The postponed launch of a Southern Baptist Convention sexual predator database has been met with skepticism from some abuse survivors and others who saw it as the key piece in a series of reforms promised three years ago.

“Once again, the Southern Baptist Convention has kicked the can down the road,” said Christa Brown, a well-known survivor of clergy sex abuse and a longtime advocate for sex abuse reform in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

But a Southern Baptist leader said the database aimed at keeping sexual offenders from moving from church to church is closer to reality than ever before — it just won’t be launched by a task force charged with implementing abuse reforms.

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With the database project in limbo, what happens next?

At this week’s Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, the Rev. Josh Wester, of North Carolina, chairman of the denomination’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, said there were already 100 names that have been vetted for placement on a Ministry Check database. He said the task force is handing responsibility for the online listings over to the denomination’s Executive Committee because challenges regarding liability insurance and funding for reforms have prevented the much-anticipated database from being launched.

“I wish that, standing before you today, I could say that the Ministry Check website is now online, but I cannot do that,” Wester told delegates, called messengers, gathered in Indianapolis, Indiana. “What I can tell you is that even though we have encountered unbelievable obstacles in the process, in the course of trying to establish the Ministry Check website, we are right now closer than we have ever been.”

The Rev. Mike Keahbone, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Lawton, served on Wester’s task force and is also a member of the Executive Committee. He reiterated Wester’s comments.

He said he felt confident that the Executive Committee and its new president Jeff Iorg would see the database project to fruition.

“I have a lot of confidence that the EC will do what it’s tasked to do now, and being on the EC, I have an opportunity to be a watchdog for it,” Keahbone said.

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The denomination — Oklahoma’s largest faith group — has been considering the database in response to a newspaper investigative report, and a subsequent independent report on the internal handling of sex abuse allegations by top leadership. Messengers at the denomination’s 2022 annual meeting voted to have a database of sex offenders created.

Keahbone said he was grateful that messengers’ meeting in Indianapolis approved the task force’s recommendation to establish the Ministry Check database website and creation a permanent home for the denomination’s abuse prevention and response. At the meeting, the task force also promoted a new curriculum for churches to use to prevent sex abuse and respond to sex abuse allegations.

“We determined the tasks that were the most necessary were, one, to make sure that there is a Ministry Toolkit that addresses prevention and response,” Keahbone said. “The second part is to figure out what to do with the Ministry check website.”

The Lawton minister also said he expected that the latest developments would draw criticism, including some from sex abuse survivors, but also some members of the denomination who did not think the issue of sex abuse reform deserved the level of attention it has received in recent years.

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A survivor’s skepticism

Brown, an attorney and author, said she viewed the delayed launch of the database as “little more than self-serving performative PR maneuvers for institutional image-management.”

“For many survivors and advocates, this long trailing out of promises and platitudes, with nothing tangible to show for it, has amounted to heaped-on cruelty,” she said in an email.

As part of her longtime advocacy efforts, Brown began contacting Southern Baptist leaders in 2006 to sound the alarm about the lack of accountability for preachers and other ministry leaders credibly accused of sexually abuse.

She created the StopBaptistPredators.org website, which she maintained for several years by compiling media reports on Baptist clergy sex abuse cases. StopBaptistPredators.org became a database of convicted, admitted and credibly accused Southern Baptist clergy sex abusers. Eventually, she spoke with the Rev. Wade Burleson, an Enid pastor (now retired), who asked the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee to explore the idea of creating a database in 2008.

In her new book “Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal and Transformation” released in May, Brown shared her story about being sexually abused by a Southern Baptist minister when she was a Texas teenager.

This week, she said she didn’t think Southern Baptist leaders’ efforts were “robust” enough.

“Protecting kids and congregants against clergy sex predators is simply not something they care about — not really,” Brown said.

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“If they did, the response would have been far more robust by now. Instead, we’ve had this long trailing out of task force after task force, and glossy brochure after glossy brochure, and all of it amounting to near-nothing.”

For his part, Keahbone pushed back at the criticism.

“In the grand scheme of things, we have not gone very far, but we can’t go very far until we take our first steps,” he said.

“So, time is going to tell the story of whether Southern Baptists are really serious about abuse reform, and I feel confident that we have laid the foundation that allows those steps to be taken.”

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Southern Baptist Convention says sexual predator database postponed