How is SBC supposed to work? Executive Committee ignites firestorm with sex-abuse logjam

Welcome to Nashville, Liam Adams.

Enjoy the journalistic whiplash.

Adams, The Tennessean’s new religion writer, has received quite an introduction to the Godbeat in Music City.

Upon starting his new job last week, Adams immediately found himself covering two days of high-profile meetings by the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee.

He’s back at it this week, reporting on the committee again delaying “action on a third-party investigation into the committee’s handling of sexual abuse claims.”

“So I’m going to take a guess that this isn’t normally what happens in the Southern Baptist Convention, right?” Adams joked on Twitter. “Asking for a friend who just so happens to be in his second week reporting the news on all of this.”

Elsewhere, Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron and Bob Smietana report that the “presidents of all six Southern Baptist seminaries have issued statements or tweets expressing their dismay at the Executive Committee’s unwillingness to act at the convention’s direction.”

According to Baptist News Global’s Mark Wingfield, new details have emerged about the committee’s handling of the investigation, “as outrage mounts among other Southern Baptist leaders.”

Read additional coverage by The Associated Press ’ Holly Meyer (Adams’ predecessor at The Tennessean) and Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt.

For more context, see our past Plug-ins — here, here and here — focused on the Southern Baptist controversy.

Southern Baptist sexual-abuse puzzle: Can Executive Committee act on its own legal authority?

I do not envy the journalists who are attempting to cover the current meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee.

The financial and moral stakes are huge. Many of the questions being debated have, from a congregational polity point of view, theological as well as legal implications. You have some activists who want the SBC to take steps that, under its system of governance, it can’t really take. You also have SBC leaders who don’t appear willing to take the actions that they can take, in order to be transparent on sexual-abuse cases.

This may sound strange, but I think it may help to look at the top of the Baptist Press report covering the opening day of the meetings in Nashville. Yes, Baptist Press is an SBC operation and its leaders report directly to the Executive Committee. That makes one statement here even more important:

NASHVILLE (BP) — In its first meeting since messengers to the June 2021 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting called for an independent, third-party review of the SBC Executive Committee, the EC responded to several routine motions and moved to fund the independent review but declined to waive attorney-client privilege for the time being.
After a three-hour extra session Tuesday afternoon, the Executive Committee ultimately rejected a proposal from its officers and instead adopted a temporary measure to move the sexual abuse review forward leaving the details to be hashed out between the officers and the Sex Abuse Task Force within seven days. One of the most significant undecided details was whether or not the EC will agree to waive attorney-client privilege as Guidepost Solutions, the independent firm chosen by the task force to conduct the review, has requested. In the motion passed SBC messengers in June, the EC was instructed to abide by the recommendations of the third-party firm, up to and including the waiver of attorney-client privilege.

Did you catch that last sentence? That’s one of the most important facts in this standoff. The Executive Committee is charged with carrying on the work of the SBC when the national convention is not in session. However, in terms of authority, the EC’s powers come from the local church “messengers” attending the annual SBC national convention.

It appears that a majority of the Executive Committee think they get to debate whether or not to approve the waiver of attorney-client privilege as part of a third-party investigation of how the EC, or some of its leaders, handled accusations of sexual abuse. However, “messengers” at the national convention already voted to approve that step.