Southern Baptist Convention sex abuse report says 44 women made allegations against former Jacksonville, Florida, pastor

Top administrative leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, said Tuesday that they will release a secret list of hundreds of pastors and other church-affiliated personnel accused of sexual abuse. An attorney for the SBC’s Executive Committee announced the decision during a virtual meeting called in response to a scathing investigative report that detailed how the committee mishandled allegations of sexual abuse and stonewalled numerous survivors. The committee anticipates releasing the list Thursday.

During the meeting, top leaders and several committee members vowed to work toward changing the culture of the denomination and to listen more attentively to survivors’ voices and stories.

The report is expected to contain new details about former Jacksonville pastor Darrell Gilyard, who served as a pastor at Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church in Jacksonville in 2007. Gilyard was convicted of having lewd contact with two teenage girls, sentenced to three years in prison, and added to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s sex offenders list.

News4JAX learned on Tuesday that the report includes allegations by a Jacksonville woman, Tiffany Thigpen, that she fought off an attempted rape in 1991 at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville. According to the report, Gilyard was working at the church when Thigpen says she was attacked, and she said she was terrified and traumatized. The report states that Dr. Jerry Vines, then-pastor of First Baptist, “was dismissive of her report” and told her “it would be embarrassing for her if others knew about it.” The report also says that Gilyard later worked at a church in Texas, where other women accused him of abuse.

The SBC Executive Committee said it became aware that “44 women had reported being victims of sexually inappropriate conduct” by Gilyard. A letter on page 146 of the report says, “In almost every case, they were reportedly shamed for it and left feeling they were not believed.” The report also says Thigpen wrote a letter to the Bylaws Work Group in 2019, stating that Gilyard was allowed to move from church to church with prominent SBC figures vouching for him. No one on the Bylaws Work Group responded to the letter. Thigpen also made a submission to the Credentials Committee. The report quotes her describing the emotional toll of the process: “Imagine telling for decades to a non-receptive audience, to an audience who abuses you with their shame and their hateful words against you.”

Dr. Heath Lambert, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, sent News4JAX a statement Tuesday night saying he was “horrified and saddened by the abuse and cover up of abuse that was chronicled in the SBC sex abuse report.” He said the church’s leadership “demands strict screening of all staff and volunteers” and “requires all accusations of abuse to be reported to the authorities.” He called on anyone involved in abuse or in concealing it to confess and seek reconciliation with those they had wronged (2 Corinthians 5:18).

The 288-page report, by Guidepost Solutions, was released Sunday after a seven-month investigation. Among its findings, the report detailed how D. August Boto, the Executive Committee’s former vice president and general counsel, and former SBC spokesman Roger Oldham kept their own private list of abusive pastors. Both retired in 2019, and the existence of the list was not widely known within the committee and its staff. “Despite collecting these reports for more than 10 years, there is no indication that (Oldham and Boto) or anyone else, took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches,” the report said. Boto joined the Executive Committee in 1995 and became executive vice president and general counsel in 2007.

On Tuesday, the committee released a statement singling out and denouncing Boto’s words in a communication to survivors and their advocates dated Sept. 29, 2006, which said that “continued discourse between us (the Executive Committee and survivors’ advocates) will not be positive or fruitful.”

Source: Read the original report