The Southern Baptist Convention’s ongoing fights about how to handle sexual-abuse claims against ministers and other church personnel and volunteers is a perfect example of the kind of story that drives newspaper editors crazy.

It’s big and complicated and it seems like something crazy or important (or both) happens every other day. But it also seems like it’s impossible to yank a big, dramatic headline out of this sprawling, complicated story.

The story never seems to end and the amount of background material needed — in story after story after story — makes it impossible to cover this stuff in tidy 500-word stories. But if a newsroom skips a few of the major developments, that makes it even harder to get back in the game and explain to readers what is happening. Oh, and did I mention that newsroom managers pretty much have to assign a reporter to this story full-time or near full-time? That’s expensive in this day and age. Obviously, this reporter has to have religion-beat experience and speak fluent Southern Baptist.

At the same time, in my experience, there will almost always be one or two editors who say (or think) something like this: “I know the SBC is huge and there are billions of dollars involved and we have lots of Southern Baptist churches (and maybe a college) in our news territory, but … I don’t ‘get’ why this story really matters to average readers. I mean, it’s not about sports or politics or something important (to me).”

As a Charlotte editor once told me, when I was poised to break a national-level SBC story in the early 1980s: Nobody reads this stuff but fanatics and every time you write about it we get too many letters to the editor.

This brings us to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, which focuses on why the SBC’s struggles with sexual-abuse are important, and NOT just to Southern Baptists (click here to tune that in). The key is to identify major stories LINKED to sexual-abuse scandals that involve ethical, moral, legal and theological issues that can be seen in religious groups of all kinds (and many secular nonprofits and organizations as well). To illustrate this, let me tell you a story about an important evangelical counseling pioneer — the late Dr. Louis McBurney, founder of the Marble Retreat Center in Colorado.