Susan Codone has been in continuous prayer leading up to this moment.
Bolstered by her faith, Codone came to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, to share her story of sexual abuse.
“I wanted to expose the evil that has occurred in the church over the years and to reflect on what I have seen happening in the denomination,” said Codone, senior associate dean of academic affairs at Mercer University’s medical school in Macon. “There’s an epidemic of sexual abuse that has been overlooked for far too long.”
Although the Nashville-based denomination also looked at racism, sex abuse received much attention and has dogged the SBC for more than a year.
Southern Baptists, by an overwhelming vote, strengthened their stances against sexual abuse and racism during the meeting by adding amendments to the denomination’s constitution.
Ronnie Floyd, president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee, called it a “very significant moment in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. And I believe that every one of us needs to thank God for this moment.”
Related: Two Georgia churches no longer being reviewed by SBC over abuse allegations
Sexual abuse, and discrimination based on ethnicity are grounds for a church to be deemed as “not in friendly cooperation” with the convention, according to the SBC.
The amendments will require a second two-thirds vote of church representatives at next year’s SBC annual meeting in Orlando.
The issue of sexual abuse — and the denomination’s failure to root out the problem over the years — has been front and center during the group’s annual meeting in Birmingham this week. During the meeting, Southern Baptists took several steps to hold churches accountable, including making it easier to expel churches for mishandling or covering up allegations of sexual abuse, as well as to make their churches safer.
Related: Two Georgia churches named in report on sex abuse
Earlier this year, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News published a series of explosive articles that outlined decades of abuse by hundreds of people who worked or volunteered in SBC churches. The initial reports included two churches in Georgia — Eastside Baptist Church on Lower Roswell Road in Marietta and Trinity Baptist Church in Ashburn, about 160 miles south of Atlanta.
About a month later, in March, the denomination reported that the Georgia churches were no longer under review.
“What we are dealing with in the sexual abuse of the vulnerable is, after all, demonic,” Russell Moore, who heads the denomination’s ethics committee, says in a special report called “Caring Well” that looked at abuse. “And that means that the devil, and those carrying out his will, are able to hide behind, and to use, virtually any ideology or theology or church structure. Evildoers can hide behind church hierarchy (as we’ve seen) and behind church autonomy.”
Codone’s story is one of fear, betrayal, shame and hope.
When she was 14, Codone says she was sexually abused by a youth minister at a small Southern Baptist church, located just outside of Birmingham.
When she told her pastor, someone she thought she could trust, he suggested that perhaps she had brought the unwanted attention on herself.
He fired the youth minister, but then she alleges the pastor began sexually abusing her.
The abuse didn’t end until she was 16. As for as her alleged abusers, said Codone, who still attends a Southern Baptist church, they simply moved on to other churches in Alabama. Codone said the youth minister died several years ago and the pastor is retired.
Codone, who is now 51 and a mother of three adult children, told few about her abuse.
Related: Atlanta women share #MeToo stories
“I didn’t participate in the #MeToo movement because I wanted to protect my privacy, even though I admired that movement a great deal,” she said. When she learned the convention was going to take a close look at sexual abuse within its member churches, she decided it was time to get involved.
Related: Baptist board supports ousting Albany church over racism allegations
“I’m very focused on finding solutions and getting the convention to act,” she said. “If my story can compel the church to action, then it was worth it to me to speak out.”
“This is a time of reckoning, whether it’s Hollywood or politics or Christian denominations,” said Barry Hankins, a professor of history and a resident scholar with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Unlike the Catholic Church, there is no hierarchical structure or figure such as the pope.
“You can’t take their property away. You can’t fire the pastor. What you can do is to refuse to accept their messengers at the national meeting. It’s a sea change in that the denomination now recognizes this as a major problem, where there has been a reluctance to do so in the past.”
The Southern Baptist Convention represents 47,000 churches in the U.S., making it the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
“It’s not just a Catholic story,” said Thomas Plante, a professor of theology at Santa Clara University and an expert on clergy sexual abuse. “It’s finally reached the tipping point with the #MeToo movement and the #ChurchToo movement. … I say, it’s about time.”
Related: #MeToo: Men need to hold other men accountable
Faith leaders, perhaps, have been among the slowest to respond to calls for change after decades of and thousands of complaints.
One of the problems is that most victims of sexual abuse never come forward or it could be years before they speak out.
In 2018, Paige Patterson, an influential figure in Southern Baptist circles, was fired as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, over allegations he mishandled sexual abuse cases, in one instance telling a campus security official that he wanted to meet privately with a female student who had reported that she was raped so he could "break her down."
“People, as a rule of thumb, try to protect the institution and the leadership. They tend to want to keep things quiet,” said Plante.
Still, the Rev. Ashley Easter, a board member of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and founder of the Courage Conference, an event designed to empower survivors of abuse and to educate communities and faith leaders about responses to abuse, is not satisfied with the denomination’s votes this week.
“They will have to vote on it again in 2020 with a two-thirds majority to pass, then they have to implement it,” he said. “So, really nothing has happened. … That’s really concerning to me because children and vulnerable adults are in danger now.”
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