SBC Guidepost Report

The Southern Baptist Convention has no bishop and no diocese: each of its roughly 47,000 member churches is self-governing, which is exactly the structural question its own Sexual Abuse Task Force asked an outside investigator to test in 2021. Was the absence of central authority a genuine limit on what the national body could do about abuse, or had the national Executive Committee been quietly acting with authority it denied having. Guidepost Solutions, a professional investigations firm, was commissioned to find out and released its 288 page report in May 2022.

The investigation covered the Executive Committee's conduct from January 2000 through June 2021 and found the answer was the second one. The Committee had secretly maintained its own internal list of pastors, denominational employees and volunteers credibly accused of abuse, a list its own leaders had previously told survivors and the public did not exist. Survivors who came forward described being met, in the report's own words, with resistance, stonewalling and outright hostility from within the Committee, whose senior leaders and outside counsel were found to have been singularly focused on avoiding legal liability for the SBC rather than protecting children or supporting survivors.

The report's finding sits alongside every other entry in this record as the same institutional pattern in a different polity: not bishops moving priests between parishes, but a national committee maintaining a secret internal record while publicly denying its own knowledge. A denomination without a hierarchy to reassign an abuser instead had a hierarchy that chose silence.