Johnny Hunt

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Plug-In: Here's the latest sex and money news from the Southern Baptist Convention

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Plug-In: Here's the latest sex and money news from the Southern Baptist Convention

After a week away, it’s nice to be back. Making headlines this week: A U.S. senator is demanding to know if the Christian aid organization World Vision is funding terrorism, Ken Chitwood reports for Christianity Today.

Pope Francis is going to Marseille to talk migration, but will Europe listen as it scrambles to stem an influx? The Associated Press’ Nicole Winfield, Trisha Thomas and Sylvie Corbet tackle that question. And Jerry Falwell Jr.’s latest legal battle with Liberty University — and his brother — has escalated, according to Religion News Service.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with the latest news — and there’s a lot of it — from the Southern Baptist Convention.

What To Know: The Big Story

Is sin a private matter?: A lawsuit filed by the Rev. Johnny Hunt, a former Southern Baptist Convention president, against the SBC’s Executive Committee and Guidepost makes that claim, Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana reports. But legal experts are skeptical, Smietana notes.

The longtime megachurch pastor is upset over the disclosure that he covered up his sexual misconduct for a decade, according to the RNS story.

Moments that made the Rev. Bart Barber: The Conservative Resurgence that the SBC’s current president defied is now shaping his leadership, The Tennessean’s Liam Adams writes.

In other coverage, Adams notes that a top SBC committee documented a former CEO’s “professional fraud” but won’t pursue legal action. And Southern Baptist leaders are promoting strength even as a top committee faces increased instability.


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Plug-In: Listening to the voices of Holocaust survivors -- while we still can

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Plug-In: Listening to the voices of Holocaust survivors -- while we still can

Good morning, my friends!

I’m your Weekend Plug-in columnist, and I need to let you know I’ve checked all my files. I didn’t find any classified documents from that time I toured the White House. Whew!

So let’s dive right into the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith.

What To Know: The Big Story

It’s Jan. 27, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today’s commemoration marks the 78th anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The United Nations “urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.”

Telling their stories: Toby Levy, now 89, was one of only 31 survivors in the town of Chodorow — then a part of Poland, now Ukraine.

“Like my father said, ‘God needed witnesses’” to the horror, Levy tells the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner. “That’s why I don’t say ‘no’ to anybody, as tired as I am,” she says of opportunities to relate her experience.

Like Levy, David Schaecter, 93, knows he is running out of time, Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron reports:

So this week he agreed to a weeklong recording of his life story using a new technology that will allow future generations to interact with a hologram-style likeness of him.

That story will form the base of an exhibit at Boston’s future Holocaust museum, which is scheduled to open in 2025.


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Despite sex-abuse reforms, some key Southern Baptist leaders remain oblivious

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Despite sex-abuse reforms, some key Southern Baptist leaders remain oblivious

The story of the Southern Baptist Convention’s sex abuse crisis is not going away.

At least not anytime soon.

Southern Baptists delegates overwhelmingly adopted abuse reforms this past summer, but some within the nation’s largest evangelical denomination remain oblivious.

Case in point: Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana broke this news:

Disgraced former Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt plans a return to ministry after completing a restoration process overseen by four pastors, according to a video released last week.

That news, just seven months after the allegations against Hunt were made public, prompted Bart Barber, the current SBC president, to release a lengthy statement via Twitter. Barber declared:

I would permanently “defrock” Johnny Hunt if I had the authority to do so. In a fellowship of autonomous churches, I do not have the authority to do so. Yet it must be said that neither do these four pastors have the authority to declare Johnny Hunt to be “restored.”

At The Tennessean, Liam Adams reports:

The news of Hunt’s return to ministry is the latest high-profile example of an issue the Nashville-based SBC is wrestling with: if and how pastors accused of abuse can return to the pulpit.

In his own follow-up report, Smietana delves into the outcry over the Hunt news:

Tiffany Thigpen, an abuse survivor and longtime advocate of abuse victims, said Hunt’s return to ministry is a sign that the legislated reforms have yet to change Southern Baptist culture.

“We are always going to have this network of powerful men who can do whatever they want and think they can get away with it,” she said. “And they are right.”

Thigpen said Hunt, like anyone, can be forgiven by God. But that does not mean he should be given power and a platform in the church. She said pastors like the ones who endorsed Hunt dole out cheap grace in order to protect their friends.

“They don’t care,” she said.

As noted by the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner, two of the four pastors involved in Hunt’s “restoration” serve churches affiliated with the SBC.

Most pastors believe clergy involved in sexual misconduct should withdraw from public ministry permanently, according to a 2021 Lifeway Research study.


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Podcast: Those hellish SBC sexual-abuse stories? They may be coming to a zip code near you

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Podcast: Those hellish SBC sexual-abuse stories? They may be coming to a zip code near you

There’s an old saying in the real estate business about properties that get hot and then sell quickly: “Location, location, location.”

That’s precisely where we are right now with the sexual-abuse scandal that looms over the core institutions of the giant, complex, sprawling Southern Baptist Convention.

Where is the story heating up right now? Where is the story going in the future? The answer to both of those questions is: “Location, location, location.” This is true with current events (and events yet to come) and it’s also true with the must-read coverage of this big story. We focused on both sides of that equation during this week’s GetReligion podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

First, let’s talk about the journalism behind this story, which has been building for several years now (see this Bobby Ross, Jr., “Plug-In” update for a starter). Everything begins in Texas and Tennessee and reporters there who are doing the heavy lifting — in Nashville and Houston, to be specific. You can see this, ironically, in this Washington Post story: “How two Texas newspapers broke open the Southern Baptist sex scandal.” Here is the overture:

Houston Chronicle city hall reporter Robert Downen was on the night shift one evening in 2018, just a few months into the job, when something caught his attention.

Scrolling through an online federal court docket, he spotted a lawsuit that accused Paul Pressler, a prominent former judge and leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, of sexual assault. While the case had been previously reported, newly filed documents painted an even more damning picture, including the revelation that Pressler had previously agreed to pay his accuser $450,000. Downen, then 25, probed more deeply and discovered other survivors of church abuse, who made it clear to him, he recalled, that “if you think this problem is confined to one leader, we have quite a bit to show you.”

Downen’s ever-growing spreadsheet of cases soon inspired a larger reporting effort to quantify the scope of sex abuse within the massive Protestant denomination. Journalists at the Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News teamed up to create a database of cases involving nearly 300 church leaders and more than 700 victims for their landmark 2019 “Abuse of Faith” series.

A wave of outrage in response to the series rocked the Southern Baptist Convention, prompting its Executive Committee to hire an outside firm to investigate.

Sexual-abuse accusations against Pressler had been rumbling for decades behind closed doors and in locked-tight legal proceedings. I first heard about them in the early 1980s, through a well-placed contact at CBS News, when I first hit the religion beat at The Charlotte News. There was smoke, but no one could get to the fire. The fact that this SBC giant’s accusers were young males only added to the tension.

If you know SBC life — I grew up as a Texas Baptist preacher’s kid and my whole family has Baylor University ties — then you may know this old saying: Texas is the wallet on which the SBC sits.


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