Clarification on Inaccurate Reporting by the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention/Baptist Press

A Letter to Interested Southern Baptists

October 7, 2019

Yesterday I sat in my favorite room on earth, my church’s chapel. I had to figure out whether to say anything about Baptist Press inaccurately reporting my abuse disclosure and if so what to say.

Provision. Power. Authority.

Misunderstanding these and seeing them so inconsistently modeled has been the root deception the enemy has most used in my life to harden my heart toward God, tempt me to despair, and to leave me confused as though I do not know the God who makes, defines, and keeps His promises. Misunderstanding or misappropriating provision, power, or authority is also at the root of the ungodly response I’ve most seen or had myself. We are completely unoriginal and yet we keep stumbling around as though we don’t know what the problem is. It is the same temptation that we see throughout the Bible. We want to have what we want and when we aren’t sure that is what God is going to give us, then we are tempted to use whatever means we have to try to make what we want to happen. I understand this pattern because I am a sinner who doesn’t trust God to do what’s best for her so in a moment of need tends to think that calling some other fallen human I trust to help me will take care of it, rather than believing that God actually knows how and where to lead me and will do so when I trust Him. It is that simple. Trust and obey—in the provision, power, and authority of God—not us. Only that isn’t what I see us consistently doing either when given power or when power is used against us.

This is why I’m coming forward despite the fact that hasn’t exactly worked out for me in the past. We should praise God for the evil that was exposed in our churches, entities, and denomination over the past eighteen months. We should pray for Him to purify us more fully. But we must start with submitting our own hearts to Him, not by gathering intel to strategize for . . . what? Our own dominion? Our personal kingdoms? Our self-protection? It all feels so important and crucial until you try to type it out and then it’s really just sad. We are turning to one another for power and on one another to feed, obtain, and manipulate power. We need to be looking to God. Simply considering Him instead of ourselves. The God who has provided everything we need, has called us to model a power that is so mighty it knows it is not threatened by riding a donkey or washing dirty feet, and who promises His authority will keep His promises for His people regardless of what our only real enemy does. What in the world are we doing? Why are we not completely undone by how sinfully power drunk we are to so ignore the character, call, and commands of God in order to establish ourselves, our friends, and our pet theological rocks or tribes into power? Who do we hope in? Please don’t just glaze over that as though it’s a trite question. It is a foundational question that we have lost and are redefining to our peril and the peril of those God has called us to love, teach, serve, and lead. We hope in the Lord. We do not hope in the security of our generational power structure, our theological tribal force, or a group of confessionally aligned churches cooperating together(ish).

We must hope in God and rely on His power. The maker who is holy and yet can make a people in His image . . . even those who reject and defile His name. The Redeemer. The Holy One. God who made light out of nothing and a universe with His voice. One God who is somehow three distinct persons. He walked on water to a group of Jewish men scared in a boat and offered living water to a Samaritan woman whose whole life He knew. He loved wobbly Peter and scholarly Paul and wrestled with Jacob. He brought and stopped the plagues, can make a heart hard or soft, placed one of the persons of Himself in a girl’s stomach as a tiny baby, died to defeat death, then rose so that He could teach us to love one another and follow all His commands as we do, came down as a fire to help us, gave us His Word written down perfectly by men who were sinners and then somehow sustained it for generations and through translations so we still hold it and trust it today. He has transformed lives that were not transformable—and He has never broken a promise. He is God and we are not, so we must stop grasping for His power as though the snake is not the one showing us the way.

Being sinned against is no excuse to spend our lives calling out the sin in others without having first considered it in ourselves. That’s one of the reasons I’m reticent to speak about my experience with the Executive Committee leadership of the SBC. God has called us to tend to our hearts, ensure our motives before Him, and only then to expose the darkness so that it might be overcome by the truth. If we are not actually children of light, then we will not bear the fruit of light. I cannot say that I am without sin, for certain, but I have submitted myself to God’s Word, His Spirit, sought counsel, and ultimately am convicted that I must trust and obey God:

“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light consists of all goodness, righteousness, and truth—testing what is pleasing to the Lord. Don’t participate in the fruitless works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what is done by them in secret. Everything exposed by the light is made visible, for what makes everything visible is light. Therefore it is said: ‘Get up, sleeper, and rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’” (Ephesians 5:8-14, CSB)

It is only compelled by the conviction of God’s Word and under its authority that I am addressing this matter. Yes, the Executive Committee leadership and Baptist Press inaccurately reported what I alleged and that has resulted in significant loss, harm, and pain to me—all of which was unnecessary. And yes, I need to create a context in which there is clarity about that, but why do you want the knowledge of what happened? Do you want it to know how to guard your own heart against evil? Do you want it to know how to genuinely pray and intercede for God to bring about repentance and healing? Or because you know individuals involved or in authority over those involved and need the information to be a means of personal engagement (not social media) to call someone you know to repentance? If that’s you and particularly if you’re in a position of governing accountability over the Southern Baptist Convention, then prayerfully and soberly read on to the end. If not, though, please stop reading now. I’m serious. Stop and do something else instead. Please do not read one more word if you are going to use what you read for any purpose other than that which is honoring and pleasing to the Lord and do so with a heart that you first submit to Him.

I am not raising this issue for the sake of tearing anyone down, but rather pray that God uses it as a means of repentance, restoration, and revival. It is also written with the conviction that we must confront and correct any place where we see a leadership culture that ever utilizes positional power to exert authority through the realms of personal preference and interest.

The most salient details that have been hidden in the darkness of my silence is that it was the initial leadership of Augie Boto, Sing Oldham, and Shawn Hendricks that led to the initial inaccurate reporting by Baptist Press in the March 8, 2019 article and then the subsequent actions of Dr. Sing Oldham, under the leadership of Dr. Ronnie Floyd, that left me without any recourse apart from further inaccuracies and escalation if I continued to pursue a correction. Jonathan Howe and Amy Whitfield have long been supportive, encouraging, and helpful to me. Because I knew they may end up working for the Executive Committee and saw the value they would bring to those roles, I have intentionally not turned to them for advocacy in this as all of my options were fully exhausted prior to either of them being in a position to address it.

I published my full statement on this website on March 8, 2019 after the inaccurate article went up and harassment began. That statement is exactly what Baptist Press had received from me and it was this statement that Dr. Mohler and the pastors of Ninth and O Baptist Church had stated they stood behind in the article published by Baptist Press. Later, beginning with an initial notification to Dr. Floyd of problems with the story during the SBC in Birmingham, and then while in a panic due to an author with whom I worked needing to correct another author’s misunderstanding of my situation based on BP’s reporting, I reached out to Shawn Hendricks to request the story just be removed. I had actually only read the story once at that point, had never Googled myself, and had been consistently told by those who cared for me that I needed to avoid doing both. I knew enough from messages I received every few days since BP released the article, to know what was out there was inaccurate. I didn’t understand at that time that removing the article would actually be more problematic and just wanted everything to go away. My request to remove the story ultimately led to a meeting with Dr. Oldham, Shawn, and I—as requested by Dr. Oldham, then the VP for the Executive Committee who oversaw Baptist Press. I provided a detailed report of the timeline, actions, and conclusions of my abuse disclosure to LifeWay and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in May 2018, as well as a detailed explanation of the inaccurate nature of the Baptist Press article. Dr. Oldham counseled against removing the article as it would have unintended consequences that could be worse for me and was not a practice that was considered journalistically sound. I realized this was wise as soon as he said it and acknowledged it as such. So both in that meeting and in the subsequent weeks of follow-up emails to Dr. Oldham, Shawn, and to Dr. Floyd, I consistently stated that removal of the article was not a solution to the problem they had created and instead requested an editorial note at the top of the article acknowledging the inaccurate language they had used. I stated that I would not draw public attention to the matter, but needed it corrected as it continued to result in harassment, misunderstanding, and harm to me and LifeWay.  

I engaged Dr. Oldham and then Dr. Floyd, making this request and demonstrating the necessity of it by providing links to articles that had been built off their inaccurate reporting and demonstrating the damage that had been done to me. I wanted to ensure I had not misunderstood or missed any detail that perhaps I was unaware of, so I notified Dr. Mohler of this engagement and he confirmed the information I had shared with Dr. Floyd, Dr. Oldham, and Shawn Hendricks—which I then told Dr. Floyd had been confirmed by Dr. Mohler.

Ultimately on July 30, 2019, after the initial meeting and three weeks of emails providing every piece of documentation requested, the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention removed the article despite Dr. Oldham’s own initial acknowledgement of the problems that would likely cause me, my expressed requests to not remove the article, and without notification to me. I then wrote Dr. Floyd on July 31 and begged him to please help me as a sister in Christ who had depended on him faithfully exercising his authority as the President and CEO of the Executive Committee to simply correct an inaccuracy created by the Executive Committee. On August 2, 2019, Dr. Oldham wrote to give me the option of the article being republished as a new story, only with an editorial note that was far from a correction and served as an editorial defense of their inaccurate language, even while acknowledging it had not been what I had reported. I was told by Dr. Oldham that if I left things as they were that the article would stay offline, but that if anything were posted, it would include that editorial language—and regardless of my response, they were filing the hardcopy of the article with the editorial note they had written. Essentially, I was to be quiet or have the matter escalated without any correction. 

So I stayed quiet.

To say that it has been difficult is almost hilarious it is such an understatement. I have physically deteriorated. I have felt as though I’m living in an Alfred Hitchcock movie because it is so unfathomable to understand how I could be spending hours upon hours dealing with this on my own in light of all the documentation, clarity, and corroboration I have from Southern Baptist leaders. I have grieved and questioned how I could have been so naïve to trust again and paralyzed with fear to speak because I cannot tolerate any more pain. All I have wanted is to move on. To tell the truth and then serve God through the SBC. It is all I have tried to do. I do not understand how or why that has led to this and I cannot express how painful it is that it has. I also cannot imagine the fortitude it has taken the men and women who have been trying to bring light to these dark places and solitary requests to simply be accurate for years and years. I am ashamed that I have not understood or cared about them enough.

It is because my hope has been in the wrong place.

My hope is now only in God. And that is good. Very good. Right. Finally. My prayer is only that He would help me to be faithful enough for it to stay that way and protect my heart from any bitterness toward those who have struggled to place their hope in God just as I have struggled to do. I hope now we all will, but I’m just going to focus on me and mine.

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