NEW ORLEANS (RNS) — For more than a decade, Southern Baptists called for their leaders to set up a database to track abusive pastors, hoping to stop abusers from preying on one church after another.In the past, their leaders said creating such a list was impossible.
That has changed this week, as leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force unveiled a “Ministry Check” website Wednesday (June 14) as part of their report on the convention’s annual meeting.
The website was part of a series of abuse reforms passed last year by Southern Baptists in the wake of an investigation that found SBC leaders had mistreated abuse survivors for years and sought to block any attempts to address the issue of abuse on a national level.
Getting that website off the ground was a historic moment, said Heather Evans, a social worker and a member of the task force charged with implementing those reforms. Evans said she’d had the privilege of watching with a group of abuse survivors as the site, sbcabuseprevention.com, went live.
“They had been told for years and years this could never be done,” she said during a press conference on Wednesday.
The website is still a work in progress, said task force leaders. While the site works, all the names to be added to the site are st …
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