“God makes it very clear that the true church is to bring light into darkness. That means seeing what things really look like and calling them by their right name. I fear that a portion of Christendom today has become less interested in truth and more interested in power.”
-Diane Langberg, PhD

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What does it mean if something is systemic?
Systemic is an adjective that means “of or relating to a system.” It is especially used to describe some phenomenon—an illness, a social problem—that affects every part of an entire system.

Two months ago Pastor Paul Watts interviewed new SBC Executive Committee Chairman Philip Robertson. They covered several subjects, but this post will deal only with the problem of sexual abuse perpetrated by SBC pastors. To begin with I will quote liberally from an article Christa Brown wrote which was published in Baptist News Global. Brown is a gifted writer,  her analysis of the interview of Philip Robertson by Paul Watts is insightful, displaying Brown’s excellent legal mind.

I have included three clips from the Robertson interview. Each video clip is followed by relevant analysis from Brown. Following that I will highlight two recent occurrences of despicable child abuse by SBC pastors. These two cases illustrate that, unfortunately, pastoral sexual abuse within the SBC has not abated and does appear to be systemic.

Robertson attempts to discredit and sow doubt about the 2019 Abuse of Faith series, which brought national attention to the pervasive sexual abuse and cover-up problem in the SBC, the country’s largest Protestant faith group.

That six-part investigatory series, jointly published by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, documented more than 700 people who were sexually abused by Southern Baptist clergy and church staff. Nearly all of them were children at the time of the abuse. This number was widely recognized as “the tip of the iceberg.”

Not only did the series disclose widespread abuse in local churches, but it also implicated top SBC officials and leaders in mishandling abuse reports.

Abuse of Faith was an exposé that should have been a launchpad for institutional change. Yet here we are more than five years later, and the needle has scarcely moved.

And now … Philip Robertson says this about Abuse of Faith:

“Essentially this article claimed that there was systemic sex abuse taking place within the Southern Baptist Convention that was elevated to a crisis. Now, there’s a lot of problems with that article, and there have been numerous individuals who have done a lot of digging into that article and have found a lot of it to be very problematic. … There were many, many people listed in that article who had no connection to Southern Baptists at all. In fact, there were only a very small … amount of the people named in that article who were part of the Southern Baptist Convention. But it was used to help create this idea that there was this systemic problem … that quite frankly, in my opinion, was not true.”

“Not true.”

Those words are a slap in the face for survivors of SBC clergy sex abuse.

And if Robertson won’t even acknowledge the systemic problem — if he thinks it’s “not true” — then it’s highly unlikely he’ll be working toward systemic solutions.

Robertson doesn’t tell us who the “numerous individuals” are that purportedly did “a lot of digging.” Personally, I suspect they aren’t really so “numerous,” and they may be just a “lone ranger” or two.

Whoever they are, Robertson’s “numerous individuals” almost certainly don’t carry the skill and professionalism of the investigatory journalists — Robert Downen, John Tedesco and Lise Olsen — who wrote Abuse of Faith, because if they were professionals, we likely would know their names.

And I just can’t understand how, with a straight face, Robertson can contend “only a very small” amount of the people named in Abuse of Faith were part of the Southern Baptist Convention. Anyone who reads the six-part series can readily see it’s all about the Southern Baptist Convention.

Source: “SBC leader offers little hope for change on addressing clergy sex abuse”
ANALYSIS Christa Brown, Baptist News Global, AUGUST 5, 2024  (Link to article on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816130753/https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-leader-offers-little-hope-for-change-on-addressing-clergy-sex-abuse/ 

Robertson also had a terrible take on the 2022 Guidepost investigatory report, which confirmed the horror of the SBC’s abuse crisis and documented “some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers.”

But Robertson says this about it: “When Guidepost finished their investigation, they essentially found no evidence of sexual abuse.”

Then he described it as “a praise God moment” — as if the Guidepost report were something Southern Baptists should celebrate.

It appears Robertson is effectively discounting the evidence in the Guidepost report related to Johnny Hunt and Paul Pressler. But more importantly, Robertson is wrongly treating the Guidepost report as if it were solely about whether Executive Committee members committed sexual abuse, even though it was about so much more than that.

The Guidepost report documented SBC officials’ decades-long practice of ignoring sexual abuse reports “even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry.” It also revealed their deceit in claiming an abuser database was impossible to build and maintain, even as, all the while, the Executive Committee was keeping a secret list of its own.

The report also showed SBC officials’ cruel treatment of survivors with stonewalling and hostility. (My own name appears dozens of times in the report precisely because the Executive Committee treated me so terribly. So, I take it personally to hear documented meanness now described in “praise God” terms.)

Many survivors of abuse within the SBC have said what did them even greater harm than the sexual abuse itself was how they were treated within the faith community. Yet Robertson completely ignores the Executive Committee’s own documented maltreatment of survivors.

Source: “SBC leader offers little hope for change on addressing clergy sex abuse”
ANALYSIS Christa Brown, Baptist News Global, AUGUST 5, 2024  (Link to article on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816130753/https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-leader-offers-little-hope-for-change-on-addressing-clergy-sex-abuse/ 

Next up, Robertson makes clear he’s not in favor of a denominational database to track credibly accused clergy sex abusers.

“There have been some controversial recommendations, particularly regarding a database of alleged offenders within the Southern Baptist Convention,” he says. “What makes that problematic … is the legal liability associated with that. … Whoever is in charge of that database, there would always be a danger of them potentially getting something wrong … of naming someone on that database who was ‘credibly accused’ but in reality they were innocent.”

The only thing good about Robertson’s remark is that it provides a window into what has always been true: SBC officials’ resistance to a database never really has been about local church autonomy — because providing local churches with a resource for information doesn’t intrude on their autonomy — but rather, it always has been about trying to minimize liability risks to the institution.

SBC officials fear the potential lawsuits that could be brought by their own SBC pastors who might be listed as “credibly accused.”

This meshes with the conclusion of the Guidepost report that, for decades, SBC officials had been “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations.” Thus, Robertson’s view is simply more of the same. It is the continued prioritizing of institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.

It’s also fundamentally irresponsible. Liability risks are a part of operating a large institution, and responsible institutions work to manage those risks ethically. The Southern Baptist Convention is a tentacular, multi-billion-dollar organization — akin to a Fortune 500 company — and yet, SBC officials are trying to operate this multi-billion-dollar organization without taking on the inherent responsibilities that go along with it. They want the power of such a behemoth without the responsibility of it.

When new leaders express views like those of Philip Robertson, there is little reason to expect any meaningful reform for addressing sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention.

So, in the words of The Who, we “won’t get fooled again.”

Source: “SBC leader offers little hope for change on addressing clergy sex abuse”
ANALYSIS Christa Brown, Baptist News Global, AUGUST 5, 2024  (Link to article on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816130753/https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-leader-offers-little-hope-for-change-on-addressing-clergy-sex-abuse/ 

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Dee has previously written about Jonathan Elwing here but since her article was published former pastor Elwing has been charged with additional felony counts and more information concerning his crimes has been revealed. Here is a clip from a press conference by Sheriff Rick Wells of Manatee County, Florida.

Unsurprisingly, Elwing’s church was listed in the 9Marks church directory.

Personally, if I were searching for a church home the first thing I would do is check the 9Marks church search. Any church appearing on that list would immediately be scratched from my list of churches to visit. Why? For starters, 9Marks President, Mark Dever, remains a close friend of C.J. Mahaney and Sovereign Grace Churches. Second, 9Marks seems to attract heavy-handed authoritarian pastors who just love to exercise church discipline on their church members, all the while holding to the unwritten rule among 9Marx clergy that church discipline is for thee, but not for me!

Jonathan Elwing is an excellent case in point. He loves the 9Marx book on church discipline authored by Mark Dever’s lap-dog, Jonathan Leeman.

Here is an “X” exchange between fellow members of The Conservative Baptist Network, Timothy Pigg and Jonathan Elwing. What’s insane about this exchange is that Elwing was neck-deep in his sexual assault crimes against children at the time of writing his comments.

To Pigg’s credit, he immediately removed Elwing from the Conservative Baptist Network. Of course I believe any Christian leader would do the same, with the possible exception of Mark Dever. Why do I say that? I communicated with a former intern of Dever who served on staff at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. The man became an atheist and advised Dever of this. He was fired immediately and removed from the former intern list within a “matter of weeks.”  Fast forward to the Anthony Moore scandal. I covered this story extensively. Moore was a pastor at the Fort Worth campus of the Village Church. He was fired because he took videos of his assistant pastor in the shower. Shortly after Moore was fired he was hired by his good friend, Thomas White, President of Cedarville University. When this news broke White had to fire his buddy. Moore was also a former intern of Mark Dever. I badgered Dever publicly for several months before Moore was finally removed from Dever’s former intern list. But I digress.

I posted information on Elwing being a member of The Conservative Baptist Network on my “X” account and received this response from Collin Hain. I don’t blame him for wanting to get the word out that the Network dropped him immediately. As you can see, I responded to him. I have never heard whether they took my advice, but I hope they did.

Here is a biblical quotation from “Jonathan the wolf” a little more than a year before the SBC world discovered that the Baptistic Calvinist was actually the great pretender.

Below is an excerpt from an article in Ministry Watch. Due to recent changes in Florida law, Jonathan Elwing could be put to death for his crimes against young children!

According to the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, police initially charged the father of four with four counts of possessing child pornography for using cryptocurrency to buy explicit images of children from the dark web. Detectives began investigating Elwing after a crypto-currency company tipped them about the purchases.

Days later, police conducted a search warrant at Elwing’s home and the church where he pastored. On his cell phone, they found explicit images of him sexually battering a 2-year-old. The images included his face and made obvious the identity and age of the child, court records show.

Nearly a month later, police found enough material to charge Elwing with over 20 counts of possession of child pornography.

For five years, Elwing has been the senior pastor at Palm View First Baptist Church in Palmetto, Florida. Elwing resigned from Palm View shortly before his arrest.

Detectives found two hidden cameras in Elwing’s home and eight in the church office, whose building links with the Educational Harbor private Christian school, where his wife Krystal Elwing is a teacher.

Palm View FBC is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which has struggled to properly resolve issues that have arisen from a scathing 2019 report accusing the convention of mishandling sexual assault cases. Elwing has reportedly opposed SBC reforms against sexual abuse, including the recommendation by the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF) to pay Guidepost Solutions to maintain a website of people credibly accused of sexual abuse in the SBC.

In a Facebook post from February 2023, Elwing said the church would not give “one dime” to Guidepost Solutions, adding that “this very well could be the straw that breaks the back of the SBC.”

Palm View FBC issued a public statement confirming Elwing’s resignation and the church’s cooperation with authorities during the investigation.

A grand jury indicted Elwing on July 10 for sexual battery of a child. He faces a minimum sentence of life without parole if convicted, but prosecutors could also press for the death penalty under a 2023 Florida law that allows for the ultimate sentence for sexual battery of a child under the age of 12. Juries in Florida need just eight of the 12 to agree to execution.

In April 2023, the Florida Legislature passed a bill expanding death penalty eligibility for those convicted for sexual battery of a child under 12, following Governor Ron DeSantis’ push for harsher penalties. A month later, Gov. DeSantis signed the bill, and it became effective on October 1, 2023, enabling the state of Florida to pursue a death sentence for adult convictions of sexual battery of a child under 12.

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Here is the latest list of felony counts against Elwing:

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Briefly, here is one more SBC pastor recently accused of sexually abusing children. The screenshot below is from Ministry Watch detailing the alleged crimes David Schneider.

As someone who writes about abuse in the Evangelical church world, the number of SBC pastors who are caught sexually abusing children seems to occur frequently. Is it a systemic problem? Perhaps not if you go by the strict definition of systemic which I listed at the beginning of this post, but the numbers are alarming and in spite of all the publicity do not seem to be abating.