Houston Chronicle Finds Five Southern Baptist Missionaries Left at Least 24 Victims Abroad

The Houston Chronicle has reported that sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches extended beyond the United States to missionaries, many of whom assaulted children and teenagers. The paper’s investigation follows a joint investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News earlier this year, which revealed widespread abuse in Southern Baptist churches in Texas and across the country. The Chronicle’s findings include a database of 220 people who, since 1998, worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches and were convicted of or pleaded guilty to sex crimes.

The Chronicle details the cases of five missionaries who served in places including Taiwan, Malawi and Indonesia and who left behind at least 24 victims. The paper found that the International Mission Board (IMB), described as the world’s largest sponsor of Protestant missions, repeatedly kept reports quiet, did not alert the public, and often delayed or took no action against accused missionaries. The board’s current policy calls for zero tolerance of child abuse and asks people to report it. The IMB told the paper it is committed to a “rigorous examination” of its policies and procedures.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, is a decentralized network. It has no investigative powers and does not always receive complaints from local churches. It has not created a database of known predators, although survivors have called for that reform for more than a decade. The Chronicle also reported that it had found at least 30 churches that have harbored sex offenders, up from 10 in its earlier reporting. Among them are churches in Austin and San Antonio that allowed known sex offenders to keep preaching despite their pasts. As a result, the San Antonio church has been ejected from the Convention.

Reformers plan to attend the Convention’s annual meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, and to press leaders for more action. Chronicle reporters John Tedesco and Lise Olsen discussed what to expect with Houston Matters, and the report notes several proposals under consideration.

Dee Ann Miller, a nurse and former Southern Baptist missionary who served in Malawi, says she was assaulted by a fellow missionary in Africa in 1984. She describes the cover-up and other complaints in her book, *How Little We Knew*. Miller says she confronted the mission board about the alleged assault and was ignored. “I did not know if the others would stand with me,” she told News 88.7. “What actually began operating is what I would later call ‘D.I.M. Thinking.’ It’s denial, ignorance and minimization.” She added, “No system is equipped to police itself.”

Harriet Sugg told a pastor at her Taiwan boarding school in 1984, as a teenager, that a Baptist missionary had molested her as a child. The school sent the missionary back to the United States, but he later settled in Texas and worked at a church in Houston, and he has since died. When Sugg, now a teacher in Florida, searched the Chronicle’s database decades later, she did not find her abuser. After reporting the abuse, she saw a counselor for one session as a teenager. “The fact that they believed me and they fired him was pretty huge,” she said. “There’s got to be a way that they could up their game with profiling candidates, background checks, that sort of thing.”

Christa Brown says she was sexually abused as a teenager at her Southern Baptist church in Texas by her youth minister, and that years later she learned her abuser was still serving in Baptist ministry. She says she contacted 18 Baptist leaders in four states, including Texas, without receiving support. Her abuser left the ministry only after she filed a lawsuit and her story received media attention. For more than a decade, Brown has advocated for reform in the Convention and has served with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) as its Baptist coordinator. “They promise that they’ll pledge to do better, that they’ll establish strong policies,” she said. “So, it is all talk and it is not true action, at least not yet.” She added that the IMB “purports now once again to have had an investigation,” but that “we don’t really see that they are engaging this problem with transparency.”

Source: Read the original report