Sola Scriptura

And I believe the News has shown that to be changing. New discipline calls for them to be defrocked now.

[SIZE=+3]The Collusion Act of the Southern Baptist Convention and Clergy Sexual Abuse[/SIZE]
by Dee Ann Miller



"I learned a long time ago life just isn't fair, so you better stop expecting it to be." These words of Dana Reeve are a good reminder for all of us. Certainly a good one for any person who dares to stand up against Baptists in a case of sexual abuse, misconduct, or harassment, especially with the largest of Baptist denominations, the SBC, even when a “moderate” organization such as the BGCT (Baptist General Convention of Texas) appears to be presenting itself as willing and able to assist victims of Baptist pastors. There is nothing fair and nothing in the interest of safety (except the safety of perpetrators) when the vast majority of Baptists respond to survivors who are hoping to get some basic assistance and to see their abusers held accountable. Anyone wishing to take Baptists to task, whether on a national, state, or local church level, would do well to read on.
What’s happening in the largest non-Catholic, Christian denomination in the United States when it comes to "sexual misconduct?" WELL…..It appears.....if you talk to the Big Whigs in the Southern Baptist Convention, they have their act all together. In fact, I think they DO.
This denomination of almost 17 million has their Collusion Act together, perhaps more than any other major denomination in the world!
How? By a structure that allows leaders to be irresponsible, getting away with it under the protection of powerful attorneys and escape clauses in the laws. Laws that protect denominations with congregational polity.
“Congregational polity….what’s that?” some of you are asking. Well, congregational polity is the exact opposite of what one finds in the Roman Catholic Church, where there are centralized authorities who can more easily be held responsible for their “sins of omission” in regard to clerical sexual abuse.
Here’s how it work. Individual congregations are in charge. This means that a six-year-old child, provided (s)he is baptized, is a voting member of a congregation, thereby technically holding the same voting power as the Chairman of the Deacons! Initially, this looks good on paper. What it boils down to, however, is that nobody is in charge of really holding ministers accountable within the Southern Baptist Convention. Nobody and no group! Baptists like it this way. It’s all in the name of freedom, under a doctrine, which also can have some fine advantages. It’s called “priesthood of the believer,” which theoretically says that every believer is a priest and does not need to go to anyone to tell him or her what to do on anything. Certainly nobody has the authority to separate any individual from God nor to give absolution.
This exact opposite way from that of Roman Catholicism, this way of doing church, requires that protection of vulnerable people can only be achieved and maintained when every single congregant is trained to respond appropriately to allegations of sexual misconduct. For, you see, the congregation must collectively hold the minister accountable.
What is everybody’s job becomes nobody’s job. “Pass the buck” is a very easy game to play, whether the players are in the Sunday School Board in Nashville, TN or sitting on the pew of a small, rural congregation. National leaders don't seem to feel the obligation to train the members in the pews, and most of the people in the pews don’t know enough to ask for appropriate preventive measures. They don’t know that they need policies that are designed to protect the church from anything more than getting sued!
When journalists have wanted to find out what’s happening in the Southern Baptist Convention, they’ve recently done the logical. They’ve gone to Baptist Press and to leaders of the Convention. It should work, but it doesn’t because of the Collusion Act.
Before reading further, it might help for you to take a look at two articles, both quoting Miller:

from the San Francisco Chronical

from the LA Times

Baptist Press doesn’t seem interested in printing stories of sexually abusive Baptist ministers, even abuse toward minors, according to the discrepancies I find between what’s been in the newspapers and what is chosen for print in Baptist press releases. I guess it wouldn’t be Christian? Or maybe just lousy politics. And it certainly wouldn’t do the reputation of the denomination any good, in the short run. It might get messy. A few smart people might start asking some good questions. Perpetrators might not find it so easy to move from one congregation to another. (I know of one in a small town in Texas who literally moved a few miles down the road, to another congregation, while the entire town watched in apathy!) Maybe, eventually, a few smart women would start to insist that changes be made. Maybe even Baptist Women, an organization considered by many of the pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention to be a threat, would finally begin speaking out, setting up and funding a genuinely compassionate ministry that would support victims, connect victims, and provide means for victims to tell their stories. Just maybe. Some day.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to speak to anyone who will listen, attempting to be a light in the darkness, in the hopes of providing survivors with these benefits as much as I can without monetary resources. Perhaps that way, by speaking with an independent voice—ironically, the Baptist way—eventually someone will find the courage to do something more. Until I have evidence that there is truly a place to send them within the Baptist system where they will certainly be welcomed and not re-victimized, I cannot recommend that they make reports to any agency.
Right now, the saddest thing is that most victims either don’t know they have been victimized or they don’t know that there is anyone else at all who understands and has resources and insights to share! That's because Baptists, especially Baptist women, are indoctrinated to look only for people within the closed system, especially when the matter involves the Baptist system. Very few understand that the very nature of institutional incest is that it forbids looking for help outside the system, yet help is almost never available in an incestuous institution, just as it is almost never available within the incestuous family!
“Are there no rays of hope?” you may ask. Well, there would appear to be in Texas, where the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas has stated its intentions to provide education, keep a roster of perpetrators on file (which would be available to others), and provide assistance to victims. Problem is that training conferences, such as those provided by Marie Fortune, have never been attended by any member of this Commission! They seem to be waiting for funding, as they have been for years—an interesting problem, considering the coffers of Southern Baptists, who seem to be able to find plenty of funds for powerful lawyers!
Having grown up in the Southern Baptist culture, I have come to understand the meaning of the word hegeomy in the context of the SBC and the South. This certainly applies in Texas, where things get very convoluted when people of the "established church of Texas" begin behaving exactly like their more conservative cousins within the larger SBC, behaving as if they are being persecuted when a person comes forward because of her/his own victimization.
It makes complete sense, however, if one stops to consider that closed systems never welcome outside information. It is too threatening, so anyone who attempts to use logic is immediately seen as either crazy or a heretic who has "turned against us."
Ironically, Texas is generally considered to be more the exception among Baptists, when it comes to being more willing to champion the right of women to be free of gender oppression within the Convention. By announcing that they have all of this help available to survivors, however, one is given false hope, at least from all that I’ve observed. Of course, if there are cases out there where one feels otherwise, I would love to have those survivors contact me, whether they come as a referral from the BGCT or find me on their own. I will be delighted to begin writing about the exceptionally positive cases!

 

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Two courageous women, both attorneys themselves, have honored me with their stories and have allowed me to share some of the intertwining of the two, to demonstrate just one example of the evidence of what I have already written.
I was first contacted by Deborah Dail in 1995. She was in the process of deciding what to do, if anything, about the double-binds of her own suffering. About a year later, she decided to confront her abuse by going directly to the church where it occurred. Yet she had no idea that the same church had another very old case, involving horrific collusion. Neither did she know that the prime colluder in that case was also still in the church.
Deborah met with extreme collusion. In desperation, after first trying "the Biblical way" that gets the kind of results that Dail got, many survivors turn either to a lawyer or to the press. In 1998, Dail found enough energy to go to the press. The Ft. Worth Star Telegram responded, and her story was written by Tara Dooley, though it still didn't name the perpetrator, something journalists are seldom allowed, by their editors, to do. In the process, Dooley contacted me and I sent a response.
I vividly remember my own dismay when she called me sometime later, having gone to the BGCT for the second time, with my encouragement. Many of the players in 1999 are no longer at the BGCT. Some have died, including the counselor who immediately picked up the phone, as soon as she walked out of his office, and called the man against whom Dail was bringing allegations--another breach of professional ethics, of course!!
What I recall from that 1999 phone call, however, was that Dail had been told not to speak the name of her perpetrator to the group gathered in the offices of the BGCT, for the purpose of better learning how to handle cases in the future. Sitting in that group were lawyers who were being paid to guide the group through this process, lawyers whom, one would assume would be teaching the Convention that to act in the best interest of survivors is to act ethically, in the best interest of the vulnerable people in their congregations. They couldn't have her speak the name of a pastor who still pastored because the BGCT only receives reports with names from the churches where the abuse occurred, and Farmers Branch wasn't about to report their pastor, Rev. Sam Underwood. They had already cleared him in a unanimous vote by the congregation, apparently incapable of seeing that the professional misconduct of their pastor was abusive!

Just five years later C. Brown contacted me. She had also been abused in the same congregation as Dail, by another perpetrator. One had been abused as an adult; the other as a minor. Yet collusion in both cases, as the second case proceeded, looked very much the same as the first. The church had not learned anything. Neither had the BGCT, nor their attorney, Mr. Wakefield who came to assist the church and proceeded to do so by intimidating the survivor.
Looking back, it's no wonder collusion was needed in Dail's earlier case! If they faced the reality about professional abuse of an adult, some of the leaders, one still there after thirty years, would have to face what they already knew about Brown's abuser, a skeleton that had been in the closet a lot longer than the senior pastor!! How could they acknowledge Dail’s abuse when they had not been able to even acknowledge the abuse of a minor?
Remember that it is not at all uncommon for churches to have multiple perpetrators or a string of them on their staff. Churches tend to use the same hiring practices, so this story about Dail and Brown isn't really unusual at all. What is interesting is that the two ladies eventually managed to find one another and to learn from one another while providing lessons for anyone else who cares to take an interest.
Sam Underwood and Farmers Branch Baptist Church had a vested interest in doing all they could to silence both ladies. Yet both voices came from women who were very well-educated professionals, women who could speak from the vantage point of considerable strength, unlike the majority of survivors who do not have the emotional resources nor the collaborating evidence that Brown was able to bring to the picture, to add to what had already transpired.
The pastor, whose own misconduct had been kept "secret," plus the church and the BGCT, if they faced the truth about one case, might certainly find themselves exposed for the other. Thereby, they'd be providing a "perfect" example of the massive collusion in this massive denomination where the cognitive dissonance "needs" to be ignored unless the world begins to see the close similarities between Roman Catholics and the Baptists.
<H2>So any person who is concerned about holding perpetrators accountable through the Baptist system better be prepared! Good places to start: Reading books like How Little We Knew, the only first-person account in book form, written by a Southern Baptist survivor, and by reading much more of the story of C. Brown , a survivor who has also paid a high price of emotional suffering for daring to confront abuse and collusion, a survivor who now offers her testimony via this site, as an educational and prophetic voice.
About the assistance to victims......It appears that strings are attached when one seeks assistance from the BGCT. Deborah Dail, told me several years ago that only by agreeing to never again talk to the press nor make her story public.....only then could she receive money from the Baptist General Convention of Texas to help pay her therapy bills! As you will see from reading Brown's story, those tactics are still in place. Hmmm. Sure sounds like the Roman Catholics to me!
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<H4>This article, like all at www.takecourage.org is copyrighted by the author. Other writers, by copyright law, may use up to 300 words in other published works without asking permission, provided the author is given full credit. This includes "DIM Thinking" a term, coined by Miller. Others are encouraged to download and/or distribute copies of any of these articles, for educational purposes, PROVIDED any page distributed is done so without alteration. The copies must include this message and the contact information below: www.takecourage.org by Dee Ann Miller, author of How Little We Knew: Collusion and Confusion with Sexual Misconduct and The Truth about Malarkey.</H4>


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Peter and the Papacy



There is ample evidence in the New Testament that Peter was first in authority among the apostles. Whenever they were named, Peter headed the list (Matt. 10:1-4, Mark 3:16-19, Luke 6:14-16, Acts 1:13); sometimes the apostles were referred to as "Peter and those who were with him" (Luke 9:32). Peter was the one who generally spoke for the apostles (Matt. 18:21, Mark 8:29, Luke 12:41, John 6:68-69), and he figured in many of the most dramatic scenes (Matt. 14:28-32, Matt. 17:24-27, Mark 10:23-28). On Pentecost it was Peter who first preached to the crowds (Acts 2:14-40), and he worked the first healing in the Church age (Acts 3:6-7). It is Peter’s faith that will strengthen his brethren (Luke 22:32) and Peter is given Christ’s flock to shepherd (John 21:17). An angel was sent to announce the resurrection to Peter (Mark 16:7), and the risen Christ first appeared to Peter (Luke 24:34). He headed the meeting that elected Matthias to replace Judas (Acts 1:13-26), and he received the first converts (Acts 2:41). He inflicted the first punishment (Acts 5:1-11), and excommunicated the first heretic (Acts 8:18-23). He led the first council in Jerusalem (Acts 15), and announced the first dogmatic decision (Acts 15:7-11). It was to Peter that the revelation came that Gentiles were to be baptized and accepted as Christians (Acts 10:46-48).

Peter the Rock


Peter’s preeminent position among the apostles was symbolized at the very beginning of his relationship with Christ. At their first meeting, Christ told Simon that his name would thereafter be Peter, which translates as "Rock" (John 1:42). The startling thing was that—aside from the single time that Abraham is called a "rock" (Hebrew: Tsur; Aramaic: Kepha) in Isaiah 51:1-2—in the Old Testament only God was called a rock. The word rock was not used as a proper name in the ancient world. If you were to turn to a companion and say, "From now on your name is Asparagus," people would wonder: Why Asparagus? What is the meaning of it? What does it signify? Indeed, why call Simon the fisherman "Rock"? Christ was not given to meaningless gestures, and neither were the Jews as a whole when it came to names. Giving a new name meant that the status of the person was changed, as when Abram’s name was changed to Abraham (Gen.17:5), Jacob’s to Israel (Gen. 32:28), Eliakim’s to Joakim (2 Kgs. 23:34), or the names of the four Hebrew youths—Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah to Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Dan. 1:6-7). But no Jew had ever been called "Rock." The Jews would give other names taken from nature, such as Deborah ("bee," Gen. 35:8), and Rachel ("ewe," Gen. 29:16), but never "Rock." In the New Testament James and John were nicknamed Boanerges, meaning "Sons of Thunder," by Christ, but that was never regularly used in place of their original names, and it certainly was not given as a new name. But in the case of Simon-bar-Jonah, his new name Kephas (Greek: Petros) definitely replaced the old.

Look at the scene


Not only was there significance in Simon being given a new and unusual name, but the place where Jesus solemnly conferred it upon Peter was also important. It happened when "Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi" (Matt. 16:13), a city that Philip the Tetrarch built and named in honor of Caesar Augustus, who had died in A.D. 14. The city lay near cascades in the Jordan River and near a gigantic wall of rock, a wall about 200 feet high and 500 feet long, which is part of the southern foothills of Mount Hermon. The city no longer exists, but its ruins are near the small Arab town of Banias; and at the base of the rock wall may be found what is left of one of the springs that fed the Jordan. It was here that Jesus pointed to Simon and said, "You are Peter" (Matt. 16:18).

The significance of the event must have been clear to the other apostles. As devout Jews they knew at once that the location was meant to emphasize the importance of what was being done. None complained of Simon being singled out for this honor; and in the rest of the New Testament he is called by his new name, while James and John remain just James and John, not Boanerges.

Promises to Peter


When he first saw Simon, "Jesus looked at him, and said, ‘So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas (which means Peter)’" (John 1:42). The word Cephas is merely the transliteration of the Aramaic Kepha into Greek. Later, after Peter and the other disciples had been with Christ for some time, they went to Caesarea Philippi, where Peter made his profession of faith: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matt. 16:16). Jesus told him that this truth was specially revealed to him, and then he solemnly reiterated: "And I tell you, you are Peter" (Matt. 16:18). To this was added the promise that the Church would be founded, in some way, on Peter (Matt. 16:18).

Then two important things were told the apostle. "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Matt. 16:19). Here Peter was singled out for the authority that provides for the forgiveness of sins and the making of disciplinary rules. Later the apostles as a whole would be given similar power [Matt.18:18], but here Peter received it in a special sense.

Peter alone was promised something else also: "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 16:19). In ancient times, keys were the hallmark of authority. A walled city might have one great gate; and that gate had one great lock, worked by one great key. To be given the key to the city—an honor that exists even today, though its import is lost—meant to be given free access to and authority over the city. The city to which Peter was given the keys was the heavenly city itself. This symbolism for authority is used elsewhere in the Bible (Is. 22:22, Rev. 1:18).

Finally, after the resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples and asked Peter three times, "Do you love me?" (John 21:15-17). In repentance for his threefold denial, Peter gave a threefold affirmation of love. Then Christ, the Good Shepherd (John 10:11, 14), gave Peter the authority he earlier had promised: "Feed my sheep" (John 21:17). This specifically included the other apostles, since Jesus asked Peter, "Do you love me more than these?" (John 21:15), the word "these" referring to the other apostles who were present (John 21:2). Thus was completed the prediction made just before Jesus and his followers went for the last time to the Mount of Olives.

Immediately before his denials were predicted, Peter was told, "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again [after the denials], strengthen your brethren" (Luke 22:31-32). It was Peter who Christ prayed would have faith that would not fail and that would be a guide for the others; and his prayer, being perfectly efficacious, was sure to be fulfilled.

 

Who is the rock?


Now take a closer look at the key verse: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church" (Matt. 16:18). Disputes about this passage have always been related to the meaning of the term "rock." To whom, or to what, does it refer? Since Simon’s new name of Peter itself means rock, the sentence could be rewritten as: "You are Rock and upon this rock I will build my Church." The play on words seems obvious, but commentators wishing to avoid what follows from this—namely the establishment of the papacy—have suggested that the word rock could not refer to Peter but must refer to his profession of faith or to Christ.

From the grammatical point of view, the phrase "this rock" must relate back to the closest noun. Peter’s profession of faith ("You are the Christ, the Son of the living God") is two verses earlier, while his name, a proper noun, is in the immediately preceding clause.

As an analogy, consider this artificial sentence: "I have a car and a truck, and it is blue." Which is blue? The truck, because that is the noun closest to the pronoun "it." This is all the more clear if the reference to the car is two sentences earlier, as the reference to Peter’s profession is two sentences earlier than the term rock.

Another alternative


The previous argument also settles the question of whether the word refers to Christ himself, since he is mentioned within the profession of faith. The fact that he is elsewhere, by a different metaphor, called the cornerstone (Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:4-8) does not disprove that here Peter is the foundation. Christ is naturally the principal and, since he will be returning to heaven, the invisible foundation of the Church that he will establish; but Peter is named by him as the secondary and, because he and his successors will remain on earth, the visible foundation. Peter can be a foundation only because Christ is the cornerstone.

In fact, the New Testament contains five different metaphors for the foundation of the Church (Matt. 16:18, 1 Cor. 3:11, Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:5-6, Rev. 21:14). One cannot take a single metaphor from a single passage and use it to twist the plain meaning of other passages. Rather, one must respect and harmonize the different passages, for the Church can be described as having different foundations since the word foundation can be used in different senses.

Look at the Aramaic


Opponents of the Catholic interpretation of Matthew 16:18 sometimes argue that in the Greek text the name of the apostle is Petros, while "rock" is rendered as petra. They claim that the former refers to a small stone, while the latter refers to a massive rock; so, if Peter was meant to be the massive rock, why isn’t his name Petra?

Note that Christ did not speak to the disciples in Greek. He spoke Aramaic, the common language of Palestine at that time. In that language the word for rock is kepha, which is what Jesus called him in everyday speech (note that in John 1:42 he was told, "You will be called Cephas"). What Jesus said in Matthew 16:18 was: "You are Kepha, and upon this kepha I will build my Church."

When Matthew’s Gospel was translated from the original Aramaic to Greek, there arose a problem which did not confront the evangelist when he first composed his account of Christ’s life. In Aramaic the word kepha has the same ending whether it refers to a rock or is used as a man’s name. In Greek, though, the word for rock, petra, is feminine in gender. The translator could use it for the second appearance of kepha in the sentence, but not for the first because it would be inappropriate to give a man a feminine name. So he put a masculine ending on it, and hence Peter became Petros.

Furthermore, the premise of the argument against Peter being the rock is simply false. In first century Greek the words petros and petra were synonyms. They had previously possessed the meanings of "small stone" and "large rock" in some early Greek poetry, but by the first century this distinction was gone, as Protestant Bible scholars admit (see D. A. Carson’s remarks on this passage in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan Books]).

Some of the effect of Christ’s play on words was lost when his statement was translated from the Aramaic into Greek, but that was the best that could be done in Greek. In English, like Aramaic, there is no problem with endings; so an English rendition could read: "You are Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church."

Consider another point: If the rock really did refer to Christ (as some claim, based on 1 Cor. 10:4, "and the Rock was Christ" though the rock there was a literal, physical rock), why did Matthew leave the passage as it was? In the original Aramaic, and in the English which is a closer parallel to it than is the Greek, the passage is clear enough. Matthew must have realized that his readers would conclude the obvious from "Rock . . . rock."

If he meant Christ to be understood as the rock, why didn’t he say so? Why did he take a chance and leave it up to Paul to write a clarifying text? This presumes, of course, that 1 Corinthians was written after Matthew’s Gospel; if it came first, it could not have been written to clarify it.

The reason, of course, is that Matthew knew full well that what the sentence seemed to say was just what it really was saying. It was Simon, weak as he was, who was chosen to become the rock and thus the first link in the chain of the papacy.

 

That is really hilarious

Let's do some substitution:

Really now, does that make sense?

 

I Don't Have The Time To Respond To Everyone. Furthermore The Conversation Has Gone Off Topic.

 

and why should I not copy and paste. The arguments provided by others are acceptable for my own. Plus it saves a lot of time.

Martin, your heart is harden as it was for the Israelites at Meribah.

All you do is attack is hate and anger. I respond with well thought out responses created by others.

Take it or leave it.

Unless of course you want to start a thread on each and every single item you don't believe, then I will entertain you .

 

I apologize for posting that. It was a bit rash for me to do so.

 

God Bless.

 

Martin you want to go off on all types of tangents by raising questions on several issues, which require there own thread. Please stick to the subject of the Post.