“I would permanently ‘defrock’ Johnny Hunt if I had the authority to do so,” Bart Barber, sitting president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in a statement released Tuesday. Hunt, who served as president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination from 2008 to 2010, stepped aside
Disgraced former Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt plans a return to ministry after completing a restoration process overseen by four pastors, according to a video released last week. Hunt, a longtime megachurch pastor in Georgia, was named earlier this year in the Guidepost Solutions
In this issue of A Public Witness, we look at what’s known about the new DOJ investigation, how people are responding in divergent ways, and what these responses illuminate about how Christians are thinking about issues of politics and legal accountability.
Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention said Friday that several of the denomination’s major entities are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice in the wake of its multiple problems related to clergy sex abuse.
In this issue of A Public Witness, we call on state attorneys general to open investigations into Southern Baptist entities and conventions. After reviewing reactions to the Guidepost report, we build our case by examining the precedent set with similar state investigations into the Catholic Church.
A blockbuster report found that SBC lawyers worked for years to protect the institution and demonized abuse survivors and accused a prominent pastor of abusing a colleague's wife.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has offered a public apology and a confidential monetary settlement to sexual abuse survivor Jennifer Lyell, who was mischaracterized by the denomination’s in-house news service when she decided to go public with her story in March 2019.
In recent weeks, state Baptist groups in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida, and California have set up committees or task forces to address sexual abuse. Attempts to set up similar responses failed in Mississippi and Missouri.
As a national task force investigates how the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee dealt with allegations of clergy sexual abuse, a motion coming this week at the Missouri Baptist Convention’s annual meeting will propose a similar task force for Southern Baptists in the Show-Me State.
A top committee of the Southern Baptist Convention agreed Tuesday (Oct. 5) to open up legally protected records to investigators who will look into how it handled, or mishandled, cases of sexual abuse within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination over the past two decades.