ABUSE-IT'S NOT JUST FOR CATHOLICS ANYMORE

Do any of the articles below sound familiar? Of course they do, with one vital difference; they are about sexual abuse in the Baptist Church. We never hear about this in the mainstream media even though it is just as bad as the abuse in the Catholic Church. Why is that? The victims are just as traumatized and their lives are just as damaged. Aren't the journalists that cover these stories of abuse inside the Catholic Church doing it out of concern for these victims? Or, is there perhaps another reason for their pogrom?

Pray for all the victims of abuse, whether Catholic, Baptist, other faiths or none at all. We all need to clean our houses and prepare the Church for what is coming. These abuses point out a deep and systemic rot inside Christianity and other faith communities. This rot exists at the very core of the leadership in all churches and needs to be revealed and addressed in an honest and forthright manner.

The Catholic Church is well on it's way to ending this problem, mainly because of reporting done by those who look to harm her. It looks as though God is using their hatred against them by using it to clean out His Church.

The press needs to turn its focus on other faiths now. If they can expose the corruption elsewhere they will be doing the work of the Lord, whether they want to or not.

This must be about the victims, not about vendettas.

All of the stories referenced below were found at Stop Baptist Predators.

"Perhaps Thomas is uninformed about the preachers who prey on children in the Southern Baptist Convention in particular and the Baptists in general, a scandal that has been exhaustively covered on EthicsDaily.com with well over 100 articles. He is certainly unfamiliar with Christa Brown, founder of Stop Baptist Predators and Baptist coordinator for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who has tirelessly sought to rip off the cover of secrecy within Baptist life and to press Baptists to reform their practices.

If Thomas is uninformed about the Baptist child-abuse scandal, then Baptist denominational leaders have successfully kept the shameful, systemic problem off the national media's radar.

Protecting the Baptist denomination and churches from public humiliation and discrediting has been a higher priority for many Baptist leaders than protecting children from the predatory ministers – ministers who move from church to church, state to state, without punishment, only to harm again.

One Baptist state convention even dismissed a staff member after his reporting on a preacher predator in an apparent effort to protect the preacher and the organization."
Ethics Daily

"Sex abuse in the church is not a Catholic crisis alone. A skeptical public repulsed at news of a priest abusing 200 deaf boys lumps local church leaders into the same putrid pot.

All Christians are stained in the sweep of the same broad brush, but a Baylor University School of Social Work study released last fall suggests that tainting is not without foundation. The study found just over 3 percent -- or seven women in a typical congregation with 400 adult members -- have been victims of clergy sexual misconduct since they turned 18.

American Catholics have instituted rules that immediately and forever remove a man from the priesthood who is shown to be guilty of abuse. The pope apologized for the sexual abuse of minors and pledged that pedophiles would not be allowed to become priests in the Catholic Church.

The Vatican even instituted reforms to prevent future abuse in the U.S. by requiring background checks for church employees and issued new rules disallowing ordination of men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies."

Sex-abuse cases also rock Baptist churches. Individually they are just as bad, and collectively we are doing a lot less than the Catholics about resolution.

Southern Baptists as a national entity have nothing in place to prevent abusers from carrying their satchels of pain to another church or to yank credentials from an abusive clergyman."
Associated Baptist Press

"An angry population of abused Christians and those who love them and advocate for them is demanding that churches of all types stop the child sexual abuse in their midst. While many other structures of modern life have heightened the protections offered to children, the churches have lagged behind -- with disastrous consequences. The Baptist situation
may be no better than the Catholic, only shielded more deeply from view. This situation demands reform, immediately, for the sake of the vulnerable and abused children among us -- not to mention for the sake of the gospel witness, so desecrated by the abuse behind our stained-glass windows."
Associated Baptist Press