Southern Baptist #MeToo reckoning…
"Many women have experienced horrific abuses within the power structures of our Christian world," Beth Moore, an evangelical teacher, wrote in a letter
http://archive.today/2018.06.08-195034/https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/metoo-goes-church-southern-baptists-face-reckoning-over-treatment-women-n880216
The Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest evangelical denomination, is headed for a showdown over its treatment of women that could not only have far-reaching ramifications for the church but also influence the broader secular #MeToo movement. At its annual meeting next week in Dallas, delegates called "messengers" will decide whether to approve a resolution acknowledging that, throughout the church's history, male leaders and members of the church "wronged women, abused women, silenced women, objectified women."
"The #MeToo moment has come to American evangelicals," Albert Mohler, president of the flagship Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote last month. "And I am called to deal with it as a Christian, as a minister of the Gospel, as a seminary and college president, and as a public leader." The convention is meeting in the wake of several widely publicized scandals in which prominent Southern Baptist leaders have been accused of or have admitted inappropriate behavior toward women. "Many women have experienced horrific abuses within the power structures of our Christian world," Beth Moore, a prominent evangelical teacher in Houston, wrote in an open letter last month.
Most recently, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in nearby Fort Worth fired Paige Patterson, a pre-eminent figure in the denomination's conservative resurgence in recent decades, who had been its president since 2003. The seminary's board cited allegations that Patterson counseled a female student not to report that another student had raped her at a seminary he was leading in 2003 shortly before he took the Southwestern job. The board also said his history of remarks about women in general — for example, in a 2014 sermon he described telling a woman that her son's "ogling" of an attractive teenage girl was an appropriately "biblical" response — was "antithetical to the core values of our faith." Patterson's attorney accused the board of having "misrepresented" his client's actions in the 2003 case. In a statement, Patterson said, "I do not believe there is a woman or girl ever associated with me who would allege any abuse on my part" — an allegation that no one appears to have made. The Patterson revelations came on the heels of Frank Page's resignation in March as president and chief executive of the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee over what the church described as a "morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past."
Also in March, Andy Savage resigned as a teaching pastor at Highpoint Church, a nondenominational congregation attended by more than 2,000 worshipers every week at three campuses in the Memphis, Tennessee, area, after he acknowledged that he had been involved in an inappropriate "sexual incident" with an underage high school student 20 years ago as a youth minister at a large Southern Baptist church near Houston. Such episodes aren't surprises to women who have recounted their own experiences in the Southern Baptist Convention, which declares that they must "submit" to their husbands and doesn't allow them to be pastors or to teach men in any official capacity. On the second day of the annual meeting next week, a coalition of women — many of whom organizers say are Southern Baptists — plans to rally outside the hall to protest what they characterized as "the prevalence of abuse and its enablement within the Southern Baptist Convention."