Josh Hamrick

You ever feel helpless in the face of some enormous problem? After starting to pull back the curtain on the clergy-sex abuse problem in the Southern Baptist Convention, that is how I now feel. Christa Brown has bravely laid out her case as a faithful teenager, taken advantage of by her youth minister decades ago. The evidence laid out, the depth of cover-up, and the lengths that some will go to is astounding. Makes me a little sick to my stomach. Even more troubling, Christa is not alone. I wish we could say that sex-abuse case in the SBC are few and far between, but they are all to common, and the cover-ups may even be more egregious than the abuse itself.

I will probably do a more complete write up on this book in the weeks to come, but for now, I just felt the immediate need to respond.

To my Southern Baptist family: We have to get this right. If you are a SBC minister and have a sexual relationship with ANYONE in your church that you are not married to, you are out of ministry. Is that tough? Unforgiving? Maybe, yes, but we can no longer allow our pulpits to be safe-harbours for sexual predators.