The SBC will sell its Nashville headquarters to defray abuse-related legal costs
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An investigation into how leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention have dealt with sexual abuse by clergy has cost more than $12 million over the past three years, causing the nation’s largest Protestant denomination to put its Nashville, Tennessee, headquarters up for sale, the SBC’s executive committee announced on Tuesday.
The expenditures, which include $3 million spent fending off a lawsuit filed by a former SBC president, have led the committee to spend down its reserves in what its auditors have called an unsustainable manner. The group, which met in Nashville this week, also approved a loan to cover budget shortfalls.
The executive committee’s fiscal woes come as the denomination is struggling to implement reforms ordered by the SBC’s governing body two years ago, designed to help churches better prevent and respond to abuse.
On Tuesday, members of the executive committee also voted to set up a new department to deal with the issue of abuse reforms, which will take over the reform effort from volunteers.
“Southern Baptists, we have had two task forces that have done difficult and important work, but it’s time now to stop talking about what we’re going to do and take an initial strategic step of action that puts into place an administrative response to this issue,” Jeff Iorg, president of the Nashville-based executive committee, told trustees.
Iorg described the new department as a “beginning point of a workable solution” on the issue of abuse reform.
A website, approved in June 2022, was supposed to include the names of Southern Baptist pastors and leaders convicted of abuse, those who confessed to abuse or have a court judgment for abuse against them, as well as those who have credible allegations of abuse made against them.
To date, no names have been added to the site, and SBC leaders have no current plans to update it and have taken no responsibility for it.
Josh Wester, a North Carolina pastor who helped start the commission, said names can’t be added to the site without a go-ahead from the SBC’s executive committee.
“When and if the EC notifies us they have cleared the hurdles on their end, we will make it live,” Wester said in a text. Wester is the former chair of a task force, dissolved earlier this year after making limited progress, that had been charged with implementing abuse reform.
Content retrieved from: https://www.christiancentury.org/news/sbc-will-sell-its-nashville-headquarters-defray-abuse-related-legal-costs.
