NC pastors among those on secret list of Southern Baptist leaders accused of sex abuse
Late Thursday, Southern Baptist Convention leaders released a list that had been under wraps for years: the names of hundreds of ministers and church workers who they say were credibly accused of sexual abuse.
Among those named: more than 30 people who worked in North Carolina churches.
The existence of the secret list became public this week, with the release of an explosive report alleging that top Baptist leaders for years had covered up allegations of sexual abuse by ministers and church staff members.
North Carolina cases on the list include:
▪ Benjamin Ross Hollifield, a former youth pastor at Piedmont Baptist Church in Kannapolis, was sentenced to prison in 2016 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. According to news reports, Hollifield had his first sexual encounter with the girl at church after choir practice.
▪ Marty Eugene Meadows, a former youth minister from Gaston County, served just over eight years of his decade-long sentence for 33 child molestation counts.
▪ Brian Goodrich Jr., a former Southeastern Baptist seminarian, served 13 years in prison for molesting several boys at Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh.
▪ Harley Michael Keough, a former pastor of King James Baptist Church in Bessemer City, was convicted of two counts of sexual battery in 2010 after several women testified that he had groped them after they came to the church for help. He was given 18 months probation and did not go to prison.
▪ Former children’s minister Jonathan Winfield Rose, who was arrested by Cumberland County deputies in 2011 at Ridgefest Christian Summer Camp for Boys. Rose pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for sex and avoided a prison sentence.
In a statement that accompanied the release of the names Thursday night, the SBC executive committee said the list was being made public as “an initial, but important, step towards addressing the scourge of sexual abuse.”
“Each entry in this list reminds us of the devastation and destruction brought about by sexual abuse,” the statement reads. “Our prayer is that the survivors of these heinous acts find hope and healing, and that churches will utilize this list proactively to protect and care for the most vulnerable among us.”
In all, the list consists of more than 500 names. Most entries include the date the person was reported, the state where the offense took place and information from news stories compiled over the past 15 years.
The Southern Baptist Convention said it was releasing names of people who had been convicted of abuse, had confessed to abuse or had been placed on a sex offender registry. Other cases were redacted.
’Resistance, stonewalling ... outright hostility’
Produced by Guidepost Solutions, a private investigations firm hired by the convention, the 288-page report released on Sunday revealed that a member of the church’s executive committee had since 2007 maintained a list of accused ministers in Baptist churches.
That list contained the names of 703 accused abusers, 409 of whom were believed to have been affiliated with the Southern Baptist churches at some point, the Guidepost report said.
There’s no indication that church leaders took action to ensure that accused members had left their positions of power at SBC churches, the report said.
The Guidepost investigative team reviewed the list and determined that nine of the people remain in active ministry, and that two of them appear to be associated with a Southern Baptist church.
In its opening sentences, the report minced no words about what happened when abuse survivors contacted the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee about child molesters and other abusers who were ministers or church employees:
“They made phone calls, mailed letters, sent emails, appeared at SBC and EC meetings, held rallies, and contacted the press … only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.”
NC’s largest Protestant denomination
With roughly 47,000 churches and 13 million members across the country, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the nation and in North Carolina.
Until now, the fullest accounting of accused Baptists was a 2019 database of convicted ministers that the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News published in 2019. The newspapers’ investigation found that nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders had pleaded guilty or had been convicted of sex crimes starting in 1998.
The newspapers listed 17 pastors, ministers and volunteers who were convicted of sex crimes in North Carolina. All but two of them had targeted underage victims, the reporting found.
The Guidepost report, which came more than three years after the newspapers’ investigation, recounted a nearly 20-year-old episode involving Paige Patterson, then president of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest. When a female student told Patterson that a male student had raped her in 2003, Patterson urged her to forgive her attacker and spare him a police investigation, the report says.
Megan Lively of Wilson confirmed over the phone Wednesday that she is the unnamed former student whose story is outlined in the report. But she declined to be quoted further.
Patterson drew criticism in 2018 when a 2000 recording of him circulating widely online. In it, he describes his advice to a congregant whose husband was abusive: to pray for him quietly, The News & Observer reported. He also told her to “get ready” for the abuse to escalate.
The congregant came to church with two black eyes on a later Sunday and told Patterson, “I hope you’re happy.” The pastor insisted that he was, because her husband had repented and come to church for the first time.
Patterson became president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2003. But he was fired in 2018 after the tape surfaced and after The Washington Post reported that he’d told a then unnamed Wake Forest seminary student not to report a rape. He could not be reached for comment.
Complaints ignored, survivors demeaned
The Guidepost report said that church members “were often ignored or told that the SBC had no power to take action” when they reported abuse.
Worse, some were vilified, the report said.
In an internal email, D. August Boto, a former general counsel and interim president of the convention’s executive committee, called the focus on sexual abuse the work of the devil, according to the report.
“This whole thing should be seen for what it is,” Boto wrote. “It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”
Boto could not be reached for comment.
The report maintains that one former SBC president, Johnny Hunt, didn’t merely suppress allegations; he himself was accused of sexually assaulting the wife of a pastor in 2010. Guidepost’s investigators said they found those allegations credible.
Hunt, who held ministerial positions in North Carolina in the 1970s and 1980s, later went to work as a pastor at First Baptist Church in Georgia, one of the nation’s largest churches. He could not be reached for comment.
Some North Carolina church leaders — including Ronnie Parrott, pastor of Christ Community Church in Huntersville, and J.D. Greear, pastor of the Summit Church, a ministry with multiple locations in the Triangle — had pushed for a broad investigation into the problems.
“There were some who desired only to shield the SBC from liability rather than protecting the abused,” Parrott wrote in an emailed response to questions Thursday. “That was absolutely wrong.”
“We need to fundamentally change the culture of the SBC when it comes to abuse,” he said.
Greear, who served as SBC president from 2018 to 2021, said his first act as president was to form a task force “to see why we were continually getting reports from victims who said they were appealing to SBC leaders and being ignored.”
Greear said he believes that while most Southern Baptists wanted to confront the problem, some on the executive committee tried to obfuscate and resist change.
“There were some who were more focused on the protection of the institution than prioritizing the safety of victims,” he said in an interview.
The Guidepost report, Greear said, confirms the need for change.
NC Baptists review their abuse policies
The ongoing conversations over abuse allegations have prompted North Carolina Baptist leaders to examine their own practices.
In November 2021, the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, which is independent from the SBC, said it would conduct a review of their “policies, procedures and materials related to sexual abuse awareness, prevention and reporting,” calling it a proactive step to address handling of sexual abuse allegations locally.
The organization hired Guidepost to conduct the review, and the company is scheduled to present its findings to the state convention’s board in September.
“If we get the same type of calls, we want to be equipped to respond well,” said Micheal Pardue, president of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina and pastor of First Baptist Icard in Connelly Springs.
In his own congregation, Pardue said he’s embracing honesty about the SBC report and its findings.
“This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not left-wing whatever,” Pardue said. “This is our convention. This is what some of our leaders did. It was wrong. We have to make it better.”
In remarks this week to the state convention board, Pardue called for members to travel to Anaheim, California, in June for the national group’s annual meeting and push for accountability. He’s lobbying for the adoption of recommendations from the SBC report to ensure churches are safe places for those who come to worship.
“We want those places to reflect the goodness of the God that we serve,” Pardue said. “The people who were leading were not reflecting the goodness of Christ.”
A Southern Baptist Convention panel that has been examining the problems recommended that the convention establish a task force to evaluate recommendations and bring suggested reforms to next year’s convention.
In a May 22 letter to church members, the convention’s Sexual Abuse Task Force said it will also work to develop a way to alert the community “to the presence and activity of credibly accused offenders, including the establishment of a ‘ministry check’ website. ”
Darlene Parsons used to attend Providence Baptist in Raleigh, but she’s since left the denomination altogether. Watching the church respond to the conviction of a former seminarian who pleaded guilty in 2007 to molesting several of the congregation’s boys led her to look for God elsewhere, she said.
She’s “reluctantly skeptical” that any system of semi-autonomous churches can effectively stamp out abuse, she said.
Now she attends a Methodist church instead. But she keeps up with churches across the nation for her blog, The Wartburg Watch, where she writes about ministerial abuse.
Parsons said the public report is a big step toward the transparency she has been pushing for, but she’s not sure it will be enough to counteract churches determined to defend even known abusers — especially if they’re willing to cut ties with the SBC.
“The individual churches are aware of the problems, but are they willing to deal with it when it comes to them,” Parsons said. “How do you know? Because every church is different.”
Charlotte Observer staff writer Joe Marusak contributed.
This story was originally published May 27, 2022 at 7:37 AM with the headline "NC pastors among those on secret list of Southern Baptist leaders accused of sex abuse."
.JPG)
