had no meaningful plan to help its churches prevent or respond to sexual abuse.”

Motions made to only hire legal counsel that reflect the convention’s values, or to launch an inquiry to tally the total spent on conducting an investigation into its abuse response, indicate that a faction within the SBC still holds a lingering sense of regret over the fallout of the 2022 Guidepost Solutions report.

Iorg mentioned that they’ve paid at least $2 million just to cover indemnity costs after two people named in the report sued (former SBC president Johnny Hunt and former seminary professor David Sills).

“We have to equip the shepherds to protect the sheep from the wolves. It can be done—it can be done within polity, it can be done well. And for a variety of reasons, it kept getting pushed off and people continued to get hurt,” said Bruce Frank, former head of the initial Sexual Abuse Task Force and a pastor in North Carolina. “Is $2 million a lot of money? Yes, it is—but it is nowhere near what it has cost survivors.”

Task force members and advocates are grateful to see the continued support for their efforts from the convention floor—but frustrated that the enthusiasm from Southern Baptists at the meeting hasn’t overridden the challenges that emerge when trying to enact change at the convention level.

Survivors decried entity leaders’ legal involvement with a Kentucky amicus brief last year that would limit their liability in sexual abuse claims, and a motion from the floor called for the SBC to censure convention president Bart Barber, Southern Seminary president Albert Mohler, and Lifeway president Ben Mandrell for approving the brief. The messengers voted it out of order on Wednesday morning.

Entities within the SBC have also been the subject of a Department of Justice investigation that began nearly two years ago and issued its first indictment last month.

Frank and Keahbone, both candidates who had been involved in abuse reform efforts, did not make the runoffs in the presidential race this year. In a forum on Monday night, Keahbone referenced people “stepping in our way” and “working purposely on the sides to make sure [the database] doesn’t happen.”

Gaines asked the task force if they would reveal who is responsible for obstructing their work and how, but so far those involved have not named names. In remarks to the media, Wester said he did not want to further “compound the problem by going into too much detail.”

Two years ago, International Mission Board president Paul Chitwood, North American Mission Board president Kevin Ezell, and Send Relief president Bryant Wright had offered $3 million from Send Relief’s undesignated funds to pay for the SBC’s sexual abuse reform programs. A spokesman for Send Relief told CT that its leaders have “not rejected any requests for funding that fall within the original intent of its commitment.”

“Send Relief is fully committed to the careful stewardship of the funds for sexual abuse prevention and response efforts within the SBC, in collaboration with the Executive Committee,” the statement said. “Currently the [Abuse Reform Commmission] is outside the structure of the SBC.”

Myer worries that confusion about the funding decisions could damage the sense of trust needed for broader cooperative efforts around the issue to be effective.

“When trust fails, you lose partners and resources,” he said. “If we can’t sort out something easy like saying, It is critical that we protect children and adults from being abused by wolves, how will we move on to more complicated matters?”

- More from Kate Shellnutt in Indianapolis

Books

Review

Kids Aren’t Cheap. That Doesn’t Fully Explain Why We’re Ambivalent About Having Them.

Bonnie Kristian

A new book explores why what was once a default life stage now feels like an increasingly fraught choice.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

In a recent Guardian article about “America’s premier pronatalists,” the journalist mentions her own assumption that “the main thing that [makes having kids] hard [is] that it’s now so incredibly expensive to raise children.”

What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice

Anastasia Berg (Author), Rachel Wiseman (Author)

336 pages

$20.77

“No,” the father of the profiled family replies. “Not at all”—and in a significant sense, I think he’s right. So do Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, authors of the newly released What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice.

That’s not to say Berg and Wiseman (or I) would ever be dismissive of the real financial hardships many would-be parents face. On the contrary, they devote the first of the book’s four long chapters to a sober examination of such “externals.”

But the delight of the book is that they do not stop there. Berg and Wiseman equally reject the assumption—seen in many lesser entries in the kids conversation—that the externals are the whole of the matter, that all this ambivalence would melt away with just the right package of policies to extend parental leave and make childcare affordable.

It wouldn’t, and What are Children For? is a welcome complication of that simplistic account. As the title signals, Berg and Wiseman aim to deliver a sharp cultural and philosophical analysis, giving rigorous but sympathetic examination to a “world that is both pro- and anti-natalist.” Though they embrace at the last moment a major claim they seem to resist throughout the text, their project succeeds.

A sea of options

Readers familiar with the Christian philosopher Charles Taylor’s idea of secularism in A Secular Age will be well-prepped to understand a core contention of What Are Children For?: that having kids once was not a choice, and now it is a choice, and this colossal change is integral to the modern experience of ambivalence about children.

Taylor defined secularism as what happens when a society changes from one “where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Likewise, where once having children was “just what people did,” Berg and Wiseman write, now it is something we feel we must “weigh against a sea of other options,” many of them at least superficially easier, more pleasurable, less risky, and simpler to do well.

A quote Berg and Wiseman share from psychologist Nancy Felipe Russo, writing in 1976, drives home the recency and totality of this shift. Having children was then so assumed that “even if the perfect contraceptive were developed and used,” Russo thought, the “social and cultural forces that enforce the motherhood mandate would continue.” Today, in my judgment, the opposite is true: Even if all contraception were to disappear tomorrow, our agonizing would not vanish with it.

Nor would we be any closer to knowing how to decide. For many of our peers, Berg and Wiseman contend, “having children is steadily becoming an unintelligible practice of questionable worth.” With the internet’s help, we mainline reports of human evil and suffering, then doubt the wisdom of prolonging human existence. “We lack the resources to answer such questions,” the authors muse. “The old frameworks, whatever they were, no longer seem to apply. And the new ones have left us far less certain about the very desirability of children.”

Life, history, literature

What Are Children For? begins and ends with single-author sections, Wiseman writing at the start about her choice to pursue motherhood and Berg reflecting at the end on life after reaching it. In between, the chapter on externals is a well-rendered map to mostly familiar territory for anyone following the natalism debates: financial concerns, worries about lost freedoms and disappointing careers, inability to find a suitable romantic partner, and so on.

Key passages on the novelty of children as a choice are found here, as is a remarkably dreary section on modern dating, portions of which appear in a 2022 Atlantic essay, “The Paradox of Slow Love.” I don’t have room here to do it justice, but Berg and Wiseman’s sketch of a heightening wall between romance and family is alarming.

The second chapter, on the history of feminist debate over reproduction, provides valuable intellectual context—albeit context that, for readers from more conservative evangelical backgrounds, may explain others’ motivations and impulses better than our own. Some of the thinkers Berg and Wiseman explore here are far outside the mainstream, but their gravitational pull on the broader culture is clear.

Perhaps the strongest portion of this chapter is its critique of an all-too-recognizable male abdication of responsibility performed in the name of progress. “In center-left circles,” Berg and Wiseman write, “the conviction that women ought to be able to determine their own reproductive fates and exercise as much autonomy over their bodies as men has transmuted over the years into the presumption that the question of whether to start a family is the purview of women alone.”

Sometimes, they acknowledge, this male passivity may be well-intended: If motherhood is as costly as our culture has come to believe, “how could a man ask the woman he loves to submit herself to such a fate?” But sometimes, what “might at first seem like an act of selfless deference (if you want a child, we can have one) functions more like an evasive maneuver”:

Lukewarm offers of cooperation can stand in the way of making the choice confidently and without reservations. Who would want to bring a child into the world with someone who, when asked whether he wants to be a dad, has only a feeble “if you insist …” to offer in return? The remark “whatever you want—it’s up to you” is annoying enough when trying to pick a film to watch or a restaurant to order takeout from; it is unbearable as a response to the question “Do you want to have a child with me?”

The third chapter, on literature, extends this exploration of cultural context into the present day: “The motherhood ambivalence novelists are prescient,” Berg and Wiseman show, “insofar as the broader mood about parenting today is one of doubt.”

By this point, I must admit, I was growing restless, eager to get to the fourth chapter’s direct tackle of the titular question. But this final bit of scene-setting was perceptive too, offering a tour of a genre I knew to be influential but haven’t personally read. For those already reading this kind of literature—perhaps not very critically—I expect it will be enlightening.

A defense of life itself

In the last chapter before Wiseman’s conclusion, the authors deal with two primary arguments against children: “that life is an evil imposed on mankind” and “that mankind is itself an evil imposition on the world.”

To both, Berg and Wiseman give a simple answer: an affirmation of life. This is not an unsophisticated response—they grapple with serious philosophers over centuries of classical, Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian thought. But it is boldly asserted and unapologetically grounded in common human intuition and experience.

In brief, they argue that humanity has value; that alongside our capacity for evil is a real capacity to recognize and choose good; that we can pursue unconditionally and universally good ends, “like friendship and justice,” which “make it genuinely worthwhile to live a human life”; and that affirming this goodness doesn’t mean turning “a blind eye to our human struggles and failings.”

As for bearing children, Berg and Wiseman argue, bringing a new life into the world affirms about others what we already affirm about ourselves. In fact, they write, asking, “What are children for?” is essentially “to say, why affirm life?”

What, after all, is one asking for? A list of benefits? To affirm life is not to give it a theoretical justification, to acknowledge its merits and counter the charges of its detractors. In deciding to have children, one takes a practical stance on one of the most fundamental questions a person can ask: Is human life, despite all the suffering and uncertainty it entails, worth living?

This is a striking and provocative conclusion, not least in its conspicuously nonsectarian framing. Would I be convinced without already having a view of humanity that accounts for these tensions of goodness and evil, dignity and suffering, chance and virtue? I’m not sure. Reading as a Christian, I found myself agreeing with Berg and Wiseman on points large and small—yet often only incidentally. We’d come to the same place by apparently different routes.

Sometimes, this difference in perspective was constructive. I’d love to see the authors in conversation with the Catholic writer Timothy Carney, whose diagnosis of “civilizational sadness” in Family Unfriendly is deeply resonant with the closing notes of What Are Children For? And I’m still chewing on Berg and Wiseman’s observation that “of all miracles performed by Christ, he never helps a barren woman conceive.”

On the other hand, I can imagine how Berg and Wiseman would likely square their call to “affirm life” with the book’s multiple endorsements of abortion rights—but it’s not a connection I could make sense of myself.

A question only you can answer?

It is commonplace that a life choice so important as whether to have children is one we each must make exclusively for ourselves. Berg and Wiseman support that view, but all over What Are Children For? they seem dissatisfied with where it leads.

They reject a vision of the kids decision as a solitary quest of “‘finding yourself’ and discovering ‘what you really want’” to the neglect of “everything else you care about.” They chastise men who shirk their role in the decision-making process and mourn a similar isolation from friends and family. They chafe against the motherhood-ambivalence literature’s deep interiority, the way it deprives characters and readers alike of insight to “the infinitely many ways each of us can be opaque to ourselves, blind to our own weaknesses, deluded about our motivations.” And they praise a writer’s reminder “that what is at stake in the decision to have children is not just a series of personal experiences to be enjoyed and suffered but the possibility of human life.”

Altogether, this reads to me as much more than an invitation to public discourse. It sounds like a plea for community, for people with good counsel and real influence in your life, people who care about what you care about, who will tell you when you are misguided or self-deceiving, who will help you through this hard question as much as the challenges that will follow if you answer yes.

Yet for all that, the final line of the last cowritten chapter declares that because having children is such a weighty, life-affirming commitment, “only you can determine if it is the right one for you.”

In a narrow sense, yes, that’s true. I certainly don’t long for the bad old days of forced marriages or a brutal, totalitarian version of pronatalism. But we’re talking about affirming life here. Surely the life we’re affirming is life together?

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

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Theology

Love in an Attention Crisis

Benjamin Vincent

Readers of the Latin Bible could see how close love and diligence are.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows the fun of stumbling across a word that looks familiar. It’s like a treasure hunt. In my first weeks of high school Latin, I found that my own surname, Vincent, was a Latin word for “conqueror,” which gave rise to the word vanquish. That’s a pretty cool find for a slightly bored 15-year-old!

It was my enthusiasm for surprising derivatives that inspired me to surf the pages of the Vulgate, which Jerome translated in the late fourth century. This Latin translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures served as the standard translation of the Bible in churches throughout the Western world for centuries, and many of Jerome’s interpretive decisions provide a glimpse into the heart of the church’s historic understanding of Scripture. For me, it was a hotbed of etymological discoveries.

Several years ago, I stumbled across one such nugget of linguistic history hidden in the Vulgate. It started as I was reading the Great Commandment from Luke 10:27 (ESV throughout):

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

When Jesus told an inquisitive lawyer that all the Law and Prophets hung on these two commandments (Matt. 22:40), he knew that his audience would recognize them. Both were drawn directly from the Torah (Deut. 6:4–9; Lev. 19:18) and would have been intimately familiar. But Jesus imbued them with a new and shocking centrality, and he spoke them with an unprecedented authority (Matt. 7:29).

He also spoke them in a new language. Although Jesus himself spoke primarily Aramaic, the Gospels record his words in Greek, with “love” often rendered with the Greek word agape.

If you have attended church for long, you have likely heard mention of this word. Agape carries shades of meaning that set it apart from more common Greek words for “love,” and the biblical distinctness of the word has made it a popular choice for both sermon illustrations and forearm tattoos.

This is not without good reason—it is remarkable to the modern English-informed mind that love could be commanded and not merely stumbled into!

It is not agape that commands my interest, however. Instead, I am fascinated by the Latin word Jerome chose to stand in its place: diligere.

Even if you’ve never studied Latin or picked up a copy of the Vulgate, diligere may look familiar to you. It is from this word that we have derived our English word diligence, which is typically used in reference to hard work and perseverance.

This connection is not an accident, and the journey that turned a Latin word for “love” into an English word for “good work” is a beautiful illustration of the nature of both love and labor.

A jaunt through the fascinating linguistic history of diligere has a lot to teach us, and it may reenchant us with the transformative power of the love to which Christ calls us. It may also present a very timely lesson for Christ followers living in an age of inattentiveness and distraction.

A quick glance at a standard Latin dictionary, such as the 1879 version of Harpers’ Latin Dictionary, will tell you that diligere means “to single out, value, esteem, prize, love.” To gain a full understanding of the word’s history and meaning, though, we need to go even further back. Diligere is a compound word formed from the Latin prefix dis-, meaning “apart,” and the Proto-Indo-European root leg-, meaning “choose” or “gather.”

This combination—meaning literally “to choose apart (from others)”—makes sense of Jerome’s early usage of the Latin term. Diligere effectively means to single something or someone out, value it highly, and treat it with commensurate honor and affection.

In a commentary on the Vulgate text of Psalm 18, where diligere is used for the Hebrew word for “love,” the Roman statesman and scholar Cassiodorus puts it this way: “Diligo is said as if I choose [one thing] out of everything” (translation by Dan Bellum).

At its heart, then, diligere is about selection—the choice to hold fast to one thing above all others. In its earliest history, diligere communicates willful devotion. We would be wise to consider how that root remains in the heart of our own language today: Diligence denotes a kind of practical devotion.

This history makes clear why Jerome chose to translate agape as diligere: Diligere beautifully illustrates the heart of the Great Commandment. When Jesus commands us to love the Lord and our neighbors, he is commanding us to make a conscious and often difficult choice: to devote ourselves to others and to their good. He is commanding us to pluck them out from the crowded field of demands on our attention and affection and to elevate them to a position of value and esteem.

This is not merely the experience of affection—this is the kind of loving devotion that can be commanded. And we are commanded to make this difficult choice every day, consistently and repeatedly.

This is the first lesson from diligere. To love God and our neighbors—to fulfill the law of God at its very core—is to choose them. I am reminded of this daily by the three little words my wife had engraved on the inside of my wedding ring: I choose you. Choice and devotion are the bedrock of biblical love, and this bedrock is visible even in the words themselves.

That alone is a beautiful and transformative idea. But diligere has yet more to teach us.

The verb diligere branched out further to create more words and meanings. One of these, the Latin term diligentia, is defined in Harpers’ Latin Dictionary as “attentiveness,” “assiduity,” “earnestness,” or other related words. The famed Roman orator Cicero called diligentia the “single virtue on which all other virtues are dependent.” High praise indeed!

Cicero’s praise of diligentia stems from its place at the center of a web of related virtues—“carefulness, mental concentration, reflection, watchfulness, persistence, and hard work.” Every one of these qualities derives from a single starting point: willful devotion. This is how diligentia comes to be derived from diligere.

Whether or not God shares Cicero’s assessment of its rank among virtues, diligentia has much to do with Christian love.

After all, how can you be persistent in a task to which you are not devoted? How can you be careful unless you care? Hard work only feels worthwhile if it is powered by underlying diligere—abiding, willful dedication to the object of your love and attention. In this way, a word for the activity of love gave birth to a word for the quality of careful attentiveness.

We will return to the significance of attentiveness, but it’s worth first exploring how we landed at today’s concept of diligence.

Over the centuries, diligentia continued to evolve, eventually taking on the form diligence in Old French. In the 18th century, a large stagecoach for long journeys in France and England was called a “diligence,” with the implication that a “diligence coach” would be swift, sure, and reliable—ideal for long, important journeys.

It wasn’t long before the term was applied more broadly, eventually producing our familiar English form of the word diligent. It’s a word that’s familiar to most of us, albeit with a slightly stripped-down meaning.

“Work diligently, son.” Those were my father’s simple instructions to me the first time I was employed for work outside my own home. It was a favorite word of his, and I heard it frequently enough that it soon became a key part of my own vocabulary.

The concept of a good “work ethic” and a general sense of diligence as wholehearted, persevering labor came to occupy a central place in my understanding of my father. As far as I knew, diligence meant something like “good old-fashioned hard work.” That’s not a bad place to start. Although diligence certainly doesn’t mean less than that, it turns out that it means a whole lot more.

In recent years, more attention has been given to what the Bible has to say about work, and the church has benefited from a more robust interest in what might be called the theology of work. I am grateful for the Theology of Work Project and for the writings of Tim Keller, Tom Nelson, and others who have contributed to this vital conversation.

Scripture contains a great wealth of wisdom pertaining to the meaning, nature, and purpose of work, from the first pages of the Bible to the last. Whether you are a pastor, a plumber, or a parent, you are commanded to “work heartily, as for the Lord” (Col. 3:23).

Work is inextricably tied to love, devotion, and care. To work diligently in the broadest and deepest historical sense means to bring all these qualities to bear on our daily tasks.

We have already seen how diligere—the act of choosing something (or someone) and willfully devoting yourself to it—can reshape our understanding of love. We also ought see how it can revolutionize our thinking about work.

Let’s face it: Most of the work we do is not work we choose to do. Most of our day-to-day tasks are not done out of personal passion. There’s not much we can do about that.

The trouble is, we tend to put a lot more diligentia—that is, care and attentiveness—into tasks we enjoy. It’s easy to be fastidious about something you’re passionate about; it’s a lot harder to care deeply about the details when you’re just going through the motions to get something done. Sometimes that’s okay; not every task requires deep engagement.

But what about the unpleasant tasks that do? How can we cultivate a character of diligence in the day-to-day drudgery? It all comes down to choice—to diligere.

When Jesus commands us to love the Lord and to love our neighbors, he is commanding us to make a choice: the choice to value, prioritize, and act for the good of the other. This first choice—the choice to be devoted to another—necessarily pushes us to make further choices.

We must choose to bring the same level of care and investment to the work we do for the sake of others that we bring to the work that furthers our own interests. We must choose, through preparation and in the moment, to remain focused, attentive, and persistent in the day-to-day tasks of care and involvement in the lives of others.

Choices that define Christian diligence are ones that require us to pour out our heart, mind, soul, and strength and allow our self-love to be eclipsed by love for others.

This reframing of diligence does not make our duties easier. On the contrary, it raises the bar higher. An exalted vision of diligence could be deeply discouraging—how can you or I ever hope to live up to this? Perfect diligence is out of reach for us creatures with rhythms of attentiveness and easily broken concentration.

But isn’t that true of every virtue worth pursuing? Isn’t that God’s modus operandi—to set before us a bar we cannot hope to clear on our own and then promise us his daily grace as we grow into good and godly living?

Diligentia presents a particularly relevant challenge to Christians in our current age. Love demands attentiveness—something that is in increasingly short supply.

In 2015, Time magazine reported a shocking bit of misinformation: The average Canadian attention span has become shorter than that of a goldfish. The comparison has been debunked many times but is still frequently cited. Nevertheless, research done by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, does show that half of the time, our focus on a task is fewer than 40 seconds.

A key factor in this worsening problem is a drastic increase in what Mark calls “attention-switching,” which refers to the process of actively shifting our attention from one task to another. This process takes time and effort, so the more often we shift gears from one thing to another, the more time and energy we expend on the simple process of transferring attention. Other factors, including increased stress and sleep deprivation, exacerbate the issue.

This is probably not the first time you’re hearing of this problem, as awareness of the attention crisis has grown in recent years. With this growing awareness has come an array of proposed solutions, including tech minimalism, discipline around sleep, meditation, and modified expectations for employees. The trouble is that growing awareness has not solved our problem.

Could it be that the biblical definition of love may directly combat the attention crisis? Might an old Latin dictionary provide resources to fight back against a 21st-century tribulation?

I don’t want to overstate my case—a fun linguistics fact is not enough to fix PTSD or sleeplessness or to tear down the sociological structures that have given rise to the attention crisis. But I do believe that followers of Jesus are uniquely equipped—and indeed commanded—to be a bulwark against distracted, inattentive living.

With the crisis of attention growing worse, the virtue of diligentia is all the more valuable. That is why it’s worth reminding ourselves of its place at the heart of diligence, and even at the heart of real Christian love.

If we want to live out a truly biblical definition of love, we must develop an ability to be careful and attentive. This takes time and practice. I’ve come to believe diligence is an even bigger part of love than good old-fashioned acts of kindness and service.

Regardless of all the obstacles in our way, Jesus is so bold as to command us to love diligently—to make the daily, willful choice to devote ourselves to others and to God; to be present, attentive, caring, and committed; and to imbue every task with the kind of steadfast diligentia that we naturally invest in our own interests.

We as followers of Jesus should be known for being present and attentive just as much as we should be known for our kindness to strangers and our love for enemies.

Every day, you will be called to do something you would rather not do or to show love to someone you don’t care for. Every day, you will face attention snatchers. And every day, I pray that the Lord will bring this little phrase to mind, as he has so often done for me: Do diligence.

Benjamin Vincent is assistant pastor at Journey of Faith Bellflower and teaches at Pacifica Christian High School in Newport Beach, California.

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Church Life

All Churches Should Require Background Checks

Michael Veitz

As a former police officer and PCA elder, I believe this basic step can protect congregations from predators.

Kinsco / Lightstock

Update (6/13/24): The Presbyterian Church in America voted not to require background checks on church leaders. Multiple presbyteries had submitted legislation for mandatory background checks on church leaders, and the denomination amended the legislation to say that churches would instead be “encouraged to adopt policies” for background checks. The assembly approved that amendment by voice vote.

For years, Jimmy G was seen as great guy and a leading member at his local community church—he was the go-to volunteer for all the ministries others avoided. On most Sunday mornings, you would see him serving alongside his wife in children’s ministry. But then something happened. Jimmy was suddenly arrested for multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault—some of them involving a minor. “Surely, Jimmy was framed,” thought everyone who knew him.

But then reports started showing up in local newspapers. This was not the first time Jimmy had been charged with such crimes. This had happened in another state years before, and his mode of operation was the same. It didn’t take long for new visitors to stop coming to this church—and as reports kept appearing on the front pages of local newspapers, even the faithful started peeling away from the congregation. The church’s reputation will take decades to recover in that close-knit small town.

I wish this account was fictional, but it isn’t. These events took place at a church in a neighboring community when I was a police officer. And although I’ve changed his name, the facts of his case, which I was privy to, are as stated. Sadly, this situation is repeated far too often in Christian churches today. During my time in law enforcement, I learned all too well how people with predatory proclivities can camouflage their activities behind church walls. And now, as the executive director of a large PCA church, I am personally aware of pastors’ immense responsibility to protect their flocks from harm.

Our churches are supposed to be sanctuaries of grace and peace, but the last few years have witnessed an explosion of abuse reports showing this calling routinely violated. This issue extends far beyond the Catholic church and has impacted many well-known evangelical denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

Sadly, no Christian community is immune to the shadows lurking within the human heart, whether these take the form of abuse or its cover-ups. And now that the devastating prevalence of such abuse and its outcomes are more apparent than ever before, we should be ever more vigilant to ensure the safety of every member in our congregations.

That’s why I’ve always considered mandatory background checks for all pastors, church officers, staff, and volunteers to be one simple step that congregations can and should take to nurture an environment that is inhospitable to abusive predators who would prey on the trust of our members. That’s also why I have been surprised by the resistance I’ve encountered to proposing mandatory background checks for all member congregations in my own denomination.

At last year’s General Assembly of the PCA, commissioners did not accept an overture to require mandatory background checks but sent it back for further consideration and perfecting. While I don’t object to making every effort to be clear when it comes to such matters, I was disappointed by some of the reasons listed for rejecting this initiative—including apprehension about government oversight, deterring volunteer retention, and damaging communal trust—which I will address shortly.

My primary concern is that many well-intentioned leaders may be naïve about how common it is for people in their congregations to carry dark secrets which threaten the safety of their church members. My time in law enforcement taught me that abusive individuals, irrespective of their church involvement, often conceal their true selves behind a veneer of respectability and personal piety. In fact, those with nefarious intentions can be even more gifted at weaving false narratives and personas than others.

In her book Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders, Anna Salter quotes a convicted child molester as saying, “I considered church people easy to fool … they have a trust that comes from being Christians. … They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people.” And as Kimi Harris wrote in a previous piece for CT, “The predators that are statistically likely to be in the pews, volunteering, and even behind the pulpit aren’t just grooming their victims, they are grooming their community to view them as trustworthy and even as spiritual leaders.”

This realization underscores the necessity of informed trust, which must be complemented by proactive measures to safeguard our communities. Yes, we should trust our members; but we should also take steps to validate that trust, especially in those who lead and serve. Naïve trust is also incongruent with the witness of Scripture. Given our theological commitments to the doctrine of total depravity, the power of indwelling sin, and our penchant for self-deception, Christians ought to know better than anyone.

As Cornelius Plantinga Jr. wrote, “The story of the fall tells us that sin corrupts… Like some devastating twister, corruption both explodes and implodes creation, pushing it back toward the ‘formless void’ from which it came.” This pervasive corruption distorts our highest ideals and masks our darkest impulses. Knowing this means we take seriously the possibility that dreadful acts will arise in the most improbable of places and from the least likely persons. In Matthew 7:15, Jesus himself warns about duplicitous individuals in our midst who come to us “in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves” (Matt. 7:15).

Especially as Presbyterians committed to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, we believe we are not only born in sin but that every aspect of our humanity is fallen. This is why our polity demands examination of all nominated officer candidates and sets up a system of accountability and appeal—precisely because we know that even at our best, we are still sinful. Given our robust doctrine of sin, we rejoice at God’s amazing grace and, at the same time, do everything we can to resist sin and prevent its pervasive presence in people and structures, especially those in our communities.

One commonly cited argument against rigorous vetting processes that I have repeatedly heard is a deep-seated trust in communal bonds—along with the belief that such intimate familiarity breeds transparency.

It is a great gift to have around us those we love and trust, and it’s understandable why many believe such community bonds would protect them and those they love from predators. Yet we cannot ignore the well-documented fact that violence often erupts at the hands of those closest to a victim. Studies show that 93 percent of juvenile victims of sexual abuse offenses know their perpetrator. And while those in rural areas may wrongly imagine the folks in their familiar circles are implicitly trustworthy, those in large urban centers should know firsthand the uncomfortable truth that proximity doesn’t always equal community.

Other critics point out that background checks have limitations and fail to catch those who have managed to avoid legal consequences for previous misdeeds. Given the relentless demands of church ministry, implementing a background check policy can feel daunting, especially when so many wrongdoers seem to slip through the cracks. Why stir up controversy for something that might offer minimal results?

While we can acknowledge that every system has its flaws, dismissing background checks on these grounds is unwise, especially given the statistics. According to RAINN, more than half of all alleged rapists have had at least one prior criminal conviction before they were arrested for rape. Background checks represent a single but vital step in a multilayered defense strategy, serving as a tangible expression of our commitment to protect the church that Christ entrusted to our care.

An especially disappointing argument I’ve heard centers on apprehension that requiring background checks invites undue “government oversight” into private affairs. But the true risk of governmental intervention arises not from taking such precautionary measures but from failing to catch perpetrators—which can lead to preventable tragedies that would rightfully attract both public and legal engagement.

Others suggest implementing background checks might deter long-standing volunteers from continuing to serve. This can be detrimental especially to smaller congregations who already struggle to attract and retain enough volunteer workers to staff their various ministries.

To be sure, introducing a new policy like this could be uncomfortable for such churches at first. Modern ministry is complex, and adding extra hoops for potential volunteers to jump through can make it more so. Perhaps the sweet grandmother who has been serving in nursery for decades will feel hurt by your request to fill out a background check. She might wonder whether this signals a lack of trust, especially after so many years. Yet this is precisely why it is important for pastors and church leaders to frame this as a universal expectation for everyone on staff—including themselves.

The vetting policy and process should be framed as a reflection of the entire congregation’s commitment to cultivating a fearless peace in the church. And this, ultimately, should lead to the recruitment of healthy volunteers who can serve the whole congregation well.

As Proverbs 22:3 reads, “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.” Navigating potential dangers requires adopting a comprehensive approach to safety. This involves not only implementing background checks but also cultivating an environment in which concerns can be voiced without any fear of reprisal and where the signs of potential harm are recognized by trained staff and volunteers—and acted upon.

For pastors, the glory of Jesus Christ and the safety of every individual entrusted to our care are held together as our chief concern. Our congregation’s most vulnerable members hold a central place in our ministry, and we are charged not only with feeding the flock (John 21) but also guarding it (Acts 20:28). Thus, we must joyfully embrace the necessary precautions that, in the end, will help us make sure the church is a safe and healthy place. This is not a sign of fear, but a demonstration of faith in action.

At this year’s General Assembly, the PCA will consider acting on a new overture to include a policy for mandatory background checks in the Book of Church Order, which some believe to be better formulated than the previous one which was rejected at last year’s assembly. And once again, as a former police officer and current PCA elder, I believe all churches should require this of their workers—starting with those in my own denomination. This basic step is worthy of our commitment to love and protect the most vulnerable among us as we serve all with the gospel.

Michael Veitz is a former Tennessee police officer, a ruling elder in the PCA, and a parent of three children who serves as the executive director of Spanish River Church in Boca Raton, Florida.

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Theology

I’m an Evangelical Parent of Adult LGBTQ Children. Now What?

Victor Clemente

My theology is squarely orthodox. Now I need fellow Christians to help me work out a sustainable vision of day-to-day life with my children.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

For evangelical parents who hold to the church’s long-standing doctrines on gender and sex, waking up to the reality of LGBTQ children in our homes frequently marks the beginning of a difficult journey.

Often blindsided by the development, many parents feel ill-prepared for the work of discernment required to move forward. They hunger for instruction and understanding. Above all, they yearn for relief from the burdensome fear of “getting it wrong” as they navigate uncharted waters requiring many choices, day after day, year after year.

This is the context that produces high turnout for events that try to help Christian parents find responses, beyond fight or flight, to their LGBTQ children—events like last year’s Unconditional Conference hosted by the church of influential pastor Andy Stanley.

The conference was controversial because it featured several speakers who don’t hold orthodox evangelical views on sex and gender. To prominent evangelical critics, the whole affair amounted to “a clear and tragic departure from Biblical Christianity” (Albert Mohler) and a “profound failure of pastoral responsibility” (Sam Allberry).

Similarly, in a more recent dustup, pastor and author Alistair Begg, who holds to the historical doctrine on marriage, saw his popular radio show dropped by a conservative Christian network. It came to light that he’d counseled a woman that she could attend her grandchild’s wedding to a transgender person, though she opposed the union on doctrinal grounds. Writing for First Things, theologian Carl Trueman argued that attending such a wedding is itself a doctrinal drift and “a very high price tag for avoiding hurting someone’s feelings. And if Christians still think it worth paying, the future of the Church is bleak indeed.”

As an evangelical parent of adult LGBTQ children myself, I followed both controversies with interest. I share some of the detractors’ concerns, but I also believe that we American evangelicals who hold fast to Christianity’s historical doctrines on sex and gender—the traditional or “non-affirming” position, per current lexical shorthand—need more, not less, conversation about the intensely practical questions of how to be good neighbors to the LGBTQ people in our lives, be they in our homes, workplaces, or congregations.

There are some resources available for Christians in my circumstance, like Allberry’s Is God Anti-Gay? and the course for parents from The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender. But beyond books or online courses, we need real-life conversations about specific circumstances. Christian parents of LGBTQ kids, like me, thirst for a sustainable vision of day-to-day life with our children. There’s certainly grounds to criticize the vision offered by Stanley and Begg, but simply restating right doctrine, while necessary, isn’t alone enough to answer those questions of practice, of how to live with our children.

As parents, we’re already rooted in the understanding that God created humanity in two distinct forms that we call male and female, and that sexual intimacy is reserved for monogamous marriage between a man and a woman. Our question is how to relate to our children, especially adult children, when they choose lives not rooted in that understanding.

We’ve made clear to them what we believe. Now what?

I suspect that much of the reaction to Unconditional and Begg is the result of worry that open consideration of these prudential questions will inevitably result in significant theological drift with dire consequences for the church and for those to whom it ministers. It’s a fear amplified by a culture war mentality, which has been present in evangelicalism since the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early 20th century. This mentality tends to cast LGBTQ people as our enemies in that fight, enemies to be constantly confronted with statements of truth.

It is good to speak truth, yet adopting a permanently confrontational posture makes it impossible for us to heed the apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Roman Christians: “So far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18, ESV). And while searching for answers to these practical questions of relationship has, for many, been but a stop on a journey away from orthodoxy, that’s not the only possible outcome.

The task at hand is one of correct practice (orthopraxy), which requires discernment, and discernment is a naturally fraught enterprise. What makes it fraught, of course, is our fallibility. For while God’s Word is wholly trustworthy, our application of it may not be. Sometimes we choose to be lenient when we should be firm, or severe when we should be flexible. Regardless of our spiritual diligence and good intentions, there’s always a chance we will make the wrong choice. Add to this the sobering awareness that even correct choices can result in pain for those we love, and discernment becomes downright daunting.

But ignoring the reality that discernment is necessary is not an option. The presence of risk does not exempt us from doing the work of loving our neighbors. People need help, and decisions need to be made: Should Christians use preferred pronouns? Should we attend the same-sex weddings of our children or coworkers? Should we allow our adult children in same-sex marriages to sleep in the same bed when they come to visit?

For many of us, these are not mere academic exercises but real situations with real people demanding answers, often without much lead time. These are the circumstances in which we must practice discernment, applying what we know from God’s Word to the best of our ability, with great care and humility. These are the kinds of questions Christian parents like me (and grandparents, as in the case Begg addressed) long to have in-person help answering in conversations with our pastors and friends at church.

Sometimes we will get it wrong. Sometimes, as J. I. Packer put it in his seminal work, Knowing God, a “Christian wakes up to the fact that he has missed God’s guidance and taken the wrong way.” But even then, the damage is not irrevocable, Packer assured, and God is gracious enough to protect his sheep—including us—from our own fallible thinking. “Thus,” Packer concluded, “it appears that the right context for discussing [divine] guidance is one of confidence in the God who will not let us ruin our souls.”

Discernment requires hard work, much prayer, biblical reflection, and testing of spirits (1 John 4:1–6). Doing this in a culture with a rapidly shifting Overton window is incredibly difficult. But having to do so in isolation because fellow orthodox evangelicals are unwilling to talk through the practical questions is even worse.

Victor Clemente is a freelance writer on faith and culture issues. His work has appeared in Christ and Pop Culture and Faithfully Magazine. Find him on X at @The_Wait_Room or Threads at @the_wait_rm.

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News

Tony Evans Steps Away from Ministry, Citing Old Sin

Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

The first African American to have both a study Bible and a full Bible commentary bearing his name said he will submit to the “biblical standard of repentance and restoration.”

Tony Evans preaches on Sunday.

YouTube screenshot / Tony Evans

Tony Evans, the longtime leader of a Dallas megachurch and best-selling author, has announced that he is stepping back from his ministry due to sin he committed years ago.

“The foundation of our ministry has always been our commitment to the Word of God as the absolute supreme standard of truth to which we are to conform our lives,” Evans said in a June 9 statement to his Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship church that was posted on its website.

“When we fall short of that standard due to sin, we are required to repent and restore our relationship with God. A number of years ago, I fell short of that standard. I am, therefore, required to apply the same biblical standard of repentance and restoration to myself that I have applied to others.”

Evans, 74, was not specific about his actions but said they were not criminal.

“While I have committed no crime, I did not use righteous judgment in my actions,” he said. “In light of this, I am stepping away from my pastoral duties and am submitting to a healing and restoration process established by the elders.”

Evans, the founder of the Christian Bible teaching ministry The Urban Alternative, has led the congregation for more than 40 years and has a radio broadcast, The Alternative with Tony Evans, that is carried on hundreds of radio outlets across the globe.

An additional statement on the website of the predominantly Black nondenominational church said Evans made the announcement about stepping away from his senior pastoral duties during both of the congregation’s services on Sunday.

“This difficult decision was made after tremendous prayer and multiple meetings with Dr. Evans and the church elders,” the other statement reads. “The elder board is obligated to govern the church in accordance with the Scriptures. Dr. Evans and the elders agree that when any elder or pastor falls short of the high standards of Scripture, the elders are responsible for providing accountability and maintaining integrity in the church.”

The second statement said lead associate pastor of fellowship Bobby Gibson and the church’s elders will provide more details about future steps concerning interim leadership.

Evans noted in his statement that he had shared this development with his family and church elders who, he said, “have lovingly placed their arms of grace around me.”

Evans’s wife of 49 years, Lois, died in 2019. He remarried in November, and the church announced his marriage to the former Carla Crummie in December, introducing her as “Mrs. Carla Evans.”

Tony Evans, the first African American to have both a study Bible and a full Bible commentary bearing his name, has called on others to be accountable.

In 2021, in an interview with Religion News Service, he spoke of how he “corrected” gospel musician Kirk Franklin, who then apologized for an obscenity-laced audio that was released by Franklin’s oldest son after the two had an argument.

Evans said at that time that Franklin “was both challenged and corrected for that. And that’s part of the accountability that every man needs in his life.”

Now, the pastor told the congregation that he is entering a period of “spiritual recovery and healing.”

“During this season, I will be a worshiper like you,” he said. “I have never loved you more than I love you right now, and I’m trusting God to walk me through this valley.”

- More from Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

Church Life

The SBC’s Abuse Prevention Work Is Not Done

Eric Costanzo

Five years ago, our messengers pledged to take substantive action to end sexual abuse in our churches. We cannot let another year pass with that promise unfulfilled.

SBC Pastor Eric Costanzo speaks with Oklahoma Baptists in his role as chair of the state's SBC abuse prevention and response task force.

Courtesy of The Baptist Messenger of Oklahoma / Edits by CT

Just over five years ago, a fire broke out in one of the world’s most famous houses of worship, the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. In the days following, officials confirmed that one reason the fire grew out of control was that the security team, after hearing the alarm, miscommunicated and responded at the wrong location. The fire was in an attic, but the team went to the sacristy, located in an entirely different building. Portions of the cathedral soon burned to the ground.

It was also just over five years ago that alarms sounded in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) when reports emerged detailing hundreds of cases of sexual abuse in our churches and organizations over a span of decades. Since then, the eyes of the nation have been on America’s largest Protestant denomination as we’ve grappled with how to respond to these revelations and prevent future sexual abuse. This includes an ongoing investigation by the US Department of Justice, which recently filed its first indictment.

As an SBC pastor for more than 20 years, it saddens me to report that, rather than fighting our fire with every available resource, efforts to extinguish sexual abuse in the SBC have been hindered by distractions and delays. As messengers gather in Indianapolis for the SBC annual meeting this week, it remains unclear whether addressing our abuse crisis is still a priority for the SBC. This concern is magnified by the latest update from our abuse implementation task force: After two years of painstaking work by faithful volunteers, their tasks were not completed due to several “obstacles and challenges.”

Five years ago, recall, our initial reaction to the abuse revelations was a unified call to action. We won’t stop until we get this right, convention and church leaders said. Momentum began to build toward fighting the fire through one of the SBC’s greatest strengths: cooperation. New relationships and efforts were forged, and a community of abuse survivors and advocates emerged, who were welcomed and given platforms from which to share their stories in the SBC.

As work was beginning in 2020, survivor Susan Codone told CT, “It takes years to change a culture, usually at least ten years, and the measure of success will be a significant reduction in the cases of sexual abuse in churches along with a much higher number of churches actively enacting policies and caring for the abused.”

Sadly, five years into the process, the hopeful spirit of cooperation with which we started has all but dissipated. Key SBC leaders have disagreed about what steps should be taken and who should direct them. A perceived divide exists between preserving institutions and protecting the vulnerable, in part because of fears of litigation and infighting about the transparency of investigations. Millions of dollars pledged by the two largest SBC entities for the purpose of abuse response and survivor support have yet to be distributed. Some leaders now treat the more vocal abuse survivors like villains rather than victims—sometimes even working against them—resulting in a seemingly irreparable loss of trust. All the while, the fire continues to burn.

This is not to say that no work has been done to address abuse in the last five years of SBC life. On the contrary, our convention has made significant efforts to identify potential vulnerabilities and to train and equip churches to prevent abuse. Multiple task forces and work groups were appointed to address abuse at both the national and state levels, and collaborative efforts from these groups have produced materials to help churches develop the right policies and procedures for abuse prevention and response.

I’ve participated personally in these efforts and have seen many of our leaders and members commit much of their time and resources to fighting the fire. I’m especially proud of the work we’ve done in Oklahoma, which has received an abundance of support from our state convention. I’ve also had the opportunity to hear from more abuse survivors than I can count, and I feel the weight of our tremendous responsibility to them.

Nevertheless, the work has been frustrated by several diversions, and abuse prevention and response efforts have been less effective than hoped. According to recently released surveys by Lifeway, the SBC’s own research arm, less than half of our churches provide training to those who work with children or teenagers on how to report sexual abuse. Additionally, less than 20 percent of churches provide training on caring for abuse survivors. Our work is far from finished.

As our annual meeting convenes yet again this year, it’s time for us to make a final and actionable commitment to address sexual abuse in every one of our more than 50,000 churches—and I believe there are at least three ways we can do so. They are the three things to which we committed from the start.

First and most importantly, we should use our unmatched capacity for cooperation in the SBC to mobilize each of our international and national entities, seminaries, state conventions, local associations, and the publications of each to train and equip every church in addressing abuse. We should ensure that the best abuse prevention and response curriculum, policies, and procedures are in the hands of pastors and key leaders in every church, in both print and digital formats. We should provide multiple opportunities for state, regional, and local abuse prevention and response training and set high expectations for churches and their participation.

Our SBC structure is built not only to protect the autonomy of local churches but also to hold them accountable to our agreed-upon standards for doctrine, practice, and cooperation. We’ve been successful in similar efforts related to other pro-life, pro-family, and pro-human dignity issues. Why would we not apply the same fervency to protect our children from abuse?

Second, our churches need comprehensive access to the long-awaited Ministry Check database of both convicted and credibly accused abusers as a forum to search for known abuse concerns related to any potential applicants for employed or volunteer positions in SBC churches or organizations. (It remains to be seen whether a recently formed independent organization to administer this database will receive official SBC support.) Though some aspects of the database have been contested, specifically those related to the category referred to as “credibly accused,” it is long past time that we have this useful instrument to protect our children and churches from repeat abusers.

Finally, our churches and leaders should reengage with the SBC abuse survivor community and allow their voices to be heard in every decision-making process. Their words may not always be as gentle or polished as some might prefer, but why should they be? They’ve been burned in the fire, and the injustice and trauma of their abuse has yet to be properly addressed. Their input, along with input from those with professional expertise in areas related to sexual abuse, will be most valuable in selecting the right tools for our work.

While the Notre-Dame fire was tragic from a symbolic standpoint, the physical damage itself was ultimately limited. The fire burning in the SBC is of a far more destructive nature because of the unspeakable harm done to precious lives. If we continue to delay our response, we’re communicating a willingness to accept the fire’s damage.

Scripture calls leaders in the church to be “shepherds” of and “examples” for “God’s flock that is under your care” (1 Pet. 5:2–3), which means the responsibility to address the SBC sexual abuse crisis lies not with the US Department of Justice, the media, or the general public. It lies with all of us who lead in the SBC.

As our messengers gather, a full half-decade after we committed to take substantive action to end sexual abuse in our churches, we must get this right. If we allow yet another year to pass without beginning to extinguish this fire, we should not be surprised when it consumes us.

Eric Costanzo is lead pastor of South Tulsa Baptist Church in Tulsa and coauthor of Inalienable: How Marginalized Kingdom Voices Can Help Save the American Church.

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Theology

The Generous Genius of Jürgen Moltmann

Paul Zahl

Memories and reflections of the famed theologian from his last overseas doctoral student and friend of 33 years.

Jürgen Moltmann in his study in his apartment in Tübingen.

Bernd Weissbrod / picture-alliance / dpa / AP Images / Edits by CT

When he died at home in Tübingen, Germany, last Monday morning at age 98, the world could justly say that Jürgen Moltmann was the leading Christian theologian of the second half of the 20th century. He had championed liberation theology from South America, then imported it successfully to the West. He had inaugurated an eschatological “theology of hope” and freshly underlined the role of the Holy Spirit in mainstream Protestant and Catholic theology alike. His 1973 book, The Crucified God, had developed an almost instantaneous following among evangelical Christians on both sides of the Atlantic, and the full list of Moltmann’s literary output is dazzling.

I was Moltmann’s last overseas doctoral student, and we were close friends for 33 years. On Wednesday, I will fly to Germany to attend his funeral and interment at Tübingen. But today, I want to share with you a glimpse of his remarkable and faithful life.

Moltmann’s theological thinking emerged initially as the result of his captivity, from 1945 to 1948, as a German prisoner of war in Britain, as well as his searing experience as a teenage anti-aircraft gunner during the 1943 British air raid on Hamburg, his native city. After the war ended, he returned to Germany and studied theology at Göttingen under the Reformed theologian Otto Weber, and was much influenced by Karl Barth.

Moltmann then spent five years as a local pastor outside Bremen, during which time his wife Elisabeth gave birth to a stillborn child. It seemed an absurd and despairing event at the time, before the couple would go on to have four healthy daughters—how much more loss could God impose?

After that early pastorate, Moltmann gradually became world renowned. He supported James Cone’s development of Black theology in New York. In El Salvador, when six liberationist Jesuits were murdered in their beds by members of the Salvadoran military, one of the priests was reading The Crucified God when he was shot. Moltmann was especially popular in Eastern bloc countries behind the Iron Curtain, including East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A consistent world traveler, he would spend 10 years in the US as a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta, though Tübingen was always home base.

When I knew him, Moltmann was never cold nor remote, despite his prestige. He looked you straight in the eye, almost always warmly, and always had his students’ best interests at heart. If he was piqued, you could tell in a moment.

Moltmann was more than an academic adviser. He helped me and my family through the seemingly impossible task of earning a Tübingen doctorate entirely within the German language, recognizing my wife Mary’s sacrifice in keeping us together during that period. One week, when he and I traveled from Tübingen to the UK, we spent an afternoon with my son John, who was at boarding school nearby. As we sat together on the airplane back to Germany, he said with real feeling, “Now I understand what you and Mary have taken on. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

I was not the only beneficiary of this generosity. I once observed Moltmann pilot a very nervous doctoral student through his final oral examination. The student, who had traveled many miles for this moment, almost failed the test—until Moltmann saved the day with a question for which the student was equipped to give a good answer. He passed.

Moltmann observed the human dimension of all his students. That was exceptional in the extremely demanding world of doctoral candidates at Tübingen. Where other professors could be severe, Moltmann was not fearsome—not at all! He brought you in to his life and thought. He never left out the pastoral dimension, the feeling dimension, the pain and stress dimension of all with whom he came into contact.

After a year of slow progress under his tutelage—including having to master Hebrew durch Deutsch, the most arduous intellectual task I have ever been set—I was suddenly admitted to Herr Moltmann’s Lehrstuhl team in 1992. I was a sort of unpaid assistant for his research projects, and morale on the team was high. We wrote our respective dissertations, tutored undergraduates, edited and translated Moltmann’s manuscripts, and even created films and other popular programs for the wider community.

The night I gave my first full lecture to the team—fellow doctoral students, full-time assistants to Moltmann, and the man himself—I played, as an intro, an excerpt from Bob Dylan’s 1979 song, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” It went on a little too long, and I saw the professor blanch for a moment, as if wondering if he’d made a mistake in taking me on. But then the lecture came, my German was okay, and I could see him breathe a sigh of relief.

After my doctorate was completed in 1994, Mary and I returned to the US. I had been called to the post of dean and rector of Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. We kept in close touch with the Moltmanns, both of whom were warmly welcomed when they visited our church to preach and teach.

We saw them several other times on both sides of the Atlantic over the decades to come. Moltmann knew about the conflicts within the American Episcopal Church, which is my denomination, over questions of gay marriage and ordination. He was less traditional on the subject than I, but he sympathized with the challenges we faced at that time. I wish now that I had actively sought his wisdom, so enduringly affected by his wartime experience, during that fraught and difficult period.

I can think of almost no weaknesses in Moltmann’s character and soul, if I can put it that way. He loved those whom he was given to love with wholehearted enthusiasm. Once, I spent an afternoon in his company when a grandchild came to visit. It was as if Kris Kringle were right there in the flesh, crawling on the floor and cracking us all up.

He had more than a twinkle in his eye—he had a belly laugh, and often. It never felt like an act, as if he were trying to be “one of the boys” (or girls, as two of his three assistants were brilliant young women). It was simply that, after all he and Elisabeth had suffered, he remained an unfailingly practical optimist.

It is strange to recall that I first went to Tübingen to study under someone else—not Moltmann. Justification by faith was my intended subject, not liberation theology! It happened, however, that George Carey, the then–archbishop of Canterbury, called his friend Jürgen, not the other chap, to make my initial contact in Germany. And it became clear, very soon after I arrived, that the other chap was not the right person—not in a thousand light years.

One Sunday afternoon, in the garden at 25 Biesinger Strasse, Moltmann turned to me and said, “You forget about him. I like you. I’ll take you. And we’ll make it about justification.” I smiled inside and thought to himself, “This is God’s teacher for me. I want no other.”

Paul Zahl is a retired Episcopal priest. He and his wife, Mary, together with their three sons, John, David, and Simeon, were loved warmly and encouraged mightily by Jürgen Moltmann.

- More from Paul Zahl

News

Some Churches Call Clergy Sexual Misconduct an ‘Affair.’ Survivors Are Fighting to Make It Against the Law.

Rebecca Hopkins

Advocates push for legislation criminalizing sex between ministers and those they spiritually guide.

The California state senate effectively killed a bill that would have made clergy sex abuse a crime.

Rich Pedroncelli / Assocaited Press

Krystal Woolston struggled with her mental health as a teenager, but she headed to college hoping for a brighter future. Then, a married pastor who seemed to care about her gave her a different path forward. He told her God wanted her to have sex with him to help her heal.

Looking back 12 years later, Woolston realizes how vulnerable she was to his spiritual manipulation.

“I was just falling, freefalling in so many ways,” Woolston said. “Everyone deserves to be able to go to church and be safe.”

It took her six years to understand this pastor’s pattern of “special treatment” was really manipulation and that the sex was, in fact, abuse. It took four more years to get her denomination to stop him from leading church youth trips.

Woolston doesn’t want anyone else to go through the same thing.

She and a small group of abuse survivors and advocates have been working to make sure it doesn’t. They want sex between clergy members and adults they are spiritually guiding to be illegal in all 50 states. It is currently only against the law in 13, including Connecticut, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, plus the District of Columbia. But advocates are working behind the scenes to introduce state legislation saying that these kinds of relationships, often characterized as “affairs,” are not consensual but criminal.

“Criminalizing abuse is another way of saying, Here, see, it’s abuse,” said Kate Roberts, an adult clergy-abuse survivor and cofounder of Restored Voices Collective. “The more it is legitimized as abuse in various ways, the better that is for prevention and for survivors getting the help that they need.”

Many states have laws that say people in some professions, such as doctors and therapists, cannot have consensual sex with clients. Professional authority changes the nature of the relationship between adults, making some very vulnerable to manipulation and thus in need of legal protection. Restored Voices Collective and other victims’ advocates say the same thing is true of ministers.

“If a victim of adult clergy sexual abuse comes forward, there’s a strong likelihood that that person is going to be blamed as somebody who is ruining the pastor’s career and [told] this is something that is purely an ‘affair,’” said Boz Tchividjian, an advocate and attorney who is helping with the effort. “The question is, if a pastor or a faith leader uses their spiritual position to identify, groom, and ultimately sexualize a relationship with a person under their care or supervision, is that really a consensual relationship?”

Tchividjian, who has been advocating for survivors for decades, said he gets more calls from survivors of adult clergy sexual abuse than any other type of victim. In most cases, they’ve never told anyone. They are often not even sure whether or not they are victims of abuse and are consumed with shame and guilt.

“This is something that is very different from child sexual abuse,” Tchividjian said.

Lucy Huh, who researches adult clergy sexual abuse at Baylor University, said victims consider what they have to lose—their reputations, relationships, marriages, faith communities, and even their faith itself—and most remain silent, keeping their trauma to themselves. The result looks very different than what happens to people who have affairs.

“Consensual relationships don’t result in trauma and lifelong suffering,” Huh said.

New research done at Baylor in fact shows that survivors of adult clergy sexual abuse suffer rates of traumatization that surpass even war veterans. In a study that is currently being peer-reviewed for publication, professor David Pooler found 39 percent of adult survivors screened positive for posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. By comparison, slightly less than a quarter of US veterans who’ve been through a war showed signs of PTSD.

Survivors are not surprised by the statistic. Lori Knapton told CT that she didn’t initially know how to describe the sexual abuse she endured. The best she could do was say her pastor had convinced her to have an affair with him. It was her husband who pointed out this was a misuse of the pastor’s spiritual authority and actually not a consensual affair, but manipulation—sexual abuse.

“It was very much emotional, mental, psychological, physical abuse, but the spiritual component was the deepest part of it,” Knapton said. “It felt like he raped my soul.”

When Julie Sale first realized she was a victim of clergy sexual abuse and reported it to her church, she was fighting suicidal thoughts. The response was devastating.

“Originally I was just trying to live, just trying to take another breath,” Sale told CT. “When you've depended on the institution your whole life to guide the way you live—decisions that you make, how you raise a family—and then suddenly that church just kicks you out and says you’re helping Satan essentially, it is soul destroying.”

According to previous research that Pooler has done at Baylor, only about 10 percent of victims who reported their abuse to their church said they received a positive response. Some of those who talked to CT for this piece said their churches ultimately disciplined the pastors. Some pastors were fired, but not all of them—and even those who were dismissed or even defrocked can apply to work at another church and pass a criminal background check with flying colors.

“You’d think pastors would be out in front on this,” Pooler said. “It’s survivors leading the way.”

Maine passed legislation criminalizing adult clergy sexual abuse in 2019. California is currently considering similar legislation. State senator Dave Min, a former law professor at the University of California, Irvine, sponsored the bill in January.

“Consent is not a defense,” the proposed legal language says, “if the person who commits the sexual battery is a member of the clergy who, in such capacity, is in a position of trust or authority over the victim and uses their position of trust or authority to exploit the victim’s emotional dependency.”

Huh, who was involved in drafting the legislation, said she hopes laws like these will change the way people think about this issue.

“The US has the potential to set a true precedent in recognizing that clergy sexual abuse of adults is a serious issue by establishing criminal consequences for those who prey on their congregants,” she said. “Most other countries automatically blame the victim while protecting the abuser at all costs.”

Changing laws is not an easy road, though. At a California Senate Public Safety Committee hearing in April, representatives from the California Public Defenders Association and the American Civil Liberties Union spoke against the legislation for criminalizing consensual sexual contact. Though Sen. Min said he was willing to make changes to the legislation, he drew the line on the matter of consent. The committee decided not to vote on it, killing the bill.

“It is so hard for survivors to be heard, much less to obtain justice,” Huh said.

Huh and others appealed the matter to the governor and plan to keep fighting.

In some cases, legislation takes years to get passed. Sometimes, there is a little progress and then nothing happens. There are few making open arguments against this kind of legislation, but inertia, neglect, and lack of concern present major obstacles for advocates who want to make change.

Knapton decided she would be vulnerable in an effort to humanize the issue and push for legislation. She shared her traumatic story with elected representatives in her state. They seemed like they cared, Knapton said, but the proposed bill was later tabled.

“It felt like that’s what’s been happening for the last five years, people hearing my experience and then being like, We don’t care about it,” she said.

Woolston is in the early stages of this effort. She knows that her story might well be ignored too. But she’s hopeful that things will be different now.

“I have a support network now that I didn’t then,” she said. “I have people who are like, We’re not going to let you fall.”

- More from Rebecca Hopkins

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