Carissa Beard was helping her daughter pack up her dorm room on Sunday night when she got the text from her husband, the lead pastor of First Baptist Church of Thurmont in Maryland. The nearly 300-page report on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention had dropped online. “It is every bit as bad as I expected it to be,” she said.
When Philip Meade, pastor at Graefenburg Baptist Church in Kentucky, read the details, he began reworking his plans for the church’s worship service next Sunday. He will now devote a portion of the service to “a lament for the mishandling of sexual abuse claims and for the survivors who have suffered so much,” he said.
Michael Howard, the head pastor of Seaford Baptist Church on the coast of Virginia, paused a family vacation to spend hours reading the report on Sunday afternoon. “It makes you ill,” Mr. Howard said. “I know as the word gets out, the people in our church will be asking: What is our response?”
Revelations in a sprawling report covering 20 years of sexual abuse accusations are coursing through every level of Southern Baptist society. The report, made public by the denomination on Sunday, claims that top church leaders suppressed and mishandled abuse claims, resisted reforms and belittled victims and their families.
The investigation, conducted by a third party at the insistence of church members, has thrust the nation’s largest Protestant denomination into turmoil at a particularly fraught moment. The Southern Baptist Convention is already grappling with declining membership, sharp divisions over politics and culture, and a high-stakes leadership change that is weeks away.
In some quarters, pastors and church members are openly frustrated at what they see as years of inaction on a crisis that has publicly persisted since 2019, when an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News revealed that nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders, from youth pastors to top ministers, had…